I enjoyed talking about why technology companies are so important, why they’re vital for the region, showcasing some great examples of local businesses and highlighting HullDigital.

For anyone at the event who didn’t catch the links:

The three companies I talked about were:

• Date FM
• Singletrack Systems
• Sypro

The excellent book, that everyone should read, is The Lean Startup and it’s available on Amazon.

If you’re interested in reading more on my thoughts about technology and the region, please have a read of my blog post on the Hull Digital site.

Also, please remember to sign up to be notified about our event in November, HullDigital Live.

Once the euphoric mist of my usual ‘Fanboi’ reactions had cleared, it was time to look at the updated iBooks to see what, if any, are the business opportunities presented by the format.   

iBooks For Self Publishers

On the surface the new announcements look fantastic;  30% cuts when you’re used to ~80% sounds great and there’s an easy route to market.  For established authors with a large following, who are only interested in selling through Apple, that has to be appealing.  If you write books on iOS development, it’s a great fit!  For others, I don’t see this as a goldrush for writers in the way that the App Store was for developers.  Sure, there will be exceptions, but  we don’t consume books in the same way we consume apps.  Books often need a greater investment of time and they tend to be a more considered purchase – not least because of their price point.  I don’t believe it’s been the absence of simpler content production or the attractive percentage cut offered by Apple that’s been holding back this goldrush in the past.  Maybe there’s an argument that the ~80% offered by other publishers isn’t so bad if it gets you editorial refinement, advertising/promotion, a buy-out from Apple’s exclusivity, and perhaps if you’re lucky, an advance whilst your write it.

iBooks In Education

Ultimately, my guess is that iBooks in the education setting is all about teacher generated content because that gets iPads in every student’s hands.  Big glossy video textbooks are great, but you don’t get many 1GB text books on a base spec iPad.  That file size becomes more of an issue if iPads are shared amongst classes or year groups.

iBooks For The Rest Of Us

So that leaves the rest of us.  Is there an opportunity?  I think there’s plenty of opportunity for 3rd party providers.  Designers will be able to create custom themes that will free up their clients to generate quick and simple content.  Developers can create widgets to enhance iBooks – imagine timetabling or homework widgets built into school books, or signature widgets built into legal proformas.  Marketeers can create brochures for their clients without incurring  design fees and businesses could move futher towards paperless systems.

I can’t wait to see some of the things that people will come up with.  I’ve a client who’s looking to change how they manage and distribute large numbers of documents and how they ensure those documents have been read when they’re revised.  I’ve another client who’s already released a number of iBooks1 books, who are desperate to update them to iBooks2.

One of the exciting things about iBooks is that a few months from now, we’ll probably be looking at all sorts of uses that we never originally imagined.  The producers who will be successful will be those who’ve understood where iBooks sits in relation to other technologies.  They’ll have realised that it’s more than PDFs with hyperlinks, but that it doesn’t provide the functionality or distribution of an App.  They’ll have seen that it fits a space that HTML5/webapps can’t fill, but that it isn’t just a way of bundling video into a simple package.  They’ll avoid those mistakes that early iPhone app developers made when they didn’t take time to learn about the iOS format and levered a web paradigm into an app.  Fundamentally, it will be about simplifying production and delivering content in a way appropriate to the format, tying it in to ecosystems of other connected technologies, and taking advantages of the strengths iBooks brings over and above other options.

If you’re working on iBooks, or just having a dabble in iBooksAuthor, I’d love to meet and chat and swap ideas.

The Christmas break also provided an opportunity to look at business from a different perspective. It allowed me to evaluate things that weren’t working, to be encouraged by those that were, and to start putting in place plans to change and grow in 2012.

As part of this review and evaluation, I met up with a group of five friends. We meet twice a year, take a room at a pub up in North Yorkshire, and in an open, honest, and frank way, critique each others’ businesses. Each of us prepares a review of the year covering finance, business, projects, worries and concerns. We then present this to the other four who feed back on various aspects of that review.

It’s fantastic. I’m asked the questions I don’t want to hear, I’m supported by those who’ve been there before, I get corrected when I’m wrong, I’m pointed towards things I’ve missed, and I come away with far more knowledge, insight and practical help than I could have imagined.

Throughout the day, a running theme for most of us was honesty and selfishness. In some form or other, most of us had been impacted by someone else’s selfishness or dishonesty over the course of the previous six months. It’s also fair to say that we’d probably been selfish at times too!

We continued those discussions over dinner, and also compared book lists for the coming six months and chatted about blog posts we’d read or columns we follow. What we became aware of was the considerable number of ‘me-centric’ content we’d all read. Whilst I’m not suggesting that reading this sort of stuff directly leads to the symptoms we’d been discussing earlier, it did leave me wondering whether there’s actually not as much outward-focussed content available. Perhaps that’s a result of lean economic times, perhaps it’s not popular, or perhaps I’m just reading the wrong books and blogs; probably a bit of all three…

The conversations over dinner and the themes we’d been discussing earlier really challenged me on the quantity and quality of material I’d been reading. My Twitter contact Richard Wanderman has a great expression (that I frequently copy!), “…that guy’s breathing his own exhaust…”. I think it really sums up some of the content I’ve been reading over the last few months.

I left our day in North Yorkshire with a seemingly endless list of notes and actions for the year. The first action was to re-read what I think is one of the best business books ever written – Love Is The Killer App, by Tim Sanders. I was given a copy by a friend when it was published years ago and it sums up the challenges I took from the day.

Sanders’ main points are:

1: Learn and share your knowledge

 

2: Grow and share your network

 

3: Show compassion

 

It’s a fantastic philosophy – it’s about sharing, about giving and about focussing on others instead of yourself. It’s also hard to do it genuinely. I’m fortunate to be in such a group that does have this philosophy at its heart, so I experience the tremendous value there is to me in other people living this out. Sanders shared some of these tips in an excellent article in Fast Company back in 2002.

Focussing on something that’s more than just about personal gain is a very powerful and healthy way of working. That’s not to say we put aside personal goals, just that a different focus may actually be the better and more fun way of achieving those goals. Furthermore, by doing those things, we build our own personal brand and the trust, respect and goodwill from others.

Hopefully, those three points will be my theme for the year. I’m looking to read and learn more – particularly comment and opinion. I’m looking at ways of being less selfish and also sharing knowledge with existing clients, prospects and friends. I’d love to share this with you and also to learn from you, so please do get in touch!

Have a great 2012!

I’ve been a die-hard 17″ Apple Laptop fan for years.  I’ve had them since the 17″ Powerbook, and my latest, the 17″ Unibody MacBook Pro was a superb machine.  I was running Lion on an Xpress card SSD and using the internal 7200rpm drive for my home folder.  It was fast, powerful and had a stunning display at 1900×1200.

My rationale for the 17″ was that I wanted something that gave an experience that was as close as possible to a my work desktop machine.  The screen and hard drive size made this possible.  The type of work I’ve been doing over the last few years also required a screen with a decent resolution.

Recently however, I’d become more and more uncomfortable with the size and weight of the 17″MBP.  I was finding that I’d leave it at home rather than transport it to the office each day, or I’d take my iPad on business trips… which ended up in compromise at some point.

I decided to take the plunge.  I put my MBP on eBay and after some arm-wrestling over a BIN price, I sold it within two hours to a really nice guy who was keen to give it a new home.  He paid immediately and arranged a UPS pickup from my office for the following day.

I settled on the latest MacBook Air 13″ i5 with 4Gb RAM.  As I understand it, the i5 in the MBA now supports hyper-threading. So, for me, there’s little need to spend the extra on the i7.  I picked up a refurb machine which met my spec and came with 3 years Applecare.  I can highly recommend refurb machines, either from Apple or from Jigsaw24.  I buy all my machines this way, they’re immaculate, and often come with 3 years warranty. Luckily for me, the price to change cost less than the UPS courier charges, so I was extremely happy!

I’ve needed to make a few workflow changes, which hasn’t actually been too painful.  I now do a ‘Selective Sync’ with Dropbox to ensure I’m only carrying about my most recent files.  iPhoto and iTunes syncing between machines will need a little more thought, but I’m running the iPhoto Cloud Preview, and it looks like this will solve most of my issues (as will the next version of iTunes). I also bought a 1Tb portable drive, which I now use as a TimeMachine for my desktop machine.  When I leave the office I take this with me, so if I really need a file and I don’t have a fast enough wifi connection to drag it from DropBox, I can just pull it from the portable drive.

I’ve been running the MBA for a couple of days now, and I’m hugely impressed.  I won’t pretend I don’t miss the screen resolution of the MBP, and the speed isn’t much different to my SSD powered MBP, but the battery life and portability are incredible.  Rather than carting around a huge Crumpler bag, I can now fit everything I need for the day in a tiny bag, and with the battery life, I don’t even need a power adapter.  It’s also completely silent, whereas my MBP had its fans running pretty much constantly.

I’m really, really impressed.  I’m echoing many people’s thoughts, but the MBA really has hit a sweet spot in performance, build quality, price and portability.  Until Apple do something with the form factor for the MBP series, it’s the one to buy.

I’m going to write a series of blog posts covering examples of where fantastic practices and tools just haven’t worked in reality.  The reasons are varied; sometimes because they were designed for a different sector; sometimes because people weren’t using them in the way originally intended; sometimes because the guy who cooked them up had no practical business experience, or at the other extreme, he’s a super-star-global-CEO whose day-to-day work is massively different from the average small business.

My aim with these companies has been to get across the point that everyone’s different and we all work in different ways.  Therefore, don’t be drawn by the crowd, but evaluate and adopt where most appropriate for you.  Cherry pick the best ideas and the ones that will best improve your business.

In the first of these posts, I’m going to discuss email and the sentenc.es approach.

* * * *

Part I. Email

Email’s great. I love it and I think it’s a tremendous productivity tool.  I field around fifty to ninety emails per day and simply couldn’t handle this volume of admin via meetings or phone calls.  I try and deal with the bulk of it in two set blocks during the day and respond to anything marked as urgent as soon as I can.  My aim is that email should be polite, efficient, and sent with consideration to the recipient.  Each email should only be as long as is absolutely necessary.

Sentenc.es is the approach suggested by a number of websites that specify,

“…all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be a pre-determined number sentences or less (sic). It’s that simple….“.

I absolutely agree with the aims of this practice, but fundamentally disagree with their prescriptive one-size-fits all approach.  In some cases, use of it can suggest an unhelpful air of self-importance or perhaps even a naivety, a disregard, or lack of understanding of how other businesses operate.

In this post, I’m going to cover the use of the sentenc.es approach to both internal and external email.

Internal Email

Never blindly adopt a sentenc.es policy.

If you work in the sort of organisation where time is swallowed answering lengthy emails, emails with multiple action points or emails that are just full of waffle, it’s highly likely that this is symptomatic of a broader micro/over-managed inefficient way of working.  The way you use email will be one manifestation of this; meetings and other internal communications may also operate in a similarly bloated manner.

What’s needed in this situation is a holistic rethink of your working practices – not just a simple sticking plaster over the symptoms.

I’d argue that if you feel you must take the sentenc.es approach, it should be the very last thing you do.  Literally.

In your situation, whilst it sounds odd, email may be the most efficient way of dealing with your inefficiencies.  Suddenly dropping your email responses down to three or five sentences (or whatever arbitrary number is chosen) is more likely to decrease productivity rather than increase it.  You’ll still be generating all the admin, but dealing with it through more inefficient meetings or lengthy phone calls.  Deal with the root cause or problem that is generating the emails.

Long emails aren’t bad, inefficient emails are. Try and keep email as efficient as possible – perhaps using bullet points.  Specifications, legal queries on contracts, lists of changes to designs and patient reports all need a written record.  Email can be the best way for dealing with this, and it’s inconceivable that these communications could be kept to under X number of sentences.

To get you under X sentences, don’t just move everything into a Word attachment that won’t render correctly for everyone or a PDF that can’t easily be edited on the move.  Don’t just post everything to Basecamp, as that can become just as awkward as team members communicate in a way similar to sending Facebook messages.   I love Basecamp, and used correctly, it’s very powerful.  It can however be abused.  A routine threaded email message that needs a ten second reply from my phone, suddenly becomes a message with no context that requires a trip to Basecamp via 1-Password to deal with.  Not good.

External Email

Never, ever, ever ask your clients to keep their email replies to a set number of sentences.

If a situation is so out-of-hand that managing a client’s email has become a serious time issue, then the failure is probably with you, not the client.  Maybe they don’t value your time – why is that?  Maybe you’ve mismanaged the project or their expectations?  Did you start the project with an enthusiasm and frequency of communication that would be impossible to maintain?  However, perhaps it really is genuinely not your fault and they’re just a complete pain…? Whatever you do, they seem to want more…?  In that case, politely deal with it and look at the business case for future work with them.

I believe one of the fundamental building blocks of businesses should be a healthy yet fanatical obsession with customer care.  The problem with prescribing a method of preferred communication with clients is that things become all about you, rather than them.  That’s not to say that you don’t demonstrate best practice in your communications, but you deal with your clients in a way that makes them feel most valued and reassured.  For some clients this will mean fielding long emails, for others this will be face-to-face meetings or short phone calls.  A company I outsource some development to recently replied to a concise list of bullet points feeding back on some of their designs with a link to five sentences.  This infuriated me!  I’d rather have sent an email that took me two minutes to write and thirty seconds to respond to, than schedule a ten minute phone call which then needs to be written-up.  Picture that scenario in another walk of life:

The garage where my car is serviced send out an email promotion about their work.  I’d like to request a time to book in my car and to outline a list of issues I’d like them to look at.  It’s important there’s a record of the work which we can refer back to.  I haven’t time to make phone calls to them to cover this, so I spend two to three minutes writing an email as it’s most convenient for me.  Imagine my astonishment when rather than being delighted that I’ve chosen to spend at least £500 with them, they reply, pointing me to their corporate communications policy and requesting that my email replies are kept to under five sentences.  What messages does that send out?

What about another one more general one… You’re having building work done at home.  It’s not something you understand and naturally you’re worried about it.  You need a fair amount of reassurance at the start of the build process.  Your builder says, “I’m sorry, but I can only spare two minutes to deal with this and no more – my time is really valuable”.  The smart builder knows that investing early in that relationship will make for a more efficient project, rather than a nervous customer who needs constant reassurance that becomes ever more time consuming.

In both of these (imaginary) examples, I’m paying a premium for their time.  Therefore, in whatever is the most efficient, convenient and reassuring way for me to communicate with them, whether  by email, letter, fax, phone call or smoke signals, I expect that them to go out of their way to accommodate me, to reassure me, and to provide me with a level of service that matches the price I pay.  My clients should feel exactly the same way.

X-Sentences in Practice.

It’s an extreme example, but I recently watched someone spend a minute writing an email, followed by another two or three minutes trying to get the email down from eight or nine sentences to five.  It would have made no difference to the recipient, but the fear of going above five sentences was causing more work, rather than less.  In the end, I caved in, “..just send the wretched email and be done with it!…”

Conclusion

Let your aim be to keep email polite, efficient, and sent with consideration to the recipient.  Don’t waste time or risk looking rude by trying to fit email responses into an arbitrary number of sentences.  Don’t let the very things designed to liberate you become a millstone around your neck, when keeping up with the latest trend or fad distracts you from running the best business you possibly can.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.  Please do feel free to comment or email.

On top of this I also had a few niggles that I hoped could be addressed.  I needed reliable calendar sharing with my wife where we could each enter social data, vet appointments, family birthdays, fuel deliveries, holidays etc.  The same was true for work colleagues, where we needed to share busy periods or meeting schedules.  Something also needed to be done about my ever growing email account (going back to the mid 90s), which has become unfeasible to migrate every few years to a new hosting server.

Solution

The Apple apps weren’t at fault; Mail, Address Book and iCal all provide simple and elegant interfaces and I was keen to stick with them.  The reliability of the service that synced all my devices was the issue and so I set about looking at alternatives.  One of the main things I was keen to avoid was a manual or ‘docking & syncing’ process offered by various 3rd parties. What I was after was a seamless ‘push’ of data in a way that those in corporate/Exchange environments are accustomed to.  I also wanted to avoid a web based service such as Gmail or Google Calendar as I just don’t enjoy their interfaces.

The solution I arrived at was to use Google as the infrastructure behind the Apple applications.

I now have:
• A Google Apps Account for my personal information (with various other accounts for family members)
• A Google Apps Account for my work information
• iCal, AddressBook, and Mail now sync seamlessly between my desktop and iOS devices.  Information entered on any device is then instantly pushed to all other devices.
• A scalable email solution
• The ability to share calendars, invites, and meeting information with family and colleagues from any device.
• My domain names tied to the relevant Google accounts.
• Very little (if any) spam – the Google spam tools seem much better than my previous hosting package.

I’d highly recommended it.  I’ve been using the set-up for over a year now and I have no complaints.

The SetUp

A year ago, there was very little documentation on this, however, Google have updated their documentation and it’s very comprehensive, so I’ve just collated links and added my comments.

Infrastructure

I’m going to assume you have a Google or GoogleApps account set up and you’ve managed to link your domain names with those accounts.  The Google documentation is great.  I just updated my MX records for my domain, which means Google handles all my mail.  Web hosting is still covered by my original hosting provider.

Setting Up The iOS Devices

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

If you have multiple calendars in Google Calendar, you need to choose which of your calendars appear on your phone.  This is done through Safari on your iOS device.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206

Setting Up Mail

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81379

In addition, Google recommend the following settings:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78892

I use Mail in a very simple way.  I have an Inbox, Sentbox,and Trash – that’s all I need.  Email for me is a communication tool, not a management tool, so I don’t use tags or contexts or any of the other features that Gmail supports.  If it’s in my inbox it’s not dealt with.  Dealing with it either means creating an Omnifocus task for it or replying.

Therefore, I turn off all the other folders for viewing in Mail – this is achieved using the IMAP folder subscriptions setting in Google Labs. Therefore, the only imap folders that appear in Mail are Inbox, Sent, All Mail and Bin.

Rather than then having a separate list of subscribed imap folders within Mail (sent, deleted etc), you really want these mapped to Mail’s main folders.  This guy has a good explanation of this:

http://blog.monkeysthumb.org/tuning-mail-app-gmail-imap-integration

However, in my setup, I map the Mail Trash to my Google Archive.  This is because I get so little spam these days that I rarely delete mail.  When I need to, I just drag the message to the ‘Bin’ imap folder.

Setting Up Address Book

This is simple, just go into preferences in AddressBook and check ‘Synchronize with Google’ and enter your Account details.

Setting Up iCal

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical

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