nicw

Yes, most people are definitely willing to talk, IF you show that you value their time, and give them some context about why you're asking.

Show that you value their time by setting the space upfront, and when you're 10 minutes away, tell them "We have 10 minutes left, and I want to respect your time...". They'll decide to keep rambling or not.

Re: numbers, you can also preface with "I'm not looking to know anything confidential, but since I don't know your industry, as we talk, it would be great to have numbers with some context.

Here is my verbatim intro for learning more about cities+construction:

"Hi! I'm a technologist who left the tech world, and I'm focusing on how I can help cities. Particularly helping cities make better decisions with Data.

To prevent building something that doesn't help cities, I'm listening to key people in your space and understanding the problems they face. I'd really like to get an understanding of your role and the issues you face, particularly around the permitting process, and code compliance.

The conversation is less than an hour, and I can meet you in person, or over the phone. The questions are lightweight, no quizzes here. :)"

- nic

Be upfront about your curiosity, otherwise it falls apart pretty quickly if you have a deeper conversation :) What you want to focus on is learning about the space and the players, not pitching them a solution.

I tell people that I am interested in the space, and am in listening mode —> and what do they do? Tell me more....etc etc

I’ve done this for several industries now:

Get out of the library and start talking to people in that field. It will take some time and have some slow starts, but the only way you learn about an industries inefficiencies and its opportunities is by hitting the pavement.

You’ll need some explanation “story” to help people understand your intentions. I am upfront and say I am interested in their space personally, and I’m looking for business opportunities - but I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know, and therefore I’m in listening mode.

With your example: Go to the stall owners, and ask if you can talk when they’re not busy. Ask little, listen a lot. Stand there for hours and observe the different stalls. Take notes.

Map out the different players, and ask to talk to them. Eventually you’ll get connected to events that they attend, and they’ll also pass you along to their peers. Ask what conferences they attend and so on.

Looks promising. While it may seem obvious, I would spell out what double-blind means, the problem it solves, and how it is used elsewhere. That then sets you up to point out how doctors use these study types, adding credibility.

My Fitbit reports the number of flights climbed - it's the Fitbit 'One' model. Along with my daily 10k steps, I have a flights climbed goal that I track through the website. Maybe it's a different model that doesn't track this?

"I was surprised to find out that Flickr now requires a Yahoo account to log in. I’m not sure when this was implemented..."

Yahoo usernames were required in 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6316761.stm

In my RSS feed, the original 2011 is linked [1]. But loading the page takes you to the follow up [2]

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmo...

[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a-cos...

Hey, thanks. We're looking at a couple ways to pair with wineries, the tough part being that the small wineries are the best market, except they're the least experimental. Big wineries have people who understand trying out new venues.

I wouldn't say that's true. My unfunded wine startup, Swirl it! (http://swirlitapp.com) was covered by TC, and even had a video interview where we came in and swirled w/Colleen Taylor.

We haven't raised any money to date, and even told TC this. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/swirl-it-wine-app-iphone/

Kinda. All coastlines are public-access, but if you own the property up to the coast (say, a cabin on a river), you do not have to grant access across your property. So, you could walk down the river and hang out in front of this cabin, but you can't trespass across private property.

Ah ha, thanks :) Woke up this morning and was wondering why. Was a late night post.

You can do this currently. My feeds were quickly ingested and everything worked great.

This almost happened at the California State University (CSU) level. An RFP went out, Alcatel bid $22MM, Cisco $123MM.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/102512-cisco-csu-26371...

""Everybody had to comply with this spreadsheet," he said. "Every campus had two border routers, two cores, and two server farm switches. All the vendors had to propose exactly the same solution" based on the average number of servers deployed at each CSU campus. "All of this is based on exactly the same data to all of the vendors. It's exactly the same formula for all of the vendors.""

One thing I would add to this:

Goes out in person(!) and talks to customers.

It's very easy to add new features to products, but until you sit down with a customer, listen to them, and watch them use your product you won't have a clear understanding of their needs. Good product managers realize they are very close to a product and need to constantly take a step back.

If you're skeptical, sign up for a UserTesting.com account and watch people navigate your site. You'll be surprised.

As pageld said, it's just a title. At an established startup, the product manager is generally the one translating the founders vision into a product. The founder might have an idea or see a need, but the product manager is the one who researches the market, does the competitive analysis and determines the feature set. Then they get it built and launched.

They may not do all the work, but they're the ones covering all the little details: making sure an email goes out when a new user signs up, reviewing that copy, watching retention, etc.

You'll see a lot of job descriptions for product managers reference 'Mini-CEO', which is pretty apt.

Along with good specs, I would add having an open line of communication with your engineers about what to do when the specs aren't clear. I've worked with some engineers that their personality caused them to think it was their fault they didn't understand the spec - and they spent unnecessary time and frustration trying to puzzle something out.

Raising your hand and asking, "Is this what you meant?" can save a lot of hassles, especially with remote teams.

You can be right - but your maturity is determined by your response when the team "comes around" to your idea. A mature developer nods, and immediately begins walking through their pre-developed action plan. That person has the confidence that the team knows there was a mistake, and no need to walk through the past.

An immature developer throws out the "I told you so" and lauds it over their team.

We all make mistakes, it's the foundation for the fail-forward-fast mantra. So acknowledge the mistake, impress others that you have a solution, and move forward.

Exactly. There are so many other factors regarding pricing: Long Term Value, and Cost to Acquire being one of them. It is common to break your audience into 'bands', and learn the trigger points for each band: cost to acquire a customer in this segment and how likely they are to make repeat purchases, at which price.

Simply put, the majority of your audience may make repeat purchases, but only if each purchase is a separate price. This is much greater value than a one-off purchase.

It depends on the process. A more expensive spirit could use processes that uses less chemicals, but takes longer to filter.

Some wines are filtered using fining agents that contain gelatin, where some winemakers choose to use higher-micron (more expensive) filters. Or they use sanitation 'preservatives' like Velcorin. Any one of these processes could either trigger an allergy or add something that your body doesn't like processing.

The closest example is decaf coffee: how to strip out the caffeine. There is a chemical way (cheap but uses benzene) vs the swiss water process.

http://www.wisegeek.org/how-is-coffee-decaffeinated.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination#Swiss_water_proc...

More importantly, people shouldn't rely on what these wine raters say. This is their palate, not yours. And while it's a good 'nudge' to try one wine versus another, they are in no way the experts on your own tastebuds. I've been working on ways to map your palate and give you recommendations for this exact reason.

"To solve this we’ve been brainstorming and thinking which features or tweaks we can make. But the problem is that we came up with lots of ideas and we don’t know which one to choose.

We can send an email asking our clients which one they like best (but I don’t think we will have lots of feedback). Or we can think the features as little MVPs with minimum goals and remove them if they don’t work out."

Don't do either. If you're not getting traction with your core product, it's time to go talk to your customers. You may have a great product, but something isn't clicking for them, and adding more and more features isn't going to make that any better. And how are you going to know which feature is "the one"?

I worked for a great product manager who once said "even if you tweak something and now you're doing 300% better, that just means that before you were 300% wrong".

Talk to your customers!

The article points out that during the 3 hours of the Superbowl, only an average of 11 minutes is actual playing time. That's a lot of downtime where fans in those $2,000 seats will be watching replay videos, uploading their own, and checking stats.

Skipping the first note, the author makes a strong point about keeping it simple. You may have an amazing idea, but if the user can't jump in, perform <x> and then jump back out, it's not likely to catch on.

By only having one thing (add text to photos), you're really letting the users vote about whether they would use that functionality. Try to pack too much into your first version of an amazing idea, and you'll have a tough time parsing out which needs tweaking when you're not getting traction.

It kind of works that way. The developers have to get their units approved by the city, which itself has a master plan of the type of growth/urban mix they'd like. The city government is making that decision to allow subdivision blooms at the city edge.

If the city is content with being a bedroom community, they'll allow developers to build anything. However, if the city wants to encourage more downtown or walkability, they'll only approve projects that offer wider sidewalks, business downstairs/lofts upstairs. Or they'll provide incentives to encourage this kind of growth.

My fathers civil engineering company is working with a small town on their 15-20 year master plan. You can see how they've blended their community values into the kind of development they want to attract (Shandon, CA):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47280427/Shandon-Community-Plan-Up...

"In order to achieve a compact urban form, the Community Plan encourages floor area ratios consistent with those found in small downtowns rather than in suburban settings."

"The neighborhood commercial areas are intended to serve a neighborhood’s daily retail needs. Uses typically found within these areas include markets, restaurants, cafés/delis,bakeries, ice cream parlors, pharmacies, laundromats, barbershops, hair salons, hardwarestores, gas stations, banks, offices, and other similar uses generally serving nearby residential areas."

"The main reason, I've heard, is that even if the Kindle format and reader app are reasonable (and I can't vouch for them), it's on publishers to put their books in the right format. "

This is akin to terrible apps on any App Store. It's up to the App Store guidelines to raise the standards and only allow certain books of quality.

Here is my experience based on building ebook-related products:

Amazon: Will allow almost any book of any kind, any formatting. Their singles publishing program is a little stricter since you're giving an exclusive to them and they plan to use those for marketing.

Apple: Strictest store in the business. Humans review every submittal and will kick back your book even if they deem the subject 'not wide enough for a large audience'. IF your book is 51% French, 49% english content but submitted in English, it'll get kicked back and so on.

I don't agree with Apples purview that you can only submit books that are for a large audience - who are they to judge that? Therefore people head to the wild world of Amazon and fight it out at the free or 0.99 level.

Fixed-layout is supported via EPUB, but you need a reader that knows how to display the fixed-layout version. 99% of readers only display reflowable content.

What you really want to do is go with reflowable content that is formatted correctly (proper HTML/CSS), and if the content breaks across the page, changing the font size should help rectify.

(spoken from too many years of ebook + tech book experience)

Adding a little more detail: To stylize your content, you create a 'mask' by specifying the character ranges that you want to change, and then applying attributes to the string

Snippet to take a gray-colored string "Hello World", and then make "World" show as a black color (from memory):

  NSString *theEntireLineOfText = @"Hello World";
  UIColor *boldColor = [UIColor blackColor];
  UIFont *myFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica" size:12.0];
  UIColor *baseColor = [UIColor grayColor];
  NSDictionary *subAttrs = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
                              myFont, NSFontAttributeName, boldColor,NSForegroundColorAttributeName, nil];
   NSMutableAttributedString *mainText = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc] initWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@",theEntireLineOfText] attributes:@{NSFontAttributeName:myFont,NSForegroundColorAttributeName:baseColor}];
  // Make the word "World" black"
  NSRange range = NSMakeRange(0,[@"World" length]);
        [mainText setAttributes:subAttrs range:range];

This is probably more prevalent at mega-corps than startups - and those mega-corps are hiring more programmers than startups, adding skew.

Breaking down the "high demand" technologies by investments (Round A, Round B...) would likely bear different results.

They are drawing power from the lightning port (in the FAQ). But you're right - the prototype doesn't show a bulge for that to happen. Nor (as in my other comment) does there seem to be a pass-through port for you to dock or connect a lightning cable.

Regarding the 30FPS, I've seen demos of e-ink running at high refresh rates (don't know what FPS), but was told that the hit on the battery is too high. Hence why the Kindle rarely refreshes.

I'm not seeing details on whether the Lightning port is still available for docking & data. The 'specs' say that it uses the lightning port for power, but not if you can still plug in your own device.

I don't think you can because of this (from the site FAQ): How do I charge my phone with popSLATE?

There is a micro-USB charging port on your popSLATE that passes charge through to your phone so you don't have to take the cover off.