An image of the 20 questions that have to be addressed in a marketting plan, which claims to be the World’s Smallest Marketting Plan Template. And actually, based on my business training, they’ve boiled it down as far as it will go.
What the hell is it with idiots and jpgs? What’s wrong with a png?
Running a web-site/service? About 1% of your clients will give you any money at all – most will be happy with your free offering. But of those that do give you money, some what to give you a lot. So segment your customers.
Erick Schonfeld writes about 5 ways to start a company (without quitting your day job) , because with Web 2.0, this time it’s different.
I found this ad for an amazing site when doing a google search:
| Sponsored Links | |||
| Photos Of Australia Find out everything you need to about this amazing destination! www-australia.info |
|||
Someone has just paid money so that I’d click on that link, and see that site. Look at the photos along the bottom. First, there’s a left-hand-drive vehicle, then a naff sunshade and beachchairs at sunset, followed by a grey road with a yellow centreline driving through a conifer forrest, and finally some people skiing past a maple or something. Search the entire continent, you’re not going to find any of that stuff.
I don’t know if it’s covered in ads, perhaps it is (my ad blocking works really well, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to some dodgy site with IE).
Somebody: Please explain what the hell is going on here? I’d especially love an economist to explain what the heck that site is about – rational decision making my shiny metal butt.
Update: This is a Made For Adsense site. Still doesn’t make sense, but whatever. They too shall pass.
Coffee drinkers are easier to persuade.
Fermi’s Paradox is explained by aliens getting adicited to computer gaming.
Strom reckons he knows how to make money with a website: ads! Plus a little other stuff.
An Irishman has a rather good summery of how to negotiate an intial salary.
Cross-platform rounded corners without images, extra markup nor CSS. The holy grail of web-design dweebs.
Edward Jay Epstein explains that The thirsty moviegoer fuels the movie business.
There’s an economic imperiative to make the salty popcorn, and movies short with action which avoids gripping plotlines – and it’s driven by the theatre’s concession stand. Coke calls the shots in the film industry.
This explains it all. It’s not about the razors, it’s about the blades.
Here’s an idea: rather than sending advertisements to user’s computers, why not send scripting code to calculate [the valuable thing, like, I dunno, pi or hacking the encryption on HDDVD or something] and send the results back to your central computer?
Come on, you know you want to. And it’s free!
I think I’m a little stupid.
Given:
What is the logical conclusion?
IT Manager’s Journal tries to tell IT Managers to hire IT professionals quickly if they want high-caliber IT personnel. High-caliber IT personnel get snapped up quickly, so if you want them (and you do). This article is a sub-point within Joel’s discussion on hiring.
I’ve been there, and seen it. On both sides. One employeer had to wait two years before being able to actually act on their intention to hire me. So my advice goes like this:
Some people will be pleased with 2 weeks, others 2 months; if you can be flexible, all the better. Bad is: “We’ve got to get final budget approval, and then we’ll stagger you in with the others over a six week window.” My response would be: “Fine, but you’re going to start paying me now, right?” That’s not a start date. That’s more like an intention. Which could have the carpet pulled out from underneath it. Why did I just spend two hours in a interview with you?
Minimize the number of people you try to hire in one hit – well, at least compress the time between interviews and acceptance. Uncertainty is hard to work with. And if you’re looking to hire twelve people, you’ll want the best 12, and that means interviewing everyone and then ranking them. Actually, perhaps Joel’s approach to interviewing is the right way to ensure you get the number of people you need – he ranks the resumes, does a half-hour+ phone interview and then a face-to-face.
High-caliber IT personnel are excellent value, even when they cost twice your average-caliber IT personnel. Study after study has shown it. They get more done, and the stuff they do works better. In fact, I believe it’s an order of magnitude best-to-average, and another order of magnitude averge-to-worst. A hundredfold difference. At twice the price, the best people are a steal. More words from Joel:
In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they’d have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up.
As an aside, I’ve used Joel’s Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing and found it works fairly well.
What have I missed?
Not-quite-legal, not-quite-illegal site AllOfMP3 introduces the “AllTunes” music browser. ArsTechnica also reports on the current legal status of the service, which is not illegal in Russia due to a loophole in their copyright laws (which apply to physical media only), but is unlicenced.
Cam reports on Cory Doctorow’s talk in Melbourne last night on the evils of DRM.
… sharing stories and songs from person to person isn’t called theft or piracy – it’s called ‘culture’.
Oh God, yes! Joel Spolsky on what makes a programmer the most productive:
A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that’s so comfortable you don’t feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1. (Here’s something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)
For myself, it’s silence that’s missing from my workplace. Ringing phones, the printer, the guy with the loud sneezes… all of these conspire to slow down my day, with music via headphones helping to minimise it.
