Jay Goldman » Observatory http://jaygoldman.com Technologist, Designer, Speaker, Author, Generally Swell Guy Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:00:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 What’s your 5 Runs? http://jaygoldman.com/2009/07/23/whats-your-5-runs/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/07/23/whats-your-5-runs/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:14:39 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=551 What's your 5 Runs?

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]]> http://jaygoldman.com/2009/07/23/whats-your-5-runs/feed/ 0 DemoCamp20 is a wrap! http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/26/democamp20-is-a-wrap/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/26/democamp20-is-a-wrap/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 15:11:44 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=548 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Thanks to everyone who made the pilgrimage to The Imperial Pub and Library for DemoCamp Toronto 20 last night. Great event, great demos, great ignites, and great people! Mike Conley posted some incredibly detailed notes if you missed out.

We’ve already started planning DemoCamp 21, which will be held either July 27th or 28th to co-incide with a visit from Jon Udell. As Jack Black once said: keep your looking balls locked to the picture radio (where the picture radio is the DemoCamp website, of course).

In the meantime, you can help us make DemoCamp a better event by taking two minutes to answer a quick Rypple about last night. These are your events, so help yourself make them better!

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]]> http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/26/democamp20-is-a-wrap/feed/ 1 WSS09: Jeremiah Oywang on the Future of the Social Web http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-jeremiah-oywang-on-the-future-of-the-social-web/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-jeremiah-oywang-on-the-future-of-the-social-web/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 23:06:22 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=544 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
  • Jeremiah Oywang is a Forrester researcher and writes the Web Strategist blog. This content is somewhat covered in his blog post The Five Eras of the Social Web.
  • Took a plane with a school teacher from Texas who told him about the generational gap with her students
    • Kids can’t read her handwriting in cursive because they’re used to fonts
    • Didn’t do homework until it was online and web-based
    • Answer questions they don’t know with “IDK” (I Don’t Know)
  • User adoption of Social Networks
    • Social Technographics Ladder
      • Creators: create opinions and put them online to share, sometimes don’t read other content
      • Critics: love or hate, no grey area. Critic something created by a Creator
      • Collectors: technology and organizational nuts who want everything in their place
      • Joiners: take part and join
        • 2007: 23%
        • 2008: 35%
      • Spectators: read things
        • 2007: 48%
        • 2008: 69%
      • Inactives: cannot be reached by social technologies at all
        • 2007: 44%
        • 2008: 25%
      • See Social Technographics presentation on Forrester Groundswell blog
    • Age is a major driver of adoption
      • Creators skew to younger, Inactives to older, everyone else gradually shifting in-between
      • It’s not necessarily a period of life thing: younger people now will likely continue to create as they get older
    • History:
      • First occurrences of companies using channels to connect with customers in 2004 (Robert Scoble at Microsoft, 2004)
      • Yahoo acquires Flickr in March 2005
      • Technorati State of the Blogosphere, March 2005
      • Tim O’Reilly coins “Web 2.0″ in August 2005
      • Google acquires YouTube for $1.65b in October 2006
      • Twitter at SXSW, 2007
      • Facebook launches Platform, May 2007
      • OpenSocial launches, October 2007
      • Demand buys Pluck, $75m
      • Various acquisitions, 2008
      • Facebook launches Connect, December 2008
  • The Five Eras
    • Era 1: Relationships
      • People connect to each other and share things
      • The first social network was AOL
      • MySpace is a mature social network in the Era of Relationships
      • Information spreads around the globe — earthquake info on Twitter before official news sources
    • Era 2: Social Functionality
      • Social networks become Operating Systems
      • Build third party apps on top of communities
      • Google Docs is social functionality (hard to collaborate and share in Word)
      • Primarily in 2007 with the launch of Facebook Platform
      • Enables people to collaborate in ways they couldn’t have before
      • Brands will soon sponsor popular apps (iLike, TripAdvisor, etc.)
      • Expect even Solitaire apps to be social
      • More eCommerce in social networks
      • Surprising: we haven’t seen Craigslist or eBay in Facebook [not actually true: eBay Marketplace App on Facebook]
      • Linkedin allows selected third party developers to create apps for their community
      • CPI (Cost Per Install) is a new form of advertising that has emerged
      • iLike was a standalone application, but its collective power within Facebook and MySpace made its external site irrelevant
      • Developers fear social networks’ ability to make constant changes to protocols and terms of use
    • Era 3: Social Colonization
      • Wherever you go, your friends come with you
      • Everyone has an entourage
      • Happens online and IRL
      • Your Twitter friends go everywhere you go through your tweets
      • Google OpenStack, OpenID, Facebook Connect, Sign-in With Twitter, etc. are powering this
      • Facebook ‘eyebrow’ bar across the top of pages brings your Facebook social context onto third party sites (who recommend this? who has read it?)
        • This makes traditional marketing irrelevant since people can ignore it and base everything on their friends
      • DiggBar does the same
      • Surfing the web won’t be lonely anymore
      • Any website can be social even if brands choose not to participate
      • 4% – 8% of Japanese consumers use their mobile phones to talk
      • Social networks are going to aggregate information and cut into the email marketing industry
        • It’s the new ’social inbox’ where all of the information about your peers is gathered
        • Will look more and more like email (and vice versa)
      • Traditional brand marketing will loose way to recommendations from friends and colleagues
      • Corporate websites fragment to join the communities
      • Question: isn’t this what Microsoft tried with Passport?
        • People are already using Facebook and they trust it. Microsoft didn’t have a lot of users at the time and so they didn’t have established trust.
    • Era 4: Social Context
      • Federated identities go with you everywhere you go online
      • Some parts of your profile can be exposed to other websites or devices
      • Relevant content comes to you
        • Surfing the web, TV, etc. will decrease
      • Minority Report: customized ads delivered to you as you walk through stores (more likely just online… for now)
      • Activity feeds, GPS, status updates (Twitter, Facebook), mobile devices, XRDF, Social TV are powering this
      • Location Based Services will thrive on this (especially things like Latitude, Foursquare, etc.)
      • Websites will be optimized to drive relevant content to you specifically
        • Serve products I’m interested in above things I’m not rather than on popularity, etc.
      • Registration pages will go away
      • Search results will serve content based on social relevance to you
      • Plaxo bought by Comcast so they can build a personalized TV service for you
        • The 1ft screen is mobile (1ft away from you), 2ft screen is your laptop, 10ft screen is the TV
        • The 1ft and 2ft screens are already very connected — 10ft is the ‘last mile’
      • A new form of ’social contract’ will appear so that consumers can choose to share their information in exchange for improved experiences
        • The more you share, the more you’ll get back
        • Various levels of increasingly personal information: Preferences > Behavioural > Social context > Location-based > Community context
    • Era 5: Social Commerce
      • Communities define products
      • CrunchPad from TechCrunch
        • Arrington asked the community to help him build a better touchpad that boots into a browser
        • Product has evolved and is likely going to come to market (latest update)
      • Social CRM, OAuth, SalesForce, embracing technologies, VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems are driving this
        • VRM tools will allow communities to define products and have companies bid on building them
        • SalesForce and Twitter are now working together to provide Customer Support by Twitter
      • Sites like Etsy are good examples: artists selling their own products and the community driving what they produce
      • Communities will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to buying
      • Social networks will become CRM systems (and eventually VRM)
      • PR Agencies will appear that represent communities rather than brands (e.g.: representing a community of mountain bike enthusiasts in Boulder, CO to a mountain bike company)
    • Question: what can we do to get our websites ready for the change?
      • SEO will start to act on social metadata as well as search data (what do your trusted friends say on this topic?). Brands need to encourage friends to share information and build the repository of data. Hashtags in Twitter is humans speaking machine language to teach the system. In the future it will pick up on its own. Turn the most popular content on your website into widgets and let them share and spread it (fish where the fish are). (see providers like WidgetBox).
  • Impacts and Risks
    • Corporate websites will become aggregation tools for what the community is discussing (catalyst: activity streams)
    • eCommerce will include social rankings from people you actually know (catalyst: portable social graph)
    • Facebook lock in will become Facebook friends everywhere (catalyst: portable identity)
    • Mobile devices become location-based through context (catalyst: identity systems)
    • Phone address books become dial social network address (catalyst: identity and social graph)
    • Celebrity endorsements become micro-celebrity endorsements (catalyst: niche communities)
    • PR firms represent communities instead of brands (catalyst: empowered communities)
    • Implicit “friending” goes away as we have a single social graph (catalyst: portable identities)
    • Challenges:
      • Social media burn out
      • Legal and privacy
      • Noise from ‘ambient intimacy’ (pokes, tweets, gestures, etc.)
      • Extremism (as communities segment, they’re less exposed to new ideas)
  • Recommendations
    • Focus on your most vocal advocates
    • Marketers need to evolve from email campaigns and broadcast advertising to social
    • Marketeres must focus on ‘pull’ as opt-in metrics replace conversions
    • Prepare internal culture for these shifts, starting from the top down
      • Getting line of business folks to let go and realize the community is in control
  • For a copy of this upcoming report: http://forrester.com/future
  • Question: how can we help clients get ready?
    • Start experimenting with multiple log-in systems now. Add inventory of content and advertising so there’s enough to contextualize and display. Modify templates to support more dynamic display of data. Include recommendation systems into design specs now. Sun aggregates good and bad blog posts about their products through Technorati now.
  • Question: we have a lot of privacy concerns now. Will people become more willing to release information as we progress? We’re seeing the opposite now.
    • Consumer products and everyday lifestyle products will shift. People are already exposing more of themselves on Twitter now. Certain info (employment, medical, financial) will stay private.
  • Question: will Twitter have a future or fade away?
    • Growth rates are tremendous but at 10m users it’s still small and overhyped. They haven’t started their monetization engines and are focused on growth. They need to innovate quickly because their core features are easily replicable by other sites. They could be a CRM system but they aren’t mature enough yet.
  • Question: what’s the next big media bubble beyond Twitter?
    • There isn’t anything out there yet that’s clear. FriendFeed seems to be a popular item among early adopters, but the toolset is very difficult and Facebook could make it obsolete by becoming better at aggregation.
  • Question: the face of SEO will obviously be changing. It’s machines interpreting people now, so how will it evolve?
    • That’s a whole other research report. It will start with pulling more social information definitely. This impacts every vertical on the web, but we’re not clear yet how.
  • Question: there’s an upcoming clash of address books between Google Contacts, Plaxo (though regarded as spammy), etc. How will that go?
    • Federated IDs will go a long way toward this. The major players have all added OpenID support except for Facebook, though they’re now funding the OpenID organization. You have a single persona with multiple facets (business, friends, family, etc.), which you have to choose to expose to different providers. A single federated ID will allow you to maintain all of that. It will happen on the 2ft screen, then the 1ft, then the 10ft.
  • Question: will the gap with the inactives continue to widen?
    • Inactives are decreasing every year (and becoming Spectators at least). Reading social material is becoming unavoidable and it might drop as low as 10% in 2009.

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-jeremiah-oywang-on-the-future-of-the-social-web/feed/ 3     WSS09: Avinash Kaushik on Web Analytics 2.0 http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 16:20:49 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=540 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
  • Avinash is the Evangelist for Google Analytics and writes the Occam’s Razor blog
  • Web Analytics in An Hour a Day
    • Wiley called a few months into writing the blog to turn it into a book
    • “People like paying for free stuff”
    • Donate all the (meagre) proceeds to DWB and the Smile Train
    • About $60k to date
  • Accountability
    • The web has infinite amounts of accountability
    • Didn’t learn much from President Bush, other than “faith-based initiatives”
    • Magazine ads are faith-based initiatives
      • Can’t measure actual impressions other than subscribers and news stand sales
    • Web advertising isn’t at all because you can measure it
      • Number of clicks
      • Relevance (shown along with search results for the term)
      • Measure effectiveness based on subsequent activities on the clicked-through site
  • The web gives you more data than God intended
    • Very good at giving you “The What”
      • You can spend your life doing path analysis and end up with no real conclusion
    • We don’t spend as much time analyzing “The How Much” or “The Why”
      • Clickstream: The What
      • Multiple Outcomes Analysis: The How Much
      • Experimentation and Testing, Voice of Customer: The Why
      • Competitive Intelligence, Insights: The Goldmine!
    • Not in the business of generating pageviews — in the business of generating revenue for your business (Clarity of Purpose!)
  • HITS: How Idiots Track Success
  • Bounce Rate
    • Not an aggregate — an actual measure of behaviour
    • Translates into: “I came, I puked, I left”
    • Very easy to understand: 70% = suck. 30% = good.
    • 20% is a fantastic rate (you always get traffic that’s not relevant to you from search engines)
    • Only seen less than 20 on high-end video porn sites, and the best still had a 4% rate (you made it all the way here and left?!)
    • Look at traffic sources and click the bar chart to compare sources to bounce rate to find your BFFs
    • Magazines are in trouble because they follow the “Selfish Lover Strategy”
      • Their ads take precedence over your content
      • Not the New Yorker, which is almost all content
      • Bounce rates are reflective of this — more ads and nav, higher bounce rate
  • We think our site traffic is all the same person coming, but it’s really a huge mess of different people with different goals
    • Segmentation and deep diving gives us the right view
    • Pageviews, etc. are all aggregated data, no segmented
    • How to improve the Reader’s Digest Advice and Know How page?
      • ~320 links on a single page
      • 10,158,033 pageviews, 9 average pageviews
      • Look at the Depth of Visit stats though — 33% of people only looked at the homepage
      • Go into segmentation and create a segment of people who’s depth was greater than four pages
      • Use that segment throughout to figure out who is driving those people to the site, which keywords, what they looked for
    • Analyze the amount of content on your site made up by each section then compare it to the total percentage of visits for it
      • Might discover that you’re spending a lot of time and money to produce content that people aren’t as interested in
  • Ecommerce
    • Average conversion rate for top ecommerce websites was 1.72%
      • What happened to the other 98%?
      • They might be offline conversions, tire kickers, etc.
    • Measure the conversions on your site for actual revenue, but also everything else
      • These are ‘macro-conversions’
      • What else does your website do to drive sales?
        • Create profiles
        • Research
        • Coupons
        • These are ‘micro-conversions’
    • Example: Avinash’s own blog
      • Set four goals: all posts, about, speaking engagements, RSS subscribers
      • “If you read two posts I’ve written, you will be convinced of my greatness”, so driving people to the “All Posts” page means they will probably read two posts
      • The last is a macro-conversion, the other three are micro
      • RSS is the ultimate form of permission marketing — I can push “any damn thing I want” to you with your permission
        • Can measure the value of that by finding out how much it would cost to purchase them as leads
      • Speaking engagements value can be measured by asking organizers how much traffic was driven to them and who registered
      • Can now measure the value in ‘fake dollars’ every month
  • How do you measure conversions on something like a drug website where you can’t actually sell the product?
    • You can measure things like watching videos, using calculators, surveys, etc.
  • Facebook measuring success by the number of active users is stupid
    • They should measure engagement
    • Look at Visitor Loyalty
      • Reconstructed data: most users came once in last 30 days, but a crazy high percentage came between 9 and 200 times
    • Look at Visitor Recency
      • Reconstructed data: 66% of people were on the site between now and 0 days ago
    • Loyalty + Recency = Profits
  • You should listen to the voice of your customers
    • How do you do it?
      • Not by looking at top content viewed — doesn’t show what they wanted but couldn’t find
      • There’s no pageview if I can’t find what I want
    • Surveys to the rescue!
      • Not like NPR: 35 question survey in a giant scrolling page
      • Greatest survey in the world has 3 questions:
        • Why are you here? -> Primary Purpose
        • Did you complete your task? -> Task Completion Rate
        • If you were not able to complete the task, why not? -> Segments of Discontent
        • Compare Primary Purpose and Task Completion to find low hanging fruit
        • Look at distribution of data to find out how many people fit into each category
          • Probably a small percentage (e.g.: mid-30s) who are there for your primary purpose
      • Perceptions, Montreal-company, created an exit survey with 4 questions to do this
      • Five Second Test: simple usability tests
      • Ethnio: remote conversations with people who are on your website right now
  • Most websites suck today because they’re created by HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
  • One of the greatest gifts the Internet gives us is the ability to learn to be wrong quickly
    • Magazines or television ads take a long, long time to produce the content and learn from it
  • A/B testing is great
    • iPhone has shown us that you can sell an object of lust to a CEO and she will force her IT staff to support it so that hers works
      • BlackBerry Storm page is horrible and creates no lust
      • Palm Pre is all about creating lust
      • Do an A/B test! You’ll quickly see that you can measure passion
  • Competitive Intelligence
    • Google Ad Planner lets you set up a very specific demographic then analyze which sites they go to
      • Can add sites those people have also visited
      • Site Profiles let you analyze the traffic and stats to specific domains
  • Questions:
    • We do a lot of work in the public sector and there’s sometimes resistance to accountability. How can public sector organizations with no bottom line tied their site use analytics?
      • The Obama administration is the best thing that could have happened to the web from an analytics perspective. Sometimes it takes a generational shift to get the old people out and new people in. Worked with a security agency to measure how many people were downloading things and found that it was 19 clicks to get to a download. Blatantly embarrassing them is a great way to get them to make changes. This is an agency America doesn’t acknowledge exists but they have a website with a Kid’s Club! Their bounce rate was 96% when we started looking. Use tools like compete.com to look up share of traffic you get for top terms (e.g.: “enterprise software” for large software companies -> top entry got 40m visits, being 44th got 3,976).

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/feed/ 0     Social Media Strategies for Organizations http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/04/social-media-strategies-for-organizations/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/04/social-media-strategies-for-organizations/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 20:11:56 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=535 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> This must be a new record! I managed to get these slides posted within two hours of ending the talk :) Delivered May 4th, 2009 at Web Strategy Summit in Calgary.

    View more presentations from Jay Goldman.

    A few things that got mucked up in the translation to Slideshare:

    • Slide 3: Those cards should have been visible one at a time. They are, in order, The Facebook Cookbook, Mr. Mobile, JayGoldman.com, and Rypple.
    • Slide 8: That’s an embedded video that doesn’t work inside Slideshare so well. The actual Motrin Moms video is on YouTube.
    • Slide 12: Wooo doggie. This one makes no sense at all ;) Those are three examples of Clarity of Purpose, being the one referenced in my original blog post (book recommendation engine > find stuff for people to buy), railroad companies being obsessed with railroads instead of transportation, and companies obsessed with being on Twitter instead of communicating.
    • Slide 13: The SMART part shouldn’t be over the table. Looks like the rest is legible other than the BAD behind the “MAR” (more newsletter subscribers), and its corresponding GOOD (30% more newsletter subscribers).
    • Slide 14: This set out an activity we did throughout the workshop as we built out the rest of the grid. This first step is all overlapped, but it shows creating the first column and some example objectives that I might list for Rypple.
    • Slide 15: Matthew Milan would be so proud of this one if the builds worked right. It shows the process of backcasting one step at a time, so you might want to refer to his awesome presentation on the topic instead: Backcasting 101.
    • Slide 22: Ugh. Slideshare should really be smarter than this. That’s a video made during the Chevy Tahoe Apprentice campaign, with a quote from Ed Peper, Chevy General Manager, overlaid on it.
    • Slide 23: The amazing visual notes Sunni Brown took at SXSW of Tony Hsieh’s opening remarks, with a few key points highlighted. See my notes on Tony for the original graphic and plenty of info. Zappos is awesome because they’re one of the most transparent companies I’ve encountered and did $1bn in revenue in 2008, so they’re a perfect example to hold up to naysers and non-believers.
    • Slide 26: Forrester’s POST model for organizations to engage in social media. See A Systematic Approach to Social Strategy on the Groundswell blog.
    • Slide 28: This didn’t work at all. It’s supposed to be a build of my tweet to Hotel Max and them back to me. See my blog post Twitter to the Max: Hotel Max Comes Through for details.

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/04/social-media-strategies-for-organizations/feed/ 0     West Coast Road Trip ‘09 Photos http://jaygoldman.com/2009/04/04/west-coast-road-trip-09-photos/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/04/04/west-coast-road-trip-09-photos/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:33:09 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=508 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Me and The Girl just wrapped up two glorious weeks road tripping down the left coast of the continent, hitting Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Bandon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas along the way. I stuck to my standard M.O. and shot tons and tons of photos, the best of which have been posted to the West Coast Road Trip 2009 collection. Here are previews of my favourite ten:

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/04/04/west-coast-road-trip-09-photos/feed/ 1     Travelling to the US with Rogers http://jaygoldman.com/2009/03/08/travelling-to-the-us-with-rogers/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/03/08/travelling-to-the-us-with-rogers/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:10:20 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=477 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> If you’re like me and you’ll soon be roaming in the US on your Rogers iPhone plan, particularly if you’re going to SXSW, you need to read this post. I suppose you don’t really need to if you’re stupidly rich and don’t mind backing dump trucks of cash right up to the Rogers loading dock. Let’s assume, for the moment anyway, that you aren’t and would like to give them as little of your hard earned dosh as possible.

    The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

    The second thing you need to understand: there are at least three ways that Rogers is going to get you drunk and take advantage of you. And I don’t mean that in the sort of ha-ha-ha frat party sense. I mean it in the posting videos of you running naked down Yonge Street with indelible ink all of your body sense.

    • Phone Calls that Hurt: Calls from the US back to Canada are billed at an astounding rate of $1.70/minute. Don’t answer calls from your friends at home (unless they’re calling to tell you that you won the lottery) since incoming Canadian calls are billed at $1.20/minute. You might think of calling ahead to Iron Works BBQ while you’re in Austin, but you better really want those ribs because that call is going to cost you $0.95/minute (hope you’re not on hold!).
    • Text Messages Full of Pain: The good news is that incoming text messages are free. Just don’t reply to them (or even think of — say — trying to make plans with a group of people), since outgoing text messages are charged at the simply mind boggling rate of $0.60/message.
    • Data with Very Sharp Edges: Oh sweet 3G data! Nectar of the web gods and very much priced accordingly. You’ll get dinged for $0.03/kb while you’re roaming, which means that you just paid about $10.50 if you’re reading this from my actual site on your Canadian iPhone (~350kb * 0.03 = $10.50). Hope it was worth it!

    Is it really any wonder that all of their customers hate them?

    There is some good news though, so read on before you abandon all technology and become a tinfoil hat wearing hermit somewhere in the northern reaches of the Great White North.

    After a lengthy call to Rogers that involved putting me on hold for at least 3 or 4 minutes to answer every question, and a whole bunch of digging through their obtuse website filled to the brim with pop-up windows and other web browsing novelties from 1996, I’ve been able to catalogue The Ultimate Down South Traveler’s Guide for Rogers Customers. Here’s how to mostly avoid waking up in a gutter with a massive Rogers bill stuffed in a very uncomfortable place:

    • Phone Calls that Feel Good: I was completely unable to find info about this on their site, but I’ve now added an option to my account that gives me 120 minutes of calling, over and above my normal plan, anywhere in the US or Canada, for $60/month. All of those calls will be treated as local calls, so there’s no roaming rates applied at all. If you’re a less frequent phone user, there’s a 60 minute option for $40/month. At an average of $1.28/minute for calls without this plan, I’m saving about $94 if I use all of the time.
    • Text Messages Still Full of Pain: I have no good news here. I was told that there’s no way to send text messages while in the US for less than $0.60/message.
    • Data with Dull Edges: There’s a little good news here. You can add the US Data Roaming Add-On to your account for $10/month, which takes data from $0.03/kb to $0.001/kb. That’s still a little pricey, but at least this page would only cost $0.35 to read instead of $10.50. Another way to look at it: the $10 you pay up front would have bought about 300kb of data without the add-on. Worth it if you think you might do more than look at a single image.

    You can apparently have them add the packages for a fixed amount of time and have them automatically come off again. I’m doing quite a bit of US travelling for the rest of March, so I’ve had them add it when I leave for SXSW and take it off when I come back from my final trip at the beginning of April. I trust Rogers to actually have things activate and deactivate about as much as I trusted Halliburton with the reconstruction of Iraq, so I’ll be monitoring my bill like a hawk.

    Avoid Charges Without Changes

    Here are some steps you can take to avoid additional charges on your iPhone if you don’t want to make a bunch of changes to your account:

    • When Your Phone is Not a Phone: Don’t make or receive any phone calls. If someone calls you, check the number in case it really is important enough to pay for and then double-click the Lock/Power button to send them straight to voicemail if it isn’t. Since SXSW provides free wireless to all attendees, install an application like fring and use your iPhone as a Skype handset (including Skype In/Out) or as a SIP client if you have access to an Asterisk box. Note that the wireless often gets completely overloaded, so don’t rely on this one.
    • Inbound Text Messages Only: Receive all you want, but don’t send ‘em. Let people txt you and then you either phone them, email them, or Twitter direct message them (since your data will be “cheap” and there’s a good chance they have incoming DMs going to their phone as text messages if they’re in the US).
    • Data on the Cheap: Make sure you turn off Data While Roaming so that your iPhone doesn’t run up a massive bill for you (you’ll find it under Settings > General > Network > Data While Roaming). That will switch of EDGE/3G data but not WiFi, so you should still be fine to use wireless networks you stumble across. If you’re staying in a hotel that offers free wireless (or even cheap wireless), consider either bringing a WiFi router to share it out to all your devices (and friends!), or use your Mac to share your Ethernet connection wirelessly.

    Did I Miss Anything?

    Know any great tips or tricks that my research didn’t uncover? Leave them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

    Notes on Rates

    • All of the rates quoted above are in effect on March 8th, 2009.
    • Rates for calls, text messages, and data from the US are from International GSM/GPRS Roaming. Select “United States” to trigger a pop-up window with all of the sordid details.
    • None of the above applies if you’re travelling outside of the US. If you thought the rates were bad below the 49th, be thankful that SXSW doesn’t happen in Europe where calls are at least $2.00/minute.

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/03/08/travelling-to-the-us-with-rogers/feed/ 44     It’s Twestival Time! February 12th at CiRCA http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/12/its-twestival-time-february-12th-at-circa/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/12/its-twestival-time-february-12th-at-circa/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:41:53 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=466 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Tonight is Twestival, the worldwide Twitter party to raise money for charity: water. 175+ cities are now on board! Not sure if I can make the Toronto event, but they’re pretty close to raising $10k so you should definitely join in the fun if you haven’t yet bought a ticket.

    12 February 2009, 19:00, CiRCA , 126 John St, Toronto M5V 2E3

    Here’s a video from charity: water founder Scott Harrison thanking everyone for the effort so far:

    Hope to see you there!

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/12/its-twestival-time-february-12th-at-circa/feed/ 0     Clarity of Purpose http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/29/clarity-of-purpose/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/29/clarity-of-purpose/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:37:22 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=447 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I’ve been pondering a thought since last Monday, when I had the chance to speak to a group of Greg Wilson’s University of Toronto CS students. Greg gets me to come in every now and then and extol the virtues of being a UX monkey instead of a Code monkey in order to make sure that his students have some perspective on the various career paths available. I was joined by Adam Goucher, one of the best QA monkeys I know, who was there to do the same but different (if you catch my drift).

    Part of the lunch involved the various project groups asking questions related to the work they were doing, which included everything from building visualizations for traffic data captured in near real-time by roadside transponders to designing better spam filtering (and pretty much everything in-between). Greg has a full list of the projects over on his blog: Update on this term’s projects. I was struck by something that all of the teams shared (and that I’ve often seen in entrepreneurs pitching their startups): a lack of clarity of purpose. That shouldn’t, in any way, diminish the awesome work they’re doing, but rather to introduce one of the aspects that I think contributes to the failure of so many enterprises.

    Clarity of purpose means knowing your ultimate goal and being able to distinguish it from the intervening steps.

    One of the teams in Greg’s class is building a better recommendation engine for Chapters/Indigo, Canada’s answer to Borders (i.e.: giant big online book store AND giant offline book stores that serve coffee). This is similar to the Netflix Prize, in which Netflix is offering $1,000,000 to the team who can beat their own Cinematch system by at least 10%, except with only one team, without the giant cash money, and probably with an easier-to-achieve ultimate goal. The interesting part of the conversation — for me at least — was not about their great grasp of a really hard tech problem but about their clarity of purpose. Their stated purpose: build a better recommendation engine for books. Their actual purpose: help people find books to buy.

    That may seem like a subtle difference on first blush, but there’s an entire startup’s world between the two. If you set out to build a better mousetrap, all you’ll ever see is cheese and springs and bait. Intermediate steps masquerading as end goals serve only to narrow your focus, sometimes right down into a sharply myopic laser beam that carves away your success in broad swaths. But look at the world through mouse-free glasses and things change considerably. No longer is it a question of trapping but instead of trapping and removal and relocation and humain solutions and a myriad of other possibilities. It may well turn out that the best way to help people find books to buy has nothing to do with recommendation engines, a possibity that simply doesn’t exist when your entire goal is to build one.

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/29/clarity-of-purpose/feed/ 1     Twitter on Adding Six Hours A Day http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/19/twitter-on-adding-six-hours-a-day/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/19/twitter-on-adding-six-hours-a-day/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:54:24 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=439 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with my To Do list lately, so I figured I’d put a call out Twitter to see who could help:

    I will pay unlimited $ to the person who figures out how to round my day up to 30 hours. Seriously. Unlimited $.

    Posted to Twitter on January 19th 2009 at 12:18am

    The replies started rolling in right away and they were so great that I decided I had to document them here. Keep ‘em coming! Some of the best:

    Moving to Another Planet


    OK, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to move to another planet. Now pay up! ;)
    ebacon


    Simplest way to to get 30 hours in a day is to move to another planet with a different rotational length.
    hexsprite

    Borrowed Time


    I’ll give you 6 of my hours in exchange for unlimited $. Seems like a fair hourly rate you’re offering.
    alexknowshtml


    you can have all of mine and i’ll just chill.
    drew

    Changing Schedules


    28 hours is the best i could do: XKCD 28 Hour Day
    Affan


    I’m your man! (The method involves an over-clocked wristwatch and Dexedrine.)
    sabbatical

    Facebookers Speak!

    Since my Twitter status also updates my Facebook status, a few people jumped in from over there:


    Simple. Use the metric day system I invented. 50 hours = one demidecaday 10 of these your get a full decaweek.
    Pete Mosley


    You would have to travel close to the speed of light for the time dilation to kick in.
    Jawad Shuaib

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