One thing that Chris Fralic and I have been tossing around is the lack of a retailer centric play—where individual retailers can run their own group buys, manage discounts across various sites, run local campaigns across Foursquare, Facebook fan pages, etc.  All of the current sites revolve around a centralized curation and sales function.   To get that spa or sandwich shop onto your system, you still need a person getting on the phone, calling them up, running through the economics and particulars of the deal, scheduling, etc. That leaves a lot of open space in the market.  Even if you have 5 major competitors in a city and they do a different place every weekday, you’re still only covering about 1,000 retailers and merchants per year, assuming no overlap and no repeats.  On top of that, the economics of having that salesforce requires you to raise boatloads of money. 

On the other hand, how many places would love to run their own little group sales—sales that might not be big enough to be the Homerun deal of the day, but might make sense to do economically if they can get two dozen people in that day?  Many would run those deals everyday if they could.

Enter Closely.  Closely just launched at DEMO this week and is the natural evolution of group buying and discount sites—allowing retailers to run these deals on their own in front of their own audiences.  I’m sure at some point, the best of these deals will be syndicated to Homerun, Groupon, Buywithme, etc., and maybe those sites will eventually compete, paying for the right to run the best deals at the most highly sought after venues.  They might even do it at a loss on a per deal basis if it means acquiring a customer. 

I’d also want to see the ability to manage deals across existing local platforms—as there’s been an explosion in local inventory that needs to get monetized.  Will Foursquare start running Closely ads?  It should… and retailers should be able to see how their campaigns are doing across sites and platforms.

Another early effort to watch in this space is BeeMe, which is a project run by some ITP students.  BeeMe is taking those little coffee shop loyalty cards (the ones you punch for your 10th and finally free coffee) and moving them online.  Retailer centric, self serve models are where it’s at—*IF* they can figure out how to acquire customers cheaply.  These plays still have the “last mile” problem of getting new venues onto the platform when the average retailer barely knows how to use the web and generally sucks at online marketing. 

Community is one solution I had in mind.  What if you weren’t just a platform for distribution of deals, but a kind of local virtual chamber of commerce or small business organization—with some social networking features so that retailers could get together to share best practices, work with each other, cross-sell, etc.  In fact, the failure of the local chamber of commerce and economic development organizations is largely the reason why it’s so expensive for local plays to acquire customers.  If you get a permit to do business in the city, you should automatically get signed up to take an online marketing course and be presented accounts in all of these local plays.  Same with banks—they’re equally incentivized to have you figure out how to bring customers in the door after they loan you money.  Chase should be a reseller of Homerun, Foursquare, Square, and all of the different ways that retailers can innovate, save money or grow revenues.

A good example is the Etsy seller community which does a lot for new sellers to help them get up and running—sharing best practices about taking photos, copy, pricing, etc.  This kind of selling optimization takes the pressure (and cost) off of Etsy to solve this problem of getting and onboarding new sellers on their own.

Not only is deal origination likely to disaggregate, but so will the end purchases.  After Facebook integrates payments, how long before you start making purchases right in your newsfeed without ever leaving the page.  Your friend will say that they bought a dress from Modcloth, publish it to their newsfeed and you’ll be able to buy the same dress right there in the newsfeed with your Facebook Payment account without leaving the site.

But there is a problem with the 40d. It’s big & heavy and I end up leaving it home a lot. It’s not easy to carry that thing when I’m running around with three kids.

So the iPhone ends up taking a ton of photos which isn’t great. Sure, it’s excellent for the casual snapshot but I love photography, getting the right light and making pictures. 

My brother has been excited about the micro four thirds system for some time now. He’s a doctor by day and as a hobby runs a micro four thirds message board. He’s been pushing me for the past year. 

A week ago I took the plunge and bought my first micro four thirds camera - the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 (honestly, who names these things).

Quick review: easy, fast, small and takes great pictures. 

 My 10 year old daughter took a bunch of shots today. It’s so fast that even in auto mode it didn’t require a flash indoors. 

Here’s a few sample indoor shots that Sophia took besides this funny self portrait. 

Me

Our dog 

James jumping (no flash) 

I absolutely love this camera. It’s light and the 20mm lens that comes with the camera is sweet. Autofocus is fast. It takes HD video. 

Right now the only thing I miss about the 40d for everyday shots is the view finder. The view finder comes in handy on sunny days and some old habits die hard I guess. I’ll probably only use the 40d when I need my telephoto lens - otherwise I’m all about the GF1.

I highly recommend this camera if you are looking for an amazing camera but don’t want to lug around a DSLR, You won’t be disappointed. 

On top of that, he wasn’t sure how much board communication was necessary.  How much should he be telling his board?  What things should he be asking for?  Should he float each opportunity by them or only tell them about the important stuff.  The investors, on the other hand, had a tough time figuring out the progress the company was making, because communication was random and seemed like the play by play of a good game of wack-a-mole versus a purposeful march forward. 

The root of the issue was that both sides were lacking the lens and filter of an explicitly communicated plan.  It was tough for the entrepreneur to prioritize new information, problems, and opportunities without placing them in the context of an agreed upon plan.  Instead of declarative statements about whether important new opportunities helped the company reach strategic goals, he’d ask his investors whether or not these opportunities made sense.  What he got back didn’t seem particularly helpful, because it was in the vein of “You tell us."  It made him want to stop asking questions altogether and it made the investors feel like he wasn’t moving the ball forward.  Clearly he was working hard, but was he treading water?  Without demonstrable progress towards a stated goal, it was tough to tell.

I run into a lot of businesses that ask for money, but haven’t drawn a line in the sand in terms of where they want to be at the end of that runway.  When I ask what they’ll do with it, I get, “spend a little more on marketing, improve usability, work on features”, but no big, hairy goals—just a ton of little small ones.

I’ll admit that writing up a business plan may seem a little archaic after you already have a business up and running—and many businesses don’t start out with business plans.  Sometimes they’re just small apps that solve a problem for a few people, and they turn into a lot more than that before anyone has a chance to write a plan down—but I think it’s a critical aspect of running a business.

The analogy we talked about was a football coach who decides, with the input of his coaches, prior stats, and even his team, that he needs to get back to establishing the running game—particularly in the first half of the next game.  That’s something everyone could agree upon as a solid goal that would change the way the team had played previously.  The operational details of which running backs were going to get the carries could change from play to play, and it doesn’t mean he couldn’t call for three passes in a row at one point, but “establishing the run in the first half” is a measurable, achievable goal that shouldn’t change too much.  At any point in time, you could use the stats of yards per carry and the mix of runs to passes to tell whether or not you were successful in setting up an effective running game.

That could make your goal something like: “Creating a viable product for SMBs by third quarter”.  We could adjust what that means, but having the whole team, the outside world, the investors, etc. know you’re focused on the SMB market helps set expectations for all involved.  It also helps you turn down that marketing partnership with MySpace, because you know that’s not where SMBs are.  The details of which features go into an SMB product should be left up to the team and worked on through customer research.  It’s something you might show to your investors at the outset, but they don’t need to know all the adjustments.

Without these kinds of value-creating goals, teams spend too much team fighting fires.  What’s interesting is that when you’re doing nothing but fighting fires, it feels like you don’t have time for audacious goals.  “How can we attack the SMB market when we have all these bugs to fix?” 

The answer, many times, is that the amount of time you can spend on engineering and operations varies greatly.  The difference between “It works” and “Its bulletproof” can be six months of engineering—six months you may not have the resources for at this time.  When you don’t communicate to your team what needs to be done in two weeks, a month, and three months—what you’re aiming for from a product goal perspective—it’s tough for them to calibrate to what level of engineering needs to go into the product.  They’ll often default to “top quality” when you’re just trying to get a product out the door.

Writing out plans shouldn’t feel like a chore.  When executed well, plans should actually save you decision making time.  When new data or opportunities come in, you can quickly go back to a plan as a reference and ask yourself, “Does this fit with the plan?  No?   Does this inform me that my plan should be different?  No?  Ok, move on…”  They provide a frame of reference for monitoring your progress and enabling others to do the same.  They also enable you to better delegate tasks as an entrepreneur.  You’ll never be able to communicate to your team exactly what to do in every situation, but with a going strategic plan in place, the people under you will have a frame of reference which will guide them to make informed decisions on the little things that a CEO shouldn’t need to worry about.

This video visits a traveling exhibit celebrating the work of Dieter Rams during its stop at the Design Museum London. Director Deyan Sudjic and Michael Czerwinski, who heads up the institution's public programs, both chime in on what made Rams such an important designer and the show's scope.

The next stop for the exhibition is Frankfurt's Museum of Applied Art, where you can catch it from 22 May-5 September 2010.

As usual, I seem to have created some misconceptions by my comments. First of all, what we said on our website is that the work on the WB-7 has been completed. We did not discuss the results. If you would like to conjecture what those results are, let me suggest that you notice the fact that we are working on the WB-8 device. The WB-8 was not a part of Dr. Bussard’s original development plan. This device came about as a result of the peer review process which suggested that there were issues that needed to be resolved at a smaller scale before proceeding to a demo. This was a conclusion that EMC2 heartily concurred with. I don’t want to leave people with the impression that everything on the WB-7 is identical to the WB-6.

Secondly, in our contract with the DOD, EMC2 owns the commercialization rights for the Polywell. However, commercialization is not something that we can do with our DOD funding. That is what we would like to look at with any contributions from the website.

This will enable us to:
1. Design an attractive commercial reactor package.
2. Identify the high leverage physics items that most impact the design (i.e. how good is good enough).
3. Give us a base design when we are ready to proceed to the next step.

After checking out the new collection of user-friendly routers from Belkin this morning, the model most after our own hearts is the top-of-the-line Play Max, a dual-band device that makes both experiencing and downloading large media files easier. Their Video Max HD technology takes advantage of the simultaneous networks that the Play Max creates, upping both performance and speed when watching HD movies and the like.

A series of software turns the router into a system for managing incoming media, using an app called Bit Boost to prioritize how it handles different types, for example. But those who regularly leave files downloading overnight will especially love Torrent Genie, a feature that will continue downloads to a hard drive without a computer.

Other fun features introduced with the new line, and included in this model, range from automatic backups, wireless printing, and music streaming to enabled devices like PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s.

Due out this April, the Play Max will sell directly from Belkin for $130.

1) Get out of information transfer mode and get into listening/conversation mode

Some entrepreneurs approach a meeting by aiming a firehose of data and features at me and just letting it rip—and they get noticeably flustered or frustrated when I attempt to interrupt the flow.  That’s hard, because I tend to be very Columbo-like in my train of thought—jumping in at random points.  It creates a number of issues.  First, without making this a back and forth, it doesn’t give you an opportunity to adjust the conversation for each investor.  You don’t want to give every investor the same pitch because we’re not all the same—we don’t have the same levels of expertise in your field, interest in different models, or innate beliefs about the world and the future.  You want to learn just as much about us—also to figure out if we’d make a good partner—as we learn about you.  On top of that, anyone who doesn’t take the time to learn about me or about First Round, in my mind, appears desperate—as if they’d take money from anyone willing to write a check.  The most sought after entrepreneurs want to know what value we can add over and above our money—and the aspirational ones are just happy to get a meeting.

2) Help the investor get unstuck

The key to your success might be X, but I’m still stuck on Y.  Y might be utterly insignificant, but it doesn’t matter, because if my caveman VC brain can’t wrap my head around Y, anything you tell me after that will only get half attention while I try and figure Y out.  You need to identify the blockages in my head that prevent me from getting to the finish line—maybe even ask me right off the bat what my biggest concerns would be knowing what I know at the outset.  Spend less time telling me what you think I need to know versus helping get me past my objections.

3) Recognize the dynamic, but don’t overplay it

Sometimes, you’re in a meeting with the founders of [insert billion dollar exit here] and they don’t need your money.  Most times, that’s not the case as an early stage investor.  You probably need funding more than anyone can know for sure that you’re going to be a success.  If you need investor to do something (like write a check) more than they want to do it, then you’re not exactly peers in that relationship.  That means you’re generally going to go to their office, work off of their schedule, etc.  It also means that you don’t make jokes at their expense to lighten the mood—and you definitely don’t spend the first 10 minutes of a meeting joking around at their expense.  Sound silly?  I’ve seen it happen.  Worst of all, it was a business development intensive business—so I took their failed attempt at building a relationship with me as a signal of what I could expect from them when they approach their potential partner pipeline.  Needless to say, I didn’t get there on that deal.

At the same time, once you get past the whole asking for money thing, let’s get one thing straight—entrepreneurs create way more value than their investors do.  So, you shouldn’t fall to your knees offering your firstborn at an investor meeting.  You don’t need to buy me lunch or coffee or whatever to get me to take a meeting—it’s my job to.  I’m not taking a meeting with you as a favor.  I want to and I need to.  Personally, I find it a little embarrassing when entrepreneurs overthank me for taking a meeting out of my busy schedule.  You know what’s in my busy schedule?  Great entrepreneurs like you…  that’s the whole point.  Confidence needs to convince you that I’d be crazy not to take a meeting with you—but, if I, in fact, don’t want to take a meeting with you, free lunch isn’t enough to compensate me for a lost hour. 

4) Be persistent, but not a pain

If you e-mail an investor or someone intros you, and you don’t hear back, just hit them again politely with, “Just want to make sure you got this.”   If you email me once, and then I never hear from you, I’m going to assume that’s the way you try to close sales deals or hires—or that you didn’t really want to meet with me.  Don’t get me wrong—I wish I could get to every e-mail sent to me within a day, but it’s not realistic… and sometimes, I need a nudge if things get lost in the flow.  It’s not a function of my interest at all, so if you want to chat with me or any other investor, just politely keep at it until you get a yes or no.

5) Do a time check

Ask the person how long they have.  Sometimes, an investor has back to back meetings but needs to squeeze a quick phonecall in between—or is cutting it close with their next location.  If you can help them shave 10-15 minutes off the end of your meeting, they’ll appreciate it.  Plus, there isn’t much more you can get done in 60 minutes that you can’t get done in 45.  They might go the other way and give you more time as well—you never know, but it’s always good to know if you’re running into a point at which the other person is going to mentally check out because they’re worried about making a flight or another meeting.

6) Outline your goals

I once did a sales training class where the guy said that you should start out by saying, “Would you feel comfortable telling me in 10 minutes whether or not this seems like a fit, and whether or not we should continue the meeting?”  I thought it was pretty ballsy—but it protected everyone against the downside of getting stuck in a meeting that was never going to result in a success.  Let’s say I realized you were too late stage, or I didn’t realize you were a medical device…  We’d both be best served by ending the meeting early, right?  Of course, I don’t expect anyone to do this, but I totally understand why both parties would want those other 50 minutes back once you realized it wasn’t going to happen.  In this way, the initial goal for the first 10 minutes was to see if there was even a fit.  That’s a good goal for the first 10 minutes.

After that, having a sense of what you’re trying to do is helpful.  For example: “I’d like to convince you that a) enough people need this, b) we can find those people and acquire them profitably and c) that there are natural acquirors to this business.”  This way, the discussion will have some structure and you won’t spend too much time on any one thing because you’ll be focused on getting through a reasonable outline for the meeting.

While we’re on the subject of meetings, I’ve been experimenting with a new way to schedule meetings called Tungle.me.  There’s now a link on my blog where it says Meet in the navbar that links to my Tungle.me profile, which shows all the free times in my calendar.  If you’d like to meet with me, just look at my calendar, pick some times, and send a request from that page.  All I need to do is confirm one and it automatically shows up on my calendar.  Keep in mind the following:

1) I’m not lowering the bar for meetings—just the friction in scheduling.  I’ll respond to your request if I don’t think it’s productive or appropriate to meet face to face.  I’ve done it before and no one seems to mind if I turn them down—it’s not really much different than turning down an e-mail request for a meeting, I suppose. 

2) Give me some details—a link to a site is great, or some information on who told you to meet with me, or who we both know in common, etc is really helpful for me to figure out whether it makes sense to meet.

3) Forget this week unless I mention it… usually the current week is pretty full and whatever few free times I have, I’m actually trying to do some work.  If you’re only in NYC this week, however, just let me know that and we’ll see if we can make it work. 

So there it is:  http://www.tungle.me/ceonyc  <—My free times.  (A lot of people think I’m going to get overhwhelmed with requests, but I don’t think so…   mostly b/c the average person won’t sign up for what they know would be an unproductive meeting if they know they don’t have much to show.  It’s not like people randomly show up at offices all the time, even thought hey have people’s addresses… why should this be different?)

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

An alarm clock, digital photo frame, portable movie display, and Skype station all in one, the iLuv IMM190 dock makes iPhone and iTouch capabilities all the more useful while keeping your beloved gadget secure and charged.

Featuring dynamic acoustic speakers, the iMM190 easily rotates horizontally or vertically to match its temporary purpose.

Available online for $90 from iLuv and elsewhere, the coordinating software downloads free from Apple's iTunes Store.

The Enterprise Irregulars blog is sponsored by .   Work.  Online.  

Selling on eBay is awful in my experience. I have a lot of gadgets. So recently I decided to list some of them on eBay.

The process to list an item is painful in my opinion but that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is what comes next. Endless requests from people asking if you will end the auction early, or go around ebay, or people bidding & winning an auction and then flaking out. I’m now 0 for 3. I think I’m done.

There has to be a better way. What do you think? Is my experience likes yours or is it much better for everyone else?

First off, there’s me.  I am front and center when it comes to being in close proximity to what I write.  Not only is my e-mail address on my blog, but I even have a live Plugoo widget that you can type into and send me a message on AIM.  Sometimes I’m not there or I’m busy, but I’m generally pretty responsive, since I spend a disproportionate amount of my day in front of the computer with a chat client open.  There are links to where else you can find me, too—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

On top of that, there’s a thriving little community happening around my comments, powered by Disqus.  I’m certainly responsive there, but you’re also bound to run into a number of other people with different views and opinions, each of whom also have links to where they are elsewhere in the social web.

If that’s not enough for you, I have a TwitterRemote badge that shows you recent visitors—a small glimpse into the other kinds of people who visit my blog, each with links to their Twitter account. 

In a sense, reading a blog post on my site is almost like going to a session at a conference and hanging out in the hallway afterwards.  You’ve got the main panel, but you’ve got all these other little ways in which you can interact with the speaker and the audience afterwards.

Contrast that with a lot of mainstream media sites.  Authors are difficult to find—certainly not easily accessible on the page.  You definitely don’t have a good sense of who else is seeing that page or interacting with it and on top of that, the comments—still stuck in an old school CMS—don’t foster discussion.  And that’s if they have any comments at all.

It’s just as well.  There probably isn’t much community around these articles anyway.  When you don’t do a good job of generating loyalty to a writer or a beat, you’re not going to get many repeat visitors.  Without a stable base of readers, what you wind up with is just the randoms who come in through search—and they’re the most likely people to leave anonymous troll comments—the graffiti of social content.  Stable readership and a strong relationship between the author and the audience engender a sense of ownership or at least belonging around this column, beat, or blog.  When people feel loyalty and ownership, the quality of interaction goes up, because the regulars set the tone.  When all you get are search trolls, you watch the “Broken Windows” theory of content—where if it doesn’t appear like anyone really cares enough to hangout around this content, others will care less about making meaningful investments in it.

Back when MyBlogLog was looking for funding a few years back, I thought a lot about the prospect of dropping in a few lines of code to “make any site social”.  To a less obvious extent, Disqus is doing the same thing.  Content publishers need to realize what event organizers have known for years—that it’s not really about the content but it’s about the people.  You go to a conference to meet people—other people interested in the same content.  Content acts as an organizing structure to attract the right people and channel them into relevant conversations.  People are the reason why I went back to SXSW for the fourth year in a row this year.

This is part of the premise of First Round’s investment in LiveIntent.  They’re building tools that publishers can use to introduce their readers to the livestreams of writers, related personalities and other relevant folks that they want in front of their audience.  Content is just a gathering mechanism—what your audience really wants is connection and engagement to other people.

It works both ways, too.  People are curators of content.  Facebook understands this.  It drives a ton of outbound traffic from the millions of links flowing through newsfeeds and inbox shares.  It’s not just a static place to collect people, but a dynamic content reader with social filters.  Twitter, too, shows that when you combine content and people, you can get a very dynamic experience.  It’s something that more professional sites like the WSJ, LinkedIn, Tracked, and TheLadders should think about more.  People don’t want visit a rolodex or a job board nearly as much as they want to visit a place where I’m instantly told what’s buzzing around people with similar titles as me and what they’re reading.  That’s what happens at offline events—smart people tell you what you should be paying attention do and you get the chance to interact with them around that content—and potentially do business with them then or at some point in the future.  The experience at the Wall Street Journal shouldn’t really be any different. 

Scientists at MIT have unraveled some of their deepest secrets in research that could lead the way to the creation of synthetic materials that duplicate, or even exceed, the extraordinary properties of natural silk.

Silks are made from proteins, including some that form thin, planar crystals called beta-sheets. These sheets are connected to each other through hydrogen bonds — among the weakest types of chemical bonds, and a far cry from the much stronger covalent bonds found in most organic molecules. Buehler’s team carried out a series of atomic-level computer simulations that investigated the molecular failure mechanisms in silk. “Small yet rigid crystals showed the ability to quickly re-form their broken bonds, and as a result fail ‘gracefully’ — that is, gradually rather than suddenly,” graduate student Keten explains.

“In most engineered materials” — ceramics, for instance — “high strength comes with brittleness,” Buehler says. “Once ductility is introduced, materials become weak.” But not silk, which has high strength despite being built from inherently weak building blocks. It turns out that’s because these building blocks — the tiny beta-sheet crystals, as well as filaments that join them — are arranged in a structure that resembles a tall stack of pancakes, but with the crystal structures within each pancake alternating in their orientation. This particular geometry of tiny silk nanocrystals allows hydrogen bonds to work cooperatively, reinforcing adjacent chains against external forces, which leads to the outstanding extensibility and strength of spider silk.