Well you’re not done yet. You see, Apple’s rumored to be coming out with this new slate thing, otherwise known as the Apple tablet, which could present you with one more way to display your site. There’s just one question you should be asking yourself: Is your website touchable?

This is pure conjecture of course but let’s assume for a moment that Apple’s tablet runs iPhone OS as is also widely rumored. Sure, browsing the web from your iPhone is cool but it isn’t by any means like browsing from your laptop/desktop.

It’s obvious the web was designed for point & click. You can click your way through simple websites with nothing but content and links using a touchscreen but try navigating to maps.google.com on your iPhone. You’ll quickly see why Apple has an app for that. Even simple content sites weren’t built for a real touch screen, like the kind you see in Star Trek and the kind that will take the world by storm when Apple releases the future next year.

My question is this: Will this new tablet somehow support gestures which would mimic a mouse? Or does Apple expect us all to make a touch screen version of our site or even worse a native app?

Maybe Apple’s devised a brilliant way around it.. but one thing’s for sure: it’s definitely something to consider.

If anyone has any information on this I’d love to hear it…

1. A pillar. This person is nearly impossible to replace because you trust them and they add incredible value to the team. It’s even more so if you’ve built a friendship and/or working relationship with them over time. Imagine starting from square one and going to a cofounder’s mixer.. I can’t.

2. Full of faith for the vision. They are not only motivated by the outcome but also by the work and the vision. They want to be a part of that vision because it’s something they fundamentally and philosophically believe in.

3. Someone who is not competitive with you. Many people start companies with their best friends, but sometimes this is exactly the wrong approach. Human relationships are complicated and someone you’ve known for years might seem like a good person to start a company with, that is until you start a company with them. Just remember to keep an open mind and that if you’re competitive with your cofounder, it probably won’t work out.

4. Someone you would trust with your life.

5. Complementary. If you have an idea they expand on that idea. If you’re a bit too liberal they’re a bit too conservative. Complementary should not be confused with diametrically opposed. There is such a thing as too different to get a long. A good example of a complimentary founding team would be the two Steves of Apple fame.

6. Unexpected. The cofounder should impress you. Not because they want to or are trying to but because you just happen to be impressed with the quality of their work/ideas/direction or whatever.

7. Challenging. They don’t blindly follow every word and they don’t challenge you on every point. They challenge you when you need to be challenged. After all, you can’t always be right even if you’d like to be.

8. Easy for you to get along with on some other level than just work. Either you have similar political views/principals or you both love Family Guy.. Whatever it is you should easily be able to find stuff to talk about. If you can’t even have a conversation with this person, they probably shouldn’t be your cofounder.

9. Someone who sticks around even when the going gets tough. Real tough. As I’ve experienced first hand startups are extremely trying for spouses, partners, friends, family and everything else. It takes its toll and no one can cross the finish line without paying that price. No one. You’re going to need someone who doesn’t just shine in the initial stages, they also need to shine when shit hits the fan and you’re losing hair, sleep, sanity and whatever else..

10. Someone who puts their money where their mouth is. You’ll know what this means when the time comes.. But the true test of character is when people start putting their own money into the project and they do it with both feet.

11. Well grounded with their ego. You obviously want someone brilliant to cofound your startup with.. But at what price? Don’t go for the guy with 2 PhDs and the nobel prize in Physics just because his IQ is 270. You have to first make sure they fit into your universe and in a good way. As Einstein said: “God does not play dice with the universe” and neither should you with your startup. Take that Niels!

0. The media loves a showdown

“….with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition”

With articles like this one popping up everywhere it’s no wonder everyone is pronouncing the Kindle dead on the rumored Tablet’s arrival.

I say hogwash! There are a few reasons why Kindle will still be a contender. In fact there is more reason to believe they would coexist peacefully…

1. Kindle’s battery life is phenomenal

That’s what happens when you’re running an electronic-ink display with a slow refresh rate. Mine last for weeks without a single charge. Great for long plane rides!

2. No heavy lifting

Unless Apple is packing some Wall-E style tech in their rumored tablet then we can expect a significantly heavier device. When reading a book for hours on end – it would make a huge difference.

3. Marketing 101

An Apple tablet would be in an entirely different market than the Kindle. How many people seriously think the Tablet will compete with Kindle on price? I just can’t see how a spanking new Apple tablet would go for anything less than $600 and that’s being conservative. Let’s not forget we don’t have AT&T in the back room subsidizing the device costs on this one. Let’s not also forget that an unlocked iPhone goes for approx. $600.

4. Amazon

Can we all give Amazon just a little street cred? They have an already enormous and rapidly growing selection of books and publishers on board. Amazon’s back end protects Kindle in a way that iTunes protects the iPod and iPhone. It’s the calvary you can depend on and if it’s one thing Amazon knows: it’s books.

5. There’s a Kindle app for that

Yeah I said it. Who would of thunk it!? You mean Amazon could develop a Kindle app on the Apple Tablet as it did for the iPhone? Yes, it could, and it could also take advantage of all that fancy new hardware. That’s what I’m waiting for.

So there you have it. The Kindle, Bezos, and Amazon may stand a chance after all.

The curse and how it affects your message

I’m not talking about the curse of the Billy Goat for all you Cubs fans.. It’s actually called the curse of too much knowledge. Sure, you know what your app is capable of. You know what it can do and what it can’t do. You know it inside out like a sibling or a parent. There’s just one problem: nobody else does.. Well maybe your cofounder does but you get the point.

Try and explain it to potential users and a lot of them draw a blank. They might say it sounds cool and they might ‘get it’ after you’ve explained it to them for the 50th time but do they really get it!? Probably not. That’s the curse. You explain away your ‘message’ to infinity but you still don’t penetrate your prospect’s mind. Why? Read on.

Stop murdering your message!

It’s like the Sopranos, the wrong person ends up knowing too much and has a fatal ‘accident’ by the next episode. In your case, it’s your message that ends up dead and you pulled the trigger because ‘it’ knew too much.

You know everything about your app and you could explain it backwards to anyone that asks but does that matter? No, it doesn’t. What matters is explaining it to your potential market in a way they can readily digest it. It’s what most successful companies put in their taglines or short descriptions on their landing page. The problem with knowing too much is we muck up our descriptions with internal knowledge or perspective that makes sense to us but would baffle most others. We also make the mistake of trying to explain everything the app is capable of. The prospect isn’t interested in that. They want to know what the added value in their lives that the app provides and they want to know in 20 words or less.

It’s much harder than you think

Try as you might, your first several attempts at coming up with a tagline will probably be some shortened sugar coated version of the complicated mess of explanations in your head. Not until you actually engage potential users, friends, and family can you get a better idea of how to clarify your core message, the soul of your app and the tagline on your landing page.

Some great examples

To get a better idea of how to form your core message we’ll start by looking at companies who have successfully created one and examine some of the trends we find. Here’s the list:

Basecamp

“The Better Way To Get Projects Done – Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project collaboration tool.”

Xobni

“Drowning in Email? Get Xobni, the Outlook plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy.”

Salesforce

“Success, not Sofware – The leader in customer relationship management (CRM) & cloud computing”

Dropbox

“Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers”

Twitter

“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

Github

“Social Coding – GitHub is for Public Open Source and Private Business Code”

Mint

“The best (free) way to manage your money”

What we’ve learned

1. The longest description is just 22 words with an average description length of 13.7 words. What does that mean? It means that not one of them is longer than a sentence.

2. Over half mention their product’s name in the description.

3. Over half of them start with a 3-5 word tagline followed by a short description.

4. All of them are tangible and/or credible and all of them are simple. For example: Salesforce taps into corporate frustration with software installs/maintenance with “Success, not Software”; Basecamp provides some credibility with “Trusted by millions”; Xobni taps into Outlook users’ frustration with being loaded down with emails;

Also notice that not one of these descriptions is abstract or full of corporate buzz words with the exception of Salesforce. It uses “cloud computing”.. but this works to their advantage since they know their users well – IT guys who do cartwheels when they hear anything with “cloud” in it.

In short, your message should:

- Be simple & short (under 20 words)

- Stay away from buzzwords! We’re programmed to mentally block them out.

- Be concrete by tapping something preexisting in the prospect’s mind.

- Be credible (testimonials, celebrity users, etc..). This one might have to come with time. In the beginning you just might not have enough street cred to make your message credible but by being concrete and simple you can still have a great message which in turn will get you those signups and hopefully great testimonials.

Go with the flow

Originally I had written this part talking about how you need to shape the message in your prospect’s mind. It’s true, you do need to define the value proposition as much and as simply as you can.. but you can’t really appreciate your app’s value until people start using it. If you have multiple users using your application in way it wasn’t designed for then maybe you should go with the flow and mold your app’s message to fit your users’ perception of it. After all, you should be so lucky that you have users in the first place, even if they’re using your creation for something it wasn’t intended for.

Finally..

Don’t let the curse of knowledge destroy the clarity of your message to your potential users. In all the above cases you’ll notice that these taglines don’t even come close to explaining what their software is really capable of or in some cases what the software really does in any kind of depth. How much depth can you fit into a standard sentence?

Your thoughts?

It seems there’s been so much focus on sharing and building up the community they forgot one simple thing: At least half of the equation for delicious is the ability to store your bookmarks in one central place. So why is it 7 years later delicious is still using the same fundamental mechanism of bookmarking websites, one link at a time?

My browsing habits have changed significantly over the last several years. Haven’t yours? In most cases, each browser instance I have open represents a theme. For example I might be searching on web design related articles in one browser instance and have Hacker News and related tabs open in another. This repeats itself over and over again with each new browser instance, the first tab representing the core and the additional tabs representing related content, searches, and tangential information, all of it revolving around one central theme.

So my question is: Why can’t I bookmark my themes? Tabbed browsing should imply tabbed bookmarking right? You would think so but apparently bookmarking is still stuck back in the 90s when the web was considerably smaller and more manageable. Is it too much to ask for a web based bookmarking site that allows me to bookmark the web the same way I browse it?

It also looks like I’m not alone.

Anyone else feel like their bookmarking prowess could use a boost?

In what could be hailed as one of the most significant developments in the tech industry for some time, an open source Google OS, the top comment on the HN post complains that “you can’t run Skype” or other instant messengers natively on a Chrome OS device..

Other commenters compared it to Steve Jobs talking about web apps running on the iPhone.. Wha????

Of course I commented, making a dumb terminals and mainframe analogy. I also brought up the potential effects on Microsoft. Yeah, that netted me -1 points. Go figure.

What was frightening was that there really wasn’t, as of this writing, much of a discussion at all – hardly anything about its effects on the industry or the significance of the event. Odd that Microsoft and Windows were hardly mentioned… Microsoft and the future of the web at large were the 800 pound gorillas in the room but somehow those facts remained invisible..  This is Google OS people..! Does it have to be spelled out?

Here we go:

1. Google is one of the 3 most influential software/tech companies on planet Earth. Apple and Microsoft being the other 2.
2. Laptops are the new desktops, Netbooks are the new laptops, and the Internet is almost everywhere.
3. The browser IS the most important app on your PC or Mac.
4. Web apps are the future.
5. When Saleforce uses a buzzword like ‘cloud computing’ I want to throw up. When Google says it, I believe them. This is the real McCoy and probably the closest yet we’ve come to a major push for actual grid computing.. Is that not significant?
6. Devices that boot directly into the ‘network’ which has more access to your GPU..? Sweet!

In short: Grid computing just got real – so it would be nice if we could have a real discussion about it…

Don’t believe me..? Checkout out the Techcrunch comments, all 178 of them as of now, and do a side by side.

When using Dropbox for your own computers the metaphor holds. It does in fact behave like a USB replacement in this scenario. It’s when you use Dropbox on computers that you don’t own that the metaphor starts to fall apart and gives users a false sense of security, leaving someone’s potentially sensitive data in plain sight and exposed.

My main gripe with the USB stick Dropbox metaphor is that when I detach a USB stick from a computer my files come with me. I may have copied some files over to the computer but everything else is with me when I remove the USB drive from the computer. Dropbox however is a little different. When you want to ‘remove’ the Dropbox instance from a computer you ‘unlink’ the computer from the Dropbox preferences menu. The nomenclature sounds correct if you think about it. You are literally ‘unlink’ing your local Dropbox instance from the cloud. Here’s the problem: I’d be willing to bet that a substantial amount of Dropbox users, after unlinking their Dropbox instance, would forget that their data is still there, lurking silently in the local unlinked Dropbox instance. Data that they would immediately delete if they knew it was still there or didn’t forget about it. It’s because in the user’s mind they have unplugged the Dropbox USB stick but in reality the virtual USB stick is still very much plugged in. It’s just no longer connected to its mothership. Of course, one has the option of downloading a file stored in your Public Dropbox folder through a web link. This solution is a little clumsy for obvious reasons though – nothing like copying and pasting random web links around to get at your files..

So that’s my main gripe with the Dropbox UX and USB stick metaphor. It gives users a false sense of security when they are copying files to computers they *don’t* own. I think it’s irresponsible of Dropbox not to have an option, as far as I can tell, to completely ‘unplug’ Dropbox from a computer when that person no longer has a need for it. If they included this option then it could potentially save a lot of people a lot of heartache.

2. Why the hell does the accessory base only allow for vertical viewing? It looks like you’ll be able to hook this up to an external monitor so that might help.

3. Where the hell is Graffiti, the finger version? Is it just me or would typing on this thing be awkward without the help of an accessory?

4. Oh great, yet another form factor to make sure my web apps look good and work on. I made extensive use of drag & drop in my last web app.. That won’t work with this!

5. No built-in camera means no video chat without an add on. WHY APPLE WHY!!!??

6. Tech that is going extinct:

1. The mouse. Point & click is on its way out. To be replaced by point & touch
2. Interacting directly with the file system
3. Microsoft

That’s it.

Section 0: Startup Failure Anonymous?
Hi my name is Fred and I failed at a software startup. Is there a Startup Failure Anonymous group I should post this to..?

Section 1: In the Beginning

I currently work for a small company as a software engineer and have been with them for 5 years now. Let’s call them Company X. Company X sells a software product to doctors nationwide and pays me well so I have no complaints about that. My primary role there is development on their main product, a web service, and back-end web apps that help Company X manage everything from accounting to customer information and more.

About a year ago I endeavored to create a piece of software which would help manage Company X’s information (I can’t get into specifics about what the actual product was because of contractual reasons but I can say that it was a business tool aimed at small to medium sized businesses and it was a django/jquery web app with a twist: a feature that used speech recognition so that users could interact with the app using voice commands from a mobile device like an iPhone).

I had looked countless hours on the net looking for an existing solution for Company X’s need and just couldn’t find one that fit the bill. That’s when I got this idea. The idea was I would develop this piece of software, get it working for Company X, make sure it worked well, and then pull a 37signals move and release it under my newly created LLC.

So it began… My new nighttime startup was just me, an independent contractor coder, and of course: several credit cards…!

Section 2: Moving along

It took us roughly 8-10 months of sleepless nights from concept to design to implementation. The plan was to get some buzz going for my web app by first releasing an iPhone app. The goal of the iPhone app was really threefold: getting some of that aforementioned buzz, testing out the server-side speech recognition, and making some cash to alleviate debt.

I guess two out of three ain’t bad. The app met some initial success but we realized quickly it wasn’t going to pay the bills. We were better off giving it away to encourage downloads. That certainly did the trick. Our system was tested to its limits when we set the price to free. We were successfully processing 1000s of daily requests which is more than I had hoped for. So on that note we were good.

Section 3: Rewind just a little – I forgot to mention…

We continued our march onwards. Or did we..? Well that’s when things get a bit foggy. I almost left something out. It didn’t kill my startup directly.. but it definitely hurt it tremendously. You might call it an accomplice in my startup’s murder.

This thing I’m speaking of was a bug in the 2 monster servers I purchased to handle the speech rec for the iPhone app. Speech recognition for the uninitiated is fairly memory/processor intensive even with today’s hardware hence the reason we needed some powerful servers. We thought about renting some Quads with decent memory but it would have been too expensive.. so I purchased 2 servers for a bargain at newegg.com and colocated them for dirt cheap.

At any rate after we had gotten everything set up we started noticing that either server would randomly throw a machine check exception every now and again which brought that entire machine to screeching halt. You can imagine my horror at this. They were brand spankin new..! I was pissed.

For nearly 2 months we pulled our hair out trying to figure out what was causing this behaviour. You can imagine what we tried: operating system version changes, disabling RAID, swapping memory. You name it and we tried it. Checking logs was useless. The kernel was killed before it could even write out something useful. The machine check exception was useless because it was too general to pinpoint any one piece of faulty hardware.

The one thing we had going for us was that it happened on both machines. So finally.. yes finally we figured out that the bug in question was an issue in our blazing fast Harpertowns’ microcode. One quick update to the microcode and 5 minutes later the ghost in the machine was dead and we shot’em good..!

Section 4: Painful realization…

The unfortunate result of this wild goose chase was that my funds had dried up. I didn’t have enough credit or cash left to keep paying my contractor to finish the web app. The iPhone app was subsequently released (now that our servers were fully working) but as I stated above it didn’t generate a significant amount of cash from app sales.

So there I was – an iPhone app released and used by tens of thousands… but not a damned dime to finish the job..!! After all, I initially set out to create a solution, not a feature to that solution. The iPhone app was really just the beginning in my mind or so I thought. In the overall scheme it was going to be a buzz generator and beta test of my “killer” feature that would later be incorporated into the general solution. I couldn’t have been more wrong in my approach. I made a fundamental mistake which I’ll discuss later.

So anyway, when the funds ran out it obviously hit me that I had to shut it all down and I did. I pulled the app from the store, sold off the servers and continued on with my day job at Company X.

Section 5: Reflections…

I’ve had almost a year to think about where I went wrong.. Here are the main observations I made about my experience:

1. iPhone app development is not trivial. This took up a huge portion of my time.
2. In a self-funded startup you’re always one emergency away from going bust i.e. your servers randomly generate machine check exceptions =)
3. the iTunes app store and hype are misleading. Most apps need enormous volume priced at 99 cents to make significant money from app sales and those tend to be video games or iFart type apps.
4. Decent designers cost a shitload, are usually too busy, and really hard to locate.
5. It was the most chaotic up and down roller coaster year of my entire life.
6. Startups are really really hard to do alone. I would have loved to have had a cofounder but it just didn’t work out that way.

Section 6: Reflections part II…

After much thought and reflection I finally realized that integrating speech recognition into my solution and scaling it out web 2.0 style was ridiculous. This was a really tough thing to do even for large and well funded companies. How could I have hoped in my wildest dreams to implement something like that on such a large scale..?

I was so enchanted by this magical killer feature and the promise of speech recognition that I fell into a delusion. I made the entire solution about this one feature. Even though I thought it was a killer feature, one that would separate me from the competition. I failed to realize that this feature did not solve the original problem. Sure it was shiny and really freakin cool but people aren’t usually willing to pay for just ‘cool’. People are willing to pay for a solution to their problem. If you’re not solving someone’s problem then what are you doing..?? It wasn’t my original intent to implement this feature. It’s just something I stumbled upon during my research.

Section 7: The number one reason my startup failed…

So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem. The shinier and more tempting features of any software program should be regarded with a high level of suspicion. There may be a reason some things are so shiny and alluring. Traps often have this quality. My advice to anyone creating a solution is to march straight towards your initial goal, as long as the goal really does address a true need then that’s what you should focus on.

Questions for the wise: Is the feature absolutely necessary for the solution to function..? If not will this feature take less than a day or two to implement…? In other words if the shiny feature you want to implement is not absolutely necessary for your solution and it will take more than a day or two to finish then move on.

That’s a wrap.. Love to hear your thoughts.

I am curious and want to know whether or not the “see as the other person types” feature is actually useful or just creepy…

In my online chats I spend plenty of time going back over an IM before I actually send it..  It’s almost like thinking before you speak.. You have this kind of filter in your brain that says “should I say it like this or that..?”  Some people don’t have this fitler, i.e. House MD..  =)

So I can’t imagine wanting to see exactly what someone is typing out as they type it. I also can’t imagine wanting someone to see me typing something out as I type it and formulate my thought into an IM…

Some people might say that I think too much.. I probably do.. but I know there are others out there who have been accused of doing the same thing and you know who you are

So I ask: Do you like Google Wave’s “see as you type” feature? And if not, can it be shut off?