design from Red Canary

Startup secures significant investment, seeks significant talent

Stealth Startup — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:38:29 GMT

Last week we closed a significant seed round financing with key players involved with Facebook, Workbrain, PayPal, Taleo, LinkedIn, Research In Motion, Slide, Thompson-Reuters, and Gini.

Six months ago we blogged about our new company on Red Canary

We had a great new idea. We had experience as co-founders of one of the biggest software companies in Canada.

We were for looking for talented and motivated developers with a passion for innovation and a will to succeed.

Thanks to Red Canary, we found them.

Now we have taken our vision and built a great core team, solution, and engaged user community.

We have built a small and closely-knit team of star developers focused on pragmatic problem solving. The team finds joy in tough challenges and tackles them together.

We are very hard working and like to have fun together. The agile mindset permeates our team; everyone is considered an equal.

We want smart, confident peers who will be essential in future feature development and who can contribute to our common vision.

Our customers tell us: "This is exactly what my people want"

The last half-year has been a blur of user-driven iteration and innovation.

Our solution (a web-service) solves a core social and productivity problem.

Recently, we attracted world-class capital as a result of our pace of our growth, the quality of our team, and large market opportunity ahead of us.

We continue to build a highly skilled team that can launch superb services with high impact. We move fast and expect to learn faster. We experiment and get users using our tools as quickly as we can.

Our approach:

Iterative
Agile
Data-driven
User-centered

You may be interested in joining us if you:

Consider yourself the best of the best
Want to be part of a world-beating team
Take pride in solving complex problems
Want your code to delight millions of people.
Are curious, learn continuously, and like to be challenged by smart people
Get things done quickly and elegantly
Enjoy a fast pace and constant change
Enjoy life outside the office

The people we are looking for:

Have experience building complex software
Are active online community participants
Adapt quickly, adopt early, and are web savvy
Love user interaction design
Dig rapid prototyping
Are excited by large datasets, statistics, and algorithms
Are familiar with Java, MySQL, GWT, Hibernate, SVN, Ehcache, and Glassfish

Specifically we need:

Front-End Ninja

A web development ninja who has experience on the server-side as well. Experience with large websites and web-based solutions where you implemented novel front-end designs, usability improvements, GUI metaphor inventions, etc. is required.

The ability to quickly prototype solutions using 80/20 rules while developing production solutions in parallel is core.

Star Developer

A highly flexible and experienced developer with a well-rounded background that includes some enterprise and lots of web experience. Innovation and technical know-how are expected. You should assume that quick change of pace and assignments will be common.

A strong sense of ownership and alignment with solution vision are key.

If you think that you might be the right person, please contact us to learn more about the opportunity.

Time is everything on the Web

Gerry McGovern — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:24:40 GMT

Borrowed from the Blog "New Thinking":http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new_thinking.htm

Auctions were once a pillar of e-commerce . . . these days, consumers are less enamored of the hassle of auctions, preferring to buy stuff quickly at a fixed price.

Information overload, news fatigue and WADD (Web Attention Deficit Disorder) are creating a brutal landscape on the Internet.

"Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online", the BBC states in a review of a Jakob Nielsen report on web habits. "Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave."

Many organizations' websites are out-of-sync with their customers. Marketers think flashy graphics of smiling faces attract customers on the Web. Showing a smiling face to a typical web customer is like showing a crucifix to a vampire.

Communicators have gone mad on the Web; publishing press releases and thinking people will actually read them. News is being devalued because huge quantities of trivia and vanity are being labeled as news.

As many as 50 percent of people bail out after a quick glance of a webpage

bA study of young people's news habits found that, "news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response. The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in."

Time is everything on the Web. "Auctions were once a pillar of e-commerce," a Business Week article states. "People didn't simply shop on eBay. They hunted, they fought, they sweated, they won. These days, consumers are less enamored of the hassle of auctions, preferring to buy stuff quickly at a fixed price."

Over 40 percent of people click on the first search result. Over 60 percent click within the first 3 results, and over 90 percent click within the first 10 results

The emergence of the impatient, unforgiving customer has been gathering pace for many years. Back in 2006 a study by Akami found that 75% of people would not go back to a website that took more than 4 seconds to load. It used to be that people would wait for 8 seconds. In 2008, how many seconds will they wait?

As many as 50 percent of people bail out after a quick glance of a webpage, another 2006 report stated. Back then you had 4 seconds to convince people that you had something useful to offer. They might read about 15 words before making that decision.

"If your copy targets multiple demographics, those 15 words will not work," the MarketingSherpa report stated. "Don't construct a page to appeal broadly across a wide variety of "typical" users. It won't appeal to anyone at all and your conversions will suffer."

Over 40 percent of people click on the first search result. Over 60 percent click within the first 3 results, and over 90 percent click within the first 10 results. (More people have been on top of Mount Everest than have been to the 1,000th search result. Does it even exist?)

I was told of a study where the first and second search result were swapped for a selection of searches. The new "first" result kept getting more clicks. So, what we're dealing with is a customer who clicks first and asks questions later. It's a customer with their finger on the Back button.

"About half of all people who visit a commercial website intending to buy something give up because, above all, they are confused--by product descriptions, navigation and checkout procedures," a Newsweek article stated in July 2008.

Think about that: half the customers who come to websites wanting to buy things leave without spending anything. How frustrating is that?

Agile as a management method and organizational philosophy

Trevor Stafford, Scott Valentine — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:18:51 GMT

In the second installment of its focus on Agile (see the first conversation here), Red Canary hosts executives from DevShop, Point Click Care, and Strangeloop Networks. This is an edited transcript of a conference call held on February 20, 2008 and moderated by Scott Valentine. An unedited audio recording of the session will be available shortly.

Participants: •Craig Fitzpatrick Founder and CEO
DevShop (visit his blog) •Dave Wessinger Co-founder and CTO Point Click Care •Kent Alstad Co-founder and CTO Strangeloop Networks

Red Canary: Welcome and thanks to all for taking part in today's discussion. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, how does Agile project management compare to other methods? Craig: "In traditional methods, the metaphor used to design software was around manufacturing; you did research up front and then you spent a number of months building the thing. The Agile method assumes that requirements can and will change. There is a fundamentally different assumption on the rigidity of requirements. I think the biggest value in the shift towards Agile philosophy is the attempt to push decision making away from trying to make predictions on the last 80 per cent of the project up front.

we found that our business started to adopt the language of Agile. We use it like a philosophy when we're trying to approach new areas and new problems

Kent: "I've worked in shops that have been pretty Waterfall, the idea that you had to not only hit the release date but call it nine months earlier. By comparison, Agile encourages faster production iterations, an emphasis on understanding over documentation, and really places a premium on interacting with the customer. On a waterfall project, I'd always be talking about where we'd like to be and where we thought we were, because there's always this big push to assess against some kind of definition. With Agile, our factory is this piece of software that grows in complexity and features with each build, each day. When we talk about what it does we're talking about right now. In my view, that emphasis on reality rather than hopes or plans has been very helpful for us as an industry because it makes us admit to ourselves that we really didn't know the requirements before we started. That can be a hard point to accept but once you get over it Agile lets you interact with the team and develop the right solution, not just "what we said it would be." Are Agile project methods inherently better suited to client-facing solutions than they are to in-house initiatives? Dave: "To add to where Craig and Kent were going, the value of Agile is getting something in the customer's hands out-of-the-gate versus down-the-road. And from the business side, there is tremendous value in getting real input from customers before you spend an inordinate amount of R&D dollars only to get six months along and realize that you missed the mark. Really, adopting a method at all as an organization is about where you are in your growth curve. When you only have three or four customers you can be a heck of a lot more agile.

As we brought on larger customers who were expecting a more formal process and longer time frames to accept and adopt new product, it sort of forced us to more of a waterfall approach

When we first started (in 1999) it was gun slinging all the way. But that eventually had to mature based on our business model. We loved the output we were getting, but it seemed to have some negative impact on the stability of product, and as we brought on larger customers who were expecting a more formal process and longer time frames to accept and adopt new product, it sort of forced us to more of a waterfall approach. Today, we're doing daily builds and releases back in to the product. The business team works with our customers and we make refinements as needed. So, as we've grown we've realized that a more formal approach is necessary if you want to entertain large, public customers." Craig, as a vendor you're in a unique position to observe the market for Agile. What are you seeing in terms of the types of organizations adopting Agile methods, and why?

At some point we have to recognize that communication is the biggest determining factor of success in software

Craig: "I think there's three ways of developing software: doing it in-house, on contract for-hire, or for commercial development aimed at a specific marketplace. I usually lump for-hire and in-house together; whether the customer is internal or external is moot. The real difference in commercial development is that you have a person like a product marketer whose job is to know the market better than they know themselves and introduce some unique things that you probably don't have in for-hire development. When you bring a commercial product to market, tipping your hand too soon and letting competitors see what you're doing can be a big risk. So, in terms of Agile, I think it's a bit riskier in the commercial development market than in the other two." Kent: "I don't know. At Strangeloop we do ship commercial product and if we're really worried about secrecy we just enter the customer into an NDA. In the long run, we work with pretty technical people and if you skirt around the issue too long they just get frustrated with you. If you investigate Microsoft, I think you'll see that they've actually gone to a Customer Technology Preview model where they ship software much earlier - with no intention of it being used in production - in order to get feedback. So we've seen models where you can integrate an Agile form of development that is very effective in responding to the changing market and taking advantage of insights. When I've used Agile before, it's been very specific to the in-house and for-hire categories Craig mentioned. But in this case we're using it quite effectively in a commercial product, so there is hope for that. But we also have a very experienced team." Dave: "With Waterfall, there was always a lot of finger pointing back-and-forth with development if the product went out the door and didn't hit the mark. “Well they didn't spec it right," met "No, they didn't build it right.". With Agile, although we have to hit the mark a lot quicker, the frustrations that we have is with developers pointing at product marketing and saying "Well they keep moving the yardstick." So, bringing the team together and working towards the same goal is unbelievably important. Sometimes it takes a little more vision than a less experienced coder may be capable of.

Bringing the team together and working towards the same end goal is unbelievably important.

One last point getting back to different styles . . . Cowboy or Extreme methods are really valuable if you're able to capture individuals that have both knowledge around the marketplace and technical ability. People like that are diamonds in the rough but if you can build a team around three or four of them - I think Steve Jobs said it best - one of those is worth 10,000 other developers. There's been one or two cases where we've been able to achieve that and it's had an incredibly positive effect." I'd be interested to know the prevalence of Agile methods in the smaller and medium-sized space where the pace of change is extremely high -- because if you're too rigid you get to a point in the growth curve where you simply can't manage change that quickly. At some point we have to recognize that communication is the biggest determining factor of success in software. If we're not focusing on valuing and teaching that, then there will be problems. When I'm interviewing and I find someone who is a great communicator and they really get it, that's just a huge deal. Even if they can't code it and have to explain it someone else, it still has a tremendous amount of value. To me that's the heart of what's going in Agile: openness, communication, relating to your colleagues and having a sense of team." Craig: "I really agree with what you've said Dave and I think that would shock all the developers that have worked for me over the years. Because what you're saying is that the ability to sit down at a keyboard and code is secondary to all these other attributes" Craig, as a project planning vendor DevShop gets to see a lot of sides to how Agile is used - in-house, client facing, hardware and software spaces - What's your take on how Agile is being used across the marketplace and are Agile methods making it out of the tech space and into "mainstream" business? Craig: "There's a direct correlation between Agile and smaller companies taking on bigger companies. If you think about it, a start-up is essentially an Agile business – you wake up every morning and never know what fire you'll have to put out or what change of plans you'll have to make. So many things have changed in the software biz around lower barriers to entry and the pace at which you can pump product out. All these things have now culminated to the point where the number one critical advantage you can have is to be an Agile business. If you are you'll be able to go toe-to-toe with the big guys and actually do some damage."

A start-up is essentially an Agile business – you wake up every morning and never know what fire you'll have to put out or what change of plans you'll have to make

How much are your own companies incorporating Agile methods into other areas of your business. For example, in product marketing or organizational planning? Kent: "We talk about being an Agile business at our board meetings, it's really crept out of development. When we began to describe how we wanted Strangeloop to behave in order to best react to our customers, we found that our business started to adopt the language of Agile. We use it like a philosophy when we're trying to approach new areas and new problems; it's very healthy because it's just enough control. As a small player among giants, we feel Agile is one of our key competitive advantages and we purposely let customers know that we will listen to the market and that we will change as time goes on. That has really led us to a change in our organization." Dave: "I'm in a bit of a different space. We compete with organizations that are a bit more mature and slower to react - I'd guess they were more Waterfall - it may take them two years to make a major change. Well, guess what? In the long term care space things change monthly and you have to be able to react from a business perspective. So for us, Agile starts with our strategic planning. We sit down at least monthly and see where are we. Is something missing? What do we need to re-prioritize? That kind of Agile strategic planning allows us to re-focus as an organization from the top down and we find that extremely valuable." Back in the 90s, we saw a real cottage industry pop-up around project management. And there's an argument to be made that modern practises such as Six Sigma are really just extensions of old-school project management practices. The question is: does Agile have the potential to cross-over and become a business model in and of itself? Craig "I think it's a bit of a slippery slope to talk about the cementing of Agile process in an industry. The more it gets written about and different flavours get taught in school, the more rigid Agile can become.

I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope to talk about the cementing of Agile process in an industry. The more it gets written about and different flavours get taught in school, the more rigid Agile can become

It comes down to adapting just the right amount of Agile process versus flatly stating “This is the agile methodology that we use.” If you go too far that way, you're not really Agile anymore because you're not continuing to redefine yourself." Dave: "I have a hard time believing that Agile is going to make any splash beyond the tech world. If you look at Six Sigma, it's been widely adopted but it's also been a miserable failure for companies like Home Depot. (Click for Google search on 'Six Sigma Failure Home Depot' Agile works well for companies that are small to medium-sized and its application as a software development technique is bang-on. But I cant imagine using it as part of a manufacturing process. A lot of interesting points raised here today. Any final thoughts on what makes Agile work, or predictions for what the future of Agile may hold? Kent: "Agile is where it's at is because it made sense and produced results for organizations, against almost everybody's belief that it could. I think that where Agile will be popular and continue to evolve is where it makes sense for businesses. If you can understand how it's agoing to work for you, you can make great progress with Agile techniques. Where you need more process, shy away from it and build the controls that are necessary. Ultimately, when Agile makes sense it gets used and that's why we're here talking about it today." Craig: "I don't know if I have any predictions but I have hopes. Agile is a better way to get it right for your customer. I hope it starts to become combined with a focus on general user experience in the software space.

Agile lets you interact with the team and develop the right solution, not just 'what we said it would be'.

It used to be you had delivered software when you'd ticked off all the requirements in a document. Where I hope it's going is towards a greater empathy for people who have to use the software. I think part of that is letting them see it and touch it sooner." Dave: "In the beginning we had to choose between doing the right thing or doing it right. I think that's been a common problem across all organizations. With this project methodology, you really have the opportunity to do both, and that's critical if you want to make inroads as a small organization. What we're all trying to do is solve problems at a lower threshold of pain for our customers. If we can make products that serve the business lifestyle and kind of hide between the walls, then we've achieved our goal. But it's really not about the technology. The difference between when we really engage with the customer and the market and when we don't is 1,000 per cent. With Agile, we can actually create caring for the ultimate user and achieve a human interaction that drives the passion to get it right. In a nutshell, I think Agile has an application for many business of many different sizes and it's just a matter of choosing what works for you." Thanks guys.

Was your product 'assembled' or 'carved'?

Craig Fitzpatrick — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:57:10 GMT

A frequent Red Canary contributor, Craig Fitzpatrick is the CEO of Devshop. This entry was borrowed from his blog, Uncommon Sense (for Software).

I've spent the last quarter re-designing the user interface for the Devshop product. The new design will be out in a couple months. During this process, I spent practically the whole year with my eyes wide open, looking for and noticing little cues to good industrial design along the way. I'd keep a list of screen shots of aspects of a particular product that I liked. I kept a list of ideas I had along the way for reference and revisited them all during the design process. I didn't just look at software. I looked at automobile design, furniture, interior design, print, architecture - any product discipline. I looked at video production, animation and writing too.

Good design is considered to be very subjective. I don't believe it is subjective. I think it is empirical and measurable. The problem is, people have a difficult time articulating what they like and don't like. They have a hard time dealing with the fact that unfortunately, a product isn't designed JUST for them, but rather for a market of people that hopefully all share a set of common enough needs and can therefore use the same product to fulfill some number like 80% of their needs. And because of these difficulties, people discount design as subjective because they can't reconcile why one person (who can't articulate why) likes something while someone else doesn't.

The other day something hit me. I think it's an easy way to articulate a set of characteristics in design that people gravitate towards, without consciously realizing it. It must have some root or explanation from anthropology or some very natural origin. I don't pretend to know the causal relationship, I've just noticed the trend.

It's what I'll now say is the difference between a product that looks like it was "assembled" (from various parts) versus a product that looks like "carved" from a single source material (like a single block of wood, clay or stone).

I have 3 examples to share: cars, laptops and finally, software.

Example #1 - Cars:

Assembled:

Carved:

Avalanche: The Avalanche is clearly "assembled" from various materials (metals & plastics), which jump from one to another along the exterior. The surface is lumpy and clearly shows things "bolted on" to the exterior. The coloring is high contrast, from light colors to dark colors. The shape is boxy, rough and has lots of cracks, crevices and protrusions.

Corvette: The Corvette looks like it was carved from a single piece of red metal. It has long smooth lines that are curved instead of at sharp angles. Very few protrusions and crevices, and nothing bolted on to the exterior. It is the ultra "low contrast" (in this case monochromatic) which furthers the illusion that it was carved.

Example #2 - Laptops:

Assembled:

Carved:

Dell: Latches, stickers, logo/emblem, rubber stoppers, lights and buttons all protrude, in different colors, from different materials along the exterior. It has a lot of visible seams, cracks and crevices. You can just imagine things being "snapped" together during assembly (and things "snapping" off as they catch things during use). The stickers aren't even straight.

Apple: Again, a single color is used to make it look like it is a single piece molding. Care was taken to remove anything that might stick out beyond the smooth surface. Even the screws on the edge have been carefully chosen and placed to not deter from the soapstone-like exterior. The power light, IR receiver and iSight camera (even the screws!) are all perfectly flush along the outside.

Example #3 - Software:

Assembled:

Carved:

Google's Gmail: Gmail actually makes my eyes bleed. It looks like it was cobbled together as an experiment or a prototype and nobody bothered to finish it. The inconsistent use of margins and whitespace, font-sizes and layout waste opportunities to visually group and convey information to the user about usage and importance. The color choices were obviously made by someone that is style blind and probably wears plaid with stripes to work. It looks like a hack.

Apple's iDisk: This iDisk screen struck me when I first saw it. It is one of the best examples of a user interface that actually looks like it was "carved" from material. The round, smooth edges, low contrast & subtle color changes (as if almost to signify texture change of a physical material rather than primary color change). The cleanliness of the margins and generous whitespace further indicates that is was designed rather than hacked.

The cues:

There is actually a morale to this story. We're surrounded by so much technology that we sometimes forget that we all come from nature. Most people have either a conscious (embraced) or unconscious (unrecognized) affinity to natural materials. Most people prefer curves to edges, simplicity to complexity (simplicity = fewer apparent material changes and protrusions, etc.). They may not know it but they will gravitate towards these things when given a choice, if everything else is equal.

I recently came to consider the following cues that can be used (or misused) to achieve a "carved" (natural) versus assembled (artificial) look in user interface design for software:

Curves vs. angles: Sure, sure, the Web 2.0 craze is experiencing a backlash towards rounded corners. The point is that people respond to smooth curves better to sharp jagged edges - again, if not consciously, then subconsciously, depending on how self-aware they are and how well they can articulate why they like or don't like something.
Contrast: : Lots of high contrast color changes mid-surface are going to increase the artificial or "assembled" looking nature of your product. A few changes is probably ok, but use them to convey something or shy away from them. The higher the contrast of the change, the more influence that change has to convey something, either intentional or by accident, so make it intentional.
Margins and whitespace: Even and consistent margins and gutters give a look of polish. Make these inconsistent, and your product comes off looking hacked. VERY generous use of whitespace can convey a feeling of cleanliness and simplicity, regardless of how many things are actually on a screen. The mean-distance between "things" on a screen (i.e. the gaps of whitespace) increase the overall perception of "smoothness" of the surface. The less white-space around things, the more "lumpy" it looks (remember all those protrusions in the Avalanche and Dell?).

Going forward, I think it's better to make your product look carved than assembled. People will respond better to it, even if they don't really understand why.

290,307 reasons why this is the best marketing I've ever seen from a Canadian technology company (VIDEO)

Trevor Stafford — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:31:40 GMT

Give me 10 minutes on the website of a typical Canadian technology company and I will punch holes in it that are twelve shades of nasty.

Some caltrops: Unfriendly navigation, long paragraphs of small text with no nutritional value, bland employment sections, lack of downloadable mar-com, zero multimedia, no press materials, no feedback mechanisms, and so on. There are sites where I can’t even figure out what the company does.

(Jimmy was not a pretty man)

There are no excuses for this, but there may be reasons: Canadian investment funding is usually low, so marketing budgets can be small (or not there at all). There’s a Marianas trench between marketing and engineering that’s rarely spanned (money is excellent bridge material), and small companies often drink their own Kool-Aid and forget that they need to explain things.

Oh, and marketing personnel can be blithely incompetent.

I’m not so foolish to think that a website is the only aspect of technology marketing, but if the public face of your company looks like Jimmy Durante, then I have doubts about the efficacy of everything else you’re doing.

Bluecat Networks are not incompetent. They are very, very good marketers. (you can read their Red Canary profile here)

First, Bluecat’s site is clean and purposeful. Sections have overviews. Information is well-ordered and accessible from multiple links. The language they use is appropriate to what a visitor is likely to want to read. And they tout BENEFITS, not FEATURES. This is Marketing 101 executed at a 401 level.

Second, Bluecat’s supporting resources are endless. There are videos for products, services and solutions, backed by a library (literally) of whitepapers, brochures, case studies and briefs. There are full-size images of their logo and other products for press use.

There are plenty of man-hours here and this was probably pretty costly. You tell me if it looks like money well spent. Or you can refer to their 18th place ranking on the Fast 50.

Third, they use commercials brilliantly and via FREE media (including their website), to entertain a captive audience. The spot below has 290,000+ views on YouTube. Even if one-tenth of 1% of these views turned into leads, this commercial would be a success. I’ll bet they are using Bluecat employees as well.

Here’s another one:

Check out their video testimonials as well.

As entertaining as these are, they still satisfy a basic tenet of advertising: convey a product benefit.

Is Bluecat’s site perfect? No. Their text is way too small. 10 point text is difficult to read and impossible to read for any length of time.

But overall, the site is the best I have ever seen from a Canadian tech company, and that makes me think they do a good job at other aspects of marketing.

Why don’t more Canadian tech companies follow Bluecat’s example? Web marketing is, dollar for dollar, cheaper than other mediums and easier to measure and gauge. Shouldn’t technology companies have an advantage here?

PROFILE: 80/20 solutions

Cristina Howorun — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:08:33 GMT

Consumers say they are bombarded by advertising, but measuring ROI from today’s multi-level campaigns is no easy feat for marketers, either. Which consumers are buying products? Who’s joining loyalty programs? Are online promotions prompting purchases? Is text messaging integrated properly? 80/20 Solutions has the answer to these questions and more. 80/20’s MCC platform enables marketers to execute and manage multi-channel campaigns while tracking consumer behavior—all from one platform. As consumer profiles are submitted—either through online, mobile or traditional forms—the platform organizes them like a coin sorter.

“We’re really the only tool that has mobile (tracking and reporting) combined with online,” – Andrew Muroff, COO. The pain of integrated campaigns Today’s marketing campaigns often use different vendors for different mediums. For large campaigns, companies can expect to deal with e-mail service providers, mobile vendors, web designers, and analytics agents. “The problem is, from a consumer’s standpoint, that (the campaign) looks disjointed. There’s no fluid experience. Your profile is stored in five different databases, they don’t communicate with each other in real time. So you’ll get a mobile message two days after you signed up for a program via email, and that’s because that’s the earliest those two systems could sync together,” CEO Steve Irvine says.

“Sales, HR and finance all have really good processes in place, from a technical [software] perspective. Marketers don’t really have that level of software assistance,” – Steve Irvine 80/20’s solution is attracting big league attention. Industry leaders, including Pepsi-Cola Canada Ltd. and Hershey Canada Inc., have used it in high-profile campaigns. Proximity Canada, named Marketing Magazine’s “Digital Agency of the Year” in 2006, and many others applaud the platform. Tie-ins that actually tie-in (to a database) The MCC platform allows user differentiation on multiple variables, including custom attributes such as a preference for diet vs regular pop. The MCC can be configured to automatically send personalized text messages and emails to customers based on their actions. If ‘Bobby’ text messages a product PIN to an MCC client, the platform can automatically send him a coupon via e-mail in real time. “You [have] to make sure that all the campaigns you’re running—the mobile, online campaigns and each advertisement that you’re doing—[are] integrated and connected so that you can get one single view of your consumer and you can track consumers’ experiences across all your channels,” explains Irvine.

“The idea is to create a platform on the backend that can manage all the touch points with your consumers,” Putting the 80/20 rule into practice The 80 per cent / 20 per cent metric is a familiar one in marketing circles, but 80/20 adds a little bit more ooomph to the idea. “The concept behind the name is two-fold. First, there’s the 80/20 rule: twenty per cent of your customers usually represent 80 per cent of your revenue,” explains Irvine. “What we wanted was to help companies identify who those top customers were so that they could market to them differently. The other side is that 80 per cent of (MCC’s) functionality, from a technical standpoint, is the same, and 20 percent is customization.” Their template-based platform has been a success. In the three years since Irvine and Shane Sincich (both in their mid-twenties) started the company it’s grown considerably. They now boast 17 employees, a Geneva office, a new and expansive office in the Davisville area and are poised to open a sales office in New York City. Sometimes frustration is the greatest muse Their company almost never was. 80/20 Solutions was originally a division of the now-defunct Motion Media Interactive (MMI). “MCC stemmed [from] a project we were working on for a big client. We were getting a lot of deadlines and pressure from the client. We reached this point where we felt helpless,” says Irvine. “It was a crystallization of the thought that ‘we shouldn’t be middlemen here. We should be able to put this in the hands of our clients and let them do it themselves. That’s where it all started.” Empowering non-technical marketers with the ability to control their content wasn’t easy. “The biggest challenge for us was to make a steady process that still enables marketing companies to do the creative things they want,” starts Chief Usability Officer, Shane Sincich. Muroff is quick to finish his thought: “The challenge was to create a workflow that marketers find friendly.” And they have. MCC users don’t need to know code, nor are they constrained by a technical maze. The interface uses coloured boxes and menus to separate the different functionalities and stages of a campaign, from campaign management to analytics. Customer support is always available, but users tend to master the platform after a short workshop. “It’s kind of like paint-by-numbers and you end up with a Mona Lisa,” says Irvine. 80/20 = 4 close-knit executives Customer feedback and quarterly software updates enable 80/20 to deliver exactly what their customers want. But a wealth of industry experience doesn’t hurt either. Muroff, the elder of the company’s executive foursome, started his own ISP company while studying law at Michigan State. He opted to stick with technology, eventually packing his bags and moving to Toronto, where he was the President of SoftQuad Software Ltd. Roland Lopes, in his mid-thirties, runs the back end of the MCC. 80/20’s Chief Technical Officer, he’s been working in IT and consulting for over a decade. Sincich, the man in charge of the user experience, studied multimedia design production at Humber College, where he graduated at the top of his class. Irvine, the lone ‘suit’, started his career as a technology analyst in venture capital companies, later founding MMI. An aura of genuine friendship surrounds the four, and it’s a camaraderie they try to cultivate with all staff. “We really try to build a culture where people are happy here, that they’re happy to come in every morning,” starts Irvine. “The four of us are all involved in the hiring process, to make sure there’s a personality fit with the new people coming in. Make the environment fun and you’ll get more results out of your employees.” A gym facility will be installed soon, perhaps to burn off some of the calories from their regular terrace bar-b-ques and monthly dinners. They operate on flextime, and borrowing from the retail and service sectors, there is a coveted “employee of the month” award. Muroff smiles. “We work hard, we play hard.” With a product that melds online, mobile and traditional campaigns and a cohesive, upbeat work environment, 80/20 seems to have found a formula for turning integration into art.

Is design really strategy?

Ray Podder — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Borrowed from, "Grow: Change Matters":http://growblog.blogspot.com/

Design is obviously important to business, but despite the success of Apple, Target, Ikea, Philips, BMW and other important design-centric organizations, so many business leaders still view design and design thinking as "decorative" or "aesthetic styling" after the "strategy" has already been worked out. Of course guys like me (and "Fast Company":http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html) can make a case for why design IS strategy, simply by the fact that strategy is nothing more than clarity of "vision for next":http://growahead.blogspot.com/2006/09/future-by-design-trailer-william.html actions. When it comes to deciding what to do next, what leaves room for no ambiguity? But is design really strategy or is this "Design IS Strategy" another business philosophy du jour to sell more design and design-thinking books? Most business leaders might argue it's strictly about numbers. Even though I can still make the case that numbers not only can be misleading, they don't create customers (more specifically woo your customers into falling in love with your brand). If the sole purpose of business is to create a customer as the late Peter Drucker made evident, then shouldn't the core factor be given more importance? The reality is that this is a loaded question because nothing specific (unlike originality) can be strategy. In an unpredictable marketplace with situational variables, strategy, or the deciding of what's next (to do, to go, etc.) is largely dependent on the current cultural, political and technological context. That said, DESIGN infused into your brand experience not only doesn't hurt, it is a real advantage. For one, design is thinking about possibilities realized. I can talk or write about fusing the colors of your imagination all day long, but none of it is going to inspire you or your customers to feel anything like what you see here and the Sony Bravia Ad here. Design is good. It should be integrated into strategy, and thinking like designers (possibility vs probability-thinking) can only help in today's hyper-competitive markets with fickle customers searching for the next thing they "might" miss out on. Design makes them stop and notice. That's definitely a solid strategic move in my books.

Why award-winning web sites are so awful

Gerry McGovern — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Borrowed from the blog: New Thinking Parent Site: Content Management Solutions: Gerry McGovern Practical and functional websites rarely win prizes for design but they do win sales and make profits. Recently, I did a masterclass on web sales with about 50 Danish web managers. I gave them a list of issues and asked them to choose the most important ones for them. The top 5 issues for these managers were: Increase sales Customer-focused Usability Completing the sale Serving customers better Then I asked them to look at the list again, and this time choose the issues that were of least importance to them. These were: Credit card fraud, More use of Flash, Award-winning website, Wow factor, More animation. The Danes (and other Scandinavians) are probably the most sophisticated web practitioners I have had the pleasure to deal with. When I deal with countries that are at the bottom of the curve when it comes to web adoption and e-commerce expertise, award-winning websites driven by Flash and wow factors tend to be top of the agenda. “I no longer enter my agency’s layouts in the contests by the art director’s societies, for fear that one of them might be disgraced by an award,” David Ogilvy wrote in his 1963 seminal book, Confessions of an Advertising Man. This legend of advertising stated that “I wage war on art-directoritis, the disease which reduces advertising campaigns to impotence.” Inspired by David Ogilvy’s wisdom,I decided to visit Ogilvy.com. There I was presented by another quote from the great man: “You aren’t advertising to a standing army, you are advertising to a moving parade.” And right underneath that quote, Ogilvy.com is boasting about how it has just won 13 awards. In fact, rarely have I come across a more vain, conceited homepage. In about 110 words, the name Ogilvy (or Ogilvy & Mather) is used over 20 times. Other phrases include ‘our work’ and ‘what we do’. Nathan Shedroff recently gave a talk at User Interface 11, where he asked the audience to name areas of life where good design has made a real impact. (Nathan is the co-author of a book on experience design called Making Meaning.) Design innovations such as wireless, voting systems, nutrition fact sheets, starting a car, were mentioned. Nathan mused that they could spend an hour mentioning really important design innovations and have a very long list. In his opinion, nothing on this list would have won a design award. Nathan showed an image of the iPod, that he described as a white block with rounded corners. Absolutely functional design. Just like the Google homepage. The Danes understand that a website needs to be designed for the customer, not for the organization, and certainly not for the web team. The most dangerous thing that web professionals can do is assume that what they really care about is what their customers really care about. The Web is a functional, practical place. A great website drives the customer to act. It uses clear, substantial language, rather than clever, meaningless words. To quote David Ogilvy again: ‘When Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.” “I’m with Demosthenes.” The shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers.

A million shoes to fill: a profile of ChickAdvisor

Trevor Stafford — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:00:00 GMT

!http://redcanary.mypublicsquare.com/files/redcanary/a-million-shoes-to/million_shoes.gif!

Read co-founder Ali de Bold's "blog"on Red Canary How long have you been working on ChickAdvisor? ALI: I guess we started about a year and a half ago. Alex and I just got married last year. We started building it slowly over the fall and this spring we really ramped it up. Where did the kernel of ChickAdvisor originate? ALI: I moved from Winnipeg to Toronto and thought it was very difficult to find a good hair salon or good dentist or a number of things. I spent time searching (online) and found that there wasn't really anything out there [locally] for Toronto. I spent all summer researching to see if there were websites that served up local product and service reviews and found that there was nothing for women that did everything that we have rolled into chickadvisor. We realized that there was a gap.

"I think Alex discovered how expensive it is to be a woman...haircuts, clothes, dry cleaning - everything for women is more expensive." - Ali de Bold

ALEX:...it costs $50 or $60 dollars for shampoo...including all of the bottles that we have crammed underneath our sink in the bathroom. What are your backgrounds? ALEX: I started in web 1.0, I launched a company called ProfessorJones that sold textbooks over the Internet. I spent four years doing that, and eventually morphed the company into an integrated media platform. We had launched a magazine across the country, created a student portal, a magazine on 20 campuses and distributed 250,000 CD-ROMs. Unbeknownst to me, Ali was working for ProfessorJones while at the University of Manitoba. (Ed. They later met serendipitously when Alex moved a friend into an apartment that Ali shared. The fact that Ali was indirectly employed by Alex wasn't discovered until later.) I spent four years at Labatt, then started working with startups again. (Ed. Alex has contributed to Albert Lai's photo-sharing startup Bubbleshare.) ALI: I was professional insurance adjuster for four years. That sounds...awful ALI: I hated it passionately and I'm a firm believer in doing what you love, so when Alex and I started dating I quit and went back to school. Tell me about the organization, what are your roles at ChickAdvisor? ALEX: I build a framework, she fills it in. ALI: I wrote the ChickAdvisor manual and I write the (on-site) articles and copy

"Last week MSNBC came out and said iVillage is going to be their growth engine and they're going to use social networking and grow it to $1 billion in revenue. That's a massive validation for the ChickAdvisor model." - Alex de Bold

When did you launch? ALEX: September 2. We feel like we're in the right place at the right time. We've been using websites like iVillage as our proxy. So you just jumped into this? ALEX We started with a focus group before we did anything. We asked what girls wanted, then we did another focus group [before launch] and that's how we came up with the flying search keywords. ALI: Everything from 'what kind of categories do you want to see?' To, 'what kind of things do you want advice on?'. Our direction has changed based on what our focus groups have said. Will ChickAdvisor be national? How does your model work? ALEX: We allow women to submit reviews for products and services across North Amercia. For now we have ChickAdvisor Everywhere and Toronto and we've already recruited city editors for four other cities. ALI: we're going to do one city at a time Like a Craigslist approach? You'll roll out Specific URLs? ALI: Yes. Tell me more about your model ALEX: Our model is based on building something useful for women. If you look at any magazine you'll see it's a one-way conversation talking women. Traditional Media doesn't engage women in a meaningful conversation. Products are a shared experience.

"At a local level when a woman says "your skin looks fantastic", or "your hair looks great" or "where'd you get those shoes", that's the conversation that we're trying to capture." - Alex de Bold

If our site can be pivot point for that conversation & discovery of products and services that work for women then maybe they might just buy it through our site. I'm sure that changes according to locality ALEX: That's been the bane of our existence in terms of database design...the east coast is more conservative than the west coast. How do you show the equivalent of a big ranking between different cities versus a local ranking? How are you getting the word out? ALEX: Organically. Through word of mouth, contests and partnerships ALI: We're going to be holding promotions to get people to give reviews. We've been getting good reviews through Mashable and had a good review from a TechCrunch analyst recently. ALEX: If women like it, they'll spread the word. What's coming up for ChickAdvisor? ALEX: Our primary objective is get the word out and then listen to what women have to say about the site before we touch any more code. We just launched discussion groups, and people can now bookmark individual items as their reviews and integrate it into their blogs. We have a lot of things up our sleeve but we want to make sure we have a solid foundation.

So what’s a chick doing in web 2.0 anyway?

Ali de Bold — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Read the ChickAdvisor interview here. On September 2nd, my husband Alex and I launched ChickAdvisor, a website for women to share advice and tips on the best local services and emerging trends. We’ve differed from the traditional editorial approach where they dictate what’s hot, what we should buy and where we should go, and placed that power into the hands of the public. Imagine that?! While finding the right audience and getting them engaged is always a challenge, the most difficult part for me has been fighting the ‘old boy’s club’. How do you convince a room full of seasoned businessmen to invest in a company that is half-owned by a woman? I was in a meeting several weeks ago where I was politely told I should be replaced as Alex’s partner, possibly by a man. They mused aloud, ‘Would it be possible to launch ChickAdvisor without a woman?’ I smiled sweetly at them across the table. Unfortunately, this has been a very common theme with most investors. Despite the fact that I have more professional experience than any of the 22- year-old guys behind other web 2.0 companies like Facebook and RateMyProfessor, I have to fight to prove I deserve to participate in my company. One need look no further than the kafuffle caused by the Office 2.0 ’sausage party?’ that was decidedly sans women to see that it’s still pretty hard out here for a chick. My experience as an insurance adjuster didn’t get me any mileage at all. Unless you’ve worked in the industry you have no idea how much work is involved. You have to become a jack-of-all-trades quickly adapting from a vehicle theft claim to a bodily injury claim to a sewer backup or fire in the wee hours of the morning. It requires a tremendous amount of organization, study (of everything from anatomy to legislation and case law), legal knowledge, and collaboration with a number of different people for any one case. It is a very demanding job, but that’s what I did for my first 4 years in Toronto at the age of 22. Since I’ve been back in school, I’m in the top 15% of my program despite the fact that I simultaneously worked an internship, a part-time job, planned our wedding out of province and then launched a company. I could get offended, but it’s not worth my time. I simply say, ‘fugheddaboutit’ to the naysayers and keep working hard to build our company the way we envisioned it. As Frank Sinatra says, “the best revenge is massive success!”

The experience IS the message

Ray Podder — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Borrowed from the blog: "Grow: Change Matters":http://growblog.blogspot.com/ Ray runs: "Grow":http://www.growbrand.com/ Until now, we've only been accustomed to a linear communication model. Getting the word of a single source out to the many. Historically, each layer of accessibility brought on by each improvement of travel and communications created more and more channels for that single initiating source.The end recipients of that communication were either confined by geography or had limited means of getting their reactions to that information out. They had little means to evaluate, compare or verify the relevance of the information sent down to them, thus popularity and conformity ruled the day. If you disagreed or had a deviant reaction as the end recipient of that communication, you were either ostracized or you kept your mouth shut. Village elders passed on information that was confined to the village, kings passed down information that was contained within their kingdoms, the printed word passed down information to the masses and radio and television followed suit. But today, something is vastly different. The recipients of the intended communications can communicate back just as efficiently and effectively as the king (one with all resources) could before. The Internet fuels that exchange by creating multisided dynamic channels irrespective of time, distance, and now even method such as user generated video a la YouTube and others. This basic idea of a dynamic, distributed peer to peer network fundamentally changes the way suppliers and seekers are connected. Most advertisers today are still operating as though the Internet is yet another media channel like television, radio and printed publications that came before it. It would certainly explain why people put banner ads on social network pages while studies clearly indicate the preference for them is zero. The Internet is not another channel !!! It changes advertising as we knew it forever and it changes it from the point of view from both the experience seekers (users) and experience providers (advertiser/suppliers) alike. In the non-linear communication paradigm we now participate in, is the message to entice one towards a particular choice still important? Is the "message" the idea that leads to the choice, or the actual choice itself? Think about it, because it's an important distinction. It questions the focus on "awareness" and puts the spotlight on "relevance". If you're an advertiser and are wondering why your ROI has been taking a dive lately, here's the first clue: The Experience IS the Message. It's not about your product or service. It's not even about you! It's how the experience you deliver makes people feel about themselves in your presence. To measure stickiness, recall, click-throughs, eyeballs or to spend more on "positioning" is not only becoming less important everyday, it will soon be unnecessary. Instead, think of what makes something MEANINGFUL to your customers.

Am I a hack? (what startups can learn from Red Canary)

Trevor Stafford — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 04:00:00 GMT

As of today, July the 15th, 2006 the five most read articles on Red Canary are:

My blog "Buzz on or Buzz off about 2.0" read it now
Malgosia Green's blog "The Importance of Focus" read it now
Craig Fitzpatrick's blog "When you're small" read it now
"7 hiring tips for startups" read it now
The 'Lessons' interview with Kash Hassan read it now

So of the top 5 articles on Red Canary, only 2 were summoned by my keystrokes.

Shakespeare I am not.

Calling myself a 'hack' may be a bit offside, but the popularity of bloggers and equally soluble content on Red Canary does deliver an important message to startups:

Web content should honour essential human truths

I'll try to connect the dots

Red Canary's top articles share most or all of these qualties:

Humanity - all but one piece is about or created by an accessibly 'real' person (not by a professional writer in his highback chair).

Brevity - they are all among the shortest and most easily read.

Faces - they have images of people, not objects - and people click on people first.

Reward - each of the top 5 hints at the reader's reward for clicking: a good, human story.

*What does this mean to your Startup?*

It says that STORYTELLING SELLS. It's an axiom the advertising world learned 50 years ago (only to forget today).

How do you tell a good story?

Get friendly. People want to read about people; they want the crunchy cornflakes of human truth and experience, even if it's packed with two scoops of real fruit fallacies. Brevity is bestity. Even if you have a complex product and have a lot to say, try not to pack it together in long paragraphs. Layer your message without burying it. Deconstruct it. Compartmentalize. Pay someone who knows what they are doing if you can.

Eschew Orwell. No paragraph - long or short - should contain corporate PR doublespeak. It's your website, not the Enron trial. Find out what your customer's stories are and tell them. Bring a camera.

Be clear. Don't dump company boilerplate on your front page. Actually, try not to dump it anywhere. Say what you do. You don't have to be trite; just clear.

Own something. If you have a critical message, say it first and say it (differently) last. Package it with ribbon and a bow or people will miss it.

That's Brisk, baby! The maximal length of a highway billboard is roughly 7 words Web visitors aren't zooming past at 100 mph, but they are still in a hurry. Deliver your purpose/benefit in one or two sentences and put it somewhere people will read it.

These tenets apply just as strongly to a B2B startup as a 'Social' 2.0 site. In fact, the product complexity and long sales cycles of most B2B concerns makes good site management even more of an imperative.

Red Canary's Lessons

I have learned that blogs have forever changed journalism. People delivering their stories - warts and grammatical farts and all - is simply more real than traditional journalism.

That doesn't mean we'll dump longer articles (our numbers say that when people do start reading them, they generally stick around until the end) but they need to be shorter and punchier.

In sum

Many startups choose to cram their website with as much detail as possible without considering a visitor's motivation or basic human needs.

Navigation and usability is important of course, but without a considered, concise message even great design is wasted.

Want a good website? Use images of (real) people, stir in some verve and honesty and tell human stories.

Everything else will take care of itself.

How to treat website visitors with respect

Dmitry Buterin — Tue, 09 May 2006 04:00:00 GMT

Borrowed from the blog: Usability.ca

Dmitri runs Wild Apricot

One important way to show respect to website visitors is to treat what they type in as something precious. Have you ever been in one of these situations?

You fill out a form and submit it. You make a slight mistake (maybe missed a field). When the form comes back it has lost some or all of the information you have entered. (Luckily, such clueless websites are getting rarer)
You accidentally click on the "Reset" button and everything you typed is wiped out. Is it your fault? No! Web developers should not have put this button on the form in the first place. A reset button is an old - and I think very stupid - convention they blindly followed. Do you ever really need a "Reset" button?
You accidentally click outside the web page you are working on - maybe on a link to another website. As it loads in your browser your current form disappears into the void - and the Back button does not help.

You are interrupted by a telephone call. You come back to your half-filled form, complete it and submit... only to get the message, "Your session has timed out. Please login again". All your data is lost. ARGH!!

I just lost my own precious time on an airline website. I filled out the form and was asked to login to confirm my status. After I typed an incorrect password, my flight data disappeared. How do you avoid these problems in your web app? (And you really want to do it. Even if it happens once in a 1000 times, it generates ill-will and hurts your business results) One simple approach is to split long entry forms into several steps/screens. Ask for the most important information first - like name, email, phone number. (This makes good business sense because if your visitor does not complete the form, you can follow up. He/she might have meant to complete it - but was distracted. One gentle reminder can boost your conversion rates!

Another good idea for a lengthy form is to let people save their work at any moment - and come back to finish it later. Maybe they are missing some key piece of information - or maybe they have an urgent task to do. Give them a button like "Save Draft". If you implement such a feature - don't bug your users to fill out all mandatory fields. Let people save whatever they have. Check mandatory fields only when they submit the final form.

Going further, implement auto-save of user input every few minutes.Some websites auto-save your input as soon as you move to the next field. Since the save happens in the background (using Ajax technology), the user is not inconvenienced, and does not have to wait.

Google Gmail is a good example - it auto-saves your draft email every few minutes. You can also save manually at any time.

Auto-save can even work if a user is not logged in (using cookies). But be careful: this has privacy implications. What if a visitor uses a public PC to access your website? His information can be accidentally disclosed to the next user of that PC. Let people know if you are auto-saving their data - and let them disable this feature or delete the saved data at any time.

Finally about those "session timeouts". Whenever possible, you should not kick people out of your system if they are in the middle of a long form. Geeks call such code "keep-session-alive". Sometimes this is not wise due to security issues - then you have to ask them to login AND still keep the submitted form data (not easy but doable).

Bottom line: Showing respect is always a good idea - in person or on the Web.