Rex Is Excited

Maybe just a joke

Here is a pretty useless tip.  You can invert the colors on your Mac’s screen by pressing ctrl+option+command+8. Yeah, it looks kind of cool, but thats about it. It doesn’t serve any real purpose that I am aware of.

The only use I have ever found for it, was as a prank.  When Best Buy first started carrying Macs, which was around Christmas time, I decided to go have a little fun with them.  I went around to their whole section of about 6 Macs and very quickly inverted the colors on all of them while no one was looking.  When they walked back through, they were dumbfounded. One employee called another over for help, and before you know it, there were about 5 Best Buy employees standing there confused as could be.  They were all trying to fix them, but I knew none of them had any idea what to do.  I stood there with my friends tucked away in the DVD section laughing at them for a few minutes.  Luckily for them, it reverts back to normal when you reset the computer.  Go have fun with it and stump your friends.

-Image courtesy of wikiHow

Applicando recently posted a speed test video between a mock “3G iPhone” and the current EDGE iPhone. Both phones are downloading the same page at the same time. The mock “3G iPhone” is simulated by sharing the same Wifi internet connection of an iMac, which was connected to the internet via HSDPA using a Huawei E172 HSPDA modem.  The “3G iPhone” is on the left and the current EDGE iPhone is on the right. The “3G iPhone” loads the same page as the EDGE iPhone in 16 seconds, and the EDGE iPhone takes 30 seconds. That’s a big difference, almost cutting the download time in half.

Dang, there has been a spate of early adopter angst lately.

Just read Alex Vanelsas to see a good example.

Today Frederick over at the Last Podcast gets into the act, writing “I kept wondering if the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t expanding more and more and what that means for services that cater mostly to early adopters.”

Over the last few days I’ve seen another misconception: that Twitter is only Silicon Valley people talking to themselves. Do a search for “Silicon Valley” on Tweetscan and you’ll see a few of those. That misconception is easy to disprove: just watch Twitter Vision for a few minutes and you’ll see that very few Twitterers are in Silicon Valley.

There ARE huge differences between early adopters and others. I was in Alana Taylor’s Ustream channel the other night and many people there told me they like hanging out there “because people understand what I’m talking about here.”

In other words, when someone says to “Tweet that” you don’t get blank stares, or, worse, derision.

If I get arrogant about the role of early adopters (some people call them influencers, or “passionates”) it’s because I’ve seen they are the ones who drive society. You really think that guy who I saw the other day on the plane using Windows 2000 and an old version of Lotus Notes is driving society? Riiiigggghhhhtttt.

I’ve seen this discussion happen EVERY TIME there’s a new technology. I remember back in 1977 that only nerds could use personal computers. Very few people (not even Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) understood just how big that would become.

I remember the days when email was only used by the nerds who had access to Unix terminals at universities or research labs.

I remember the days when people said “IM would never be used in enterprises.” Today it’s built into Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Seriously. They did say that.

I remember the days when the World Wide Web was only for nerds who did physics at places like CERN and weird kids who went to Stanford. I remember people actively betting against the Web. Luckily the guy I worked for, Jim Fawcette, saw its promise early in 1994 and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build one of the first publisher’s Web sites. That investment is why I’m here today.

Today the angst is onto things like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Even older Web 2.0 properties like Flickr haven’t really gone mainstream. Last week we spent some time with Ansel Adams’ son. He had never heard of Flickr. Ansel Adams son!!! That dude should be the first that photo sharing sites pitch, since he’s always talking to press about photography and his company does tons of classes for photographers in Yosemite and other places. Heck, Flickr should figure out how to sponsor the Ansel Adams’ Gallery. But they don’t.

Why not? Because convincing late adopters to change their behavior is VERY hard and VERY expensive. It’s why Amazon doesn’t do TV advertising. Rather they build a product that early adopters, passionate computer geeks, and influencers like.

How does that affect their business performance? Well, compare Best Buy’s price/earnings ratio to that of Amazon’s. According to Google Finance Best Buy’s is 13.91 and Amazon’s is 67.03. I know which one I’d rather have.

Early adopters DO matter. Anyone who says that they don’t needs to go back to business school.

This is why I follow 20,000 Twitterers. I want to study what early adopters are doing and thinking. Twitter is the best place — by far — to do that.

That’s not to say that business people should forget about the late adopters. They are going to be the ones you need to see huge profitability and growth. I guarantee you that most of Ansel Adams’ business is among late adopters now. But then his business has been in Yosemite for 102 years and has one of America’s best-known brands. If you’re building a business today you don’t have those advantages. Your best option is to follow eBay, Amazon, Google, Flickr, Facebook, etc by talking and understanding early adopters first. Why? They are passionate and want to see something new. That guy with the Windows 2000 old Dell laptop? He isn’t looking for anything new. He isn’t going to adopt your newfangled service.

But the people on Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn and Plaxo? They have already told you they are willing to try new things. Therefore they are probably going to be willing to try your new thing too.

We’ll be talking about this in 20 more years when some newfangled thing comes out, though. Most people have no clue about the role of early adopters, and/or totally misunderstand early adopters and/or even lie about them, hence the “only Silicon Valley people are on Twitter” meme.

While we’re talking about Twitter, Yuvi, the wonderkid in India, did an analysis of my usage of Twitter that’s pretty interesting.

If you own a cellphone (almost everyone does these days!) you may or may not have noticed a subtle change in the way we utilize our cell phones versus a traditional land line. During the pre-cellphone days if you were making plans to have lunch with your buddy for example, you would typically call on your land line and the conversation may be something to the effect of …

Joe: “…I’ll meet you at the restaurant at 12:00 noon”.
Bob: “Ok I live only 10 mins from the restaurant - I’ll see you at noon”
Joe: “Ok - I’ll be coming from the office so if I’m a little late just wait for me…”

That same conversation on a cell phone may go something like this …

Bob: “… it’s 11:50, I’m about to leave for the restaurant. Where are you?”
Joe: “I just left the office 5 minutes ago and I’m in my car- running a little late - I’ll be there at 12:30″
Bob: “Ok I’m only 10 mins from the restaurant so I’ll leave around 12:20 - see you in a bit…”

If you haven’t figured out my point yet cell phones are not just used for “conversations” but we also use them extensively (most of the time unknowingly) to plan our lives in real time. My example is rather a simplistic one to illustrate how Bob was able to optimally manage his time using a cell phone by not having to leave his house at 11:50 and waste time at the restaurant waiting for Joe.

The New York Times has a piece titled “Can the Cell Phone Help End Global Poverty” that sort of puts this in real context. The article focuses mainly on tech companies like Nokia employing “human behavior researchers” across the planet to collect data on usability trends among the various demographics - especially the poorer segments in Africa and Asia.

There were a few points however in the article that I found interesting like …

Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

For those of us who had an Operations course in college may remember the “Just in Time” concept discussed in the Inventory management chapters - the concept made popular by Toyota where parts for manufacturing cars are ordered on a need by basis rather than stocking the assembly line thus eliminating waste.

It’s an interesting analogy especially when put into context….

A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

…fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent.

I’m usually pretty skeptical when I hear about corporations claiming to do good by “empowering” the poor and down trodden with their products when they can’t even afford three squares and a roof over their heads. I mean just look at the numbers - It is estimated that there are over 2.8 billion people across the planet that are impoverished. That’s a huge “opportunity” for a company with something to sell that will in turn impact their bottom line. However the more I think about it, the best course of action to help the impoverished is to indeed empower them with the latest and greatest technological advancements. People may be poor but they certainly don’t lack ambition nor intelligence - as is the case with the fisherman in Kerala, India. Encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship at the grassroots level is probably the best way to help the poor and if that means the corporations make a profit so be it.

Tags: CellPhones, Technology, Nokia. JIT, Operations, Software, Mobile, Wireless