DISQUS

Seems to me that the affiliate-style marketplace is an ideal place to put dollars in a down-turn. I would expect affiliate to thrive and grow in this market.

Yes on the one hand, hesitant companies will be tempted to simply allow for traffic from "natural" channels. But that's a very defensive stance and horrible place to be. In a lagging economy failure to be aggressive is akin to waiting to die.

If everyone is waiting for pocket pairs, it's time to start betting your suited connectors.

From a fundamentals standpoint, I think this might actually be a mistake:
As a result, retailers will pay less to affiliates.
What other advertising channel actually guarantees sales? From a friend in the business: "CPA isn't going anywhere. If I can spend $5 to generate $10 in profits, why would I stop?"

And flip it around, imagine that you have $1M to spend on generating sales. You know that the economy isn't great, and you're seeing lots of misers everywhere. You can either pay some agency a bunch of money for some form of "display" campaign, with no guaranteed return or you can pay for conversions.

Don't get me wrong, I believe the some form of display is still essential to long-term business success. But really, this sounds like a market where you want to raise the value of conversions, not drop them. Sure it eats up some GP, but it also steals from dwindling market share. Heck, steal the money from less performance-driven parts of the sales budget. I mean, why not spend money where you know you're making money?

If you're expecting less conversions and you drop the value of those conversions, you're simply going to aggravate your situation. Less money = less interest = less affiliates = less conversions.

Maybe my math is wonky here, but if you figure that your market has just shrunk by 20%, shouldn't you be upping your conversions by 25% to compensate? Heck doesn't it make sense to be the first to push rates? (especially with a crappy Holiday season looming?)

@Nate: ...Canada is definitely not laughing as the U.S. (unless they are kidding themselves) with the horrendous taxes they pay and waits for this awesome “free” (paid for through more taxes) health care.

As a Canadian now living in the US, I can tell you that the "horrendous" taxes pretty much even out after even moderate health care costs. Sure if you're living on your own and young you may be better off in the US. But for working, middle-class families, the cost of taxes + health care insurance + medicare ends up very close to the cost of taxes in Canada.

Of course, in Canada, everyone is covered (not just 50%) and bankruptcies due to medical conditions are dramatically lower.

Lets also talk about "wait times" as a metric. Waiting sure is annoying, but aren't we really worried about the amount people who receive timely care and the amount of people who survive medical emergencies?

And yes, the author is right, Canadians do a lot of laughing at the silly things that happen in the US.

Your Nielsen study notably leaves out some significant countries like Japan and South Korea.

Raj captures part of the problem but so does the study. It's not just the cost of the devices, it's the cost of the services. Most mobile providers have been pricing data plans at "corporate" or "business" prices. It's just too expensive, iPhone plans are starting at $60 / month (i.e. $720+ / year)

If I'm single and don't have a landline, that's cool. If I'm running a business and can bill usage to the business, sure. But this doesn't scale to normal users. My wife and I aren't going to spend $1450+ / year plus $400+ for the phones. If we ad kids, that's another $240+ for their phone line too.

you’ll find me immediately turn on my phone as my airplane touches down

And I'm sure there are a bunch of you. Me, I turn on my phone so that I can text my ride, so I don't know what you can read into the activities of others.

Business in general has become mobile and as such I would suggest that those not accessing the web via their mobile device are at a competitive disadvantage.

And I think you've nailed the divide right there. Most people aren't businesses and simply can't afford the "competitive advantage". Until we get "personal" pricing, these things are simply not mainstream.

This is why your article about the iPhone as the new social gaming platform was so far removed from reality. There just aren't enough people with mobile net access, let alone iPhones for any successful game to become anything more than "cult".

Click through rates are currently horrendous on the sites that offer hyper-targeted advertising.

Again, what are we comparing this to? Search? CTR on social media sites are never going to be as good as search or even blogs. MySpace shows like 6 ads / page. Why is CTR important in that case? Shouldn't we be tracking conversions instead? 2% CTR with 100% conversions is much better than 1% CTR with 50% conversions, seems like these are important numbers.

The reported ROI on TV advertising is 18%. How does that compare to Social Advertising? Isn't TV a more valid basis for comparison than blogs and search?

At least give us a supporting comparison to prove that you're not just spouting media rhetoric.

Great post Andrew.

From a development standpoint, I think it's important to focus on this as very "TDD-ish".

Instrumenting "as you go" can really help deliver at least some fundamental data. Obviously, the Google Analytics are cheap and free, but some things are "almost free" and that's always the first step.

Take a simple one, you have a client reporting screen with filters. You're already running this reporting query, but why not track the filters that are actually being used? The same goes for "timestamping" creation and modification times of primary entities or even just writing "triggers" to start tracking history on this stuff.

A lot of useful "how often does X happen" data is just disappearing into the aether, even though tracking it can just be built into the framework without the 25% "product tax".

Don't get me wrong, you'll still incur that tax as you grow, but it's been my experience that most young companies do too little instrumentation not too much.

Michael: I think there may be a technology disconnect here.

I don't believe that a blog is an appropriate technology for maintaining an "operations manual". A blog is akin to this website and is not a good spot for maintaining important and changing data. A blog is more akin to a newsletter

I think what you're looking for is a wiki such as the ones offered by Wetpaint or PBWiki. A wiki is very much akin to a living piece of documentation (which is really the definition of your "ops manual"). A good wiki has methods for controlling user access, tracking an article's history and providing an integrated forum for tracking comments about an article.

@Maria: like most new initiatives, management involvement and education is key. I've seen three types of problems
1. People (who don't like change) and refuse to use the wiki.
2. Barrier to entry (some wikis are still a quite convoluted to use), and people don't want to "waste time" learning another piece of technology.
3. Some people just don't "get wikis".

I've seen all three in our office. Problem #1 is completely solved by management, you need to remove people who cannot adopt to this type of change. Problem #2 likely requires some education time, wiki technology is generally easy to use, but it has a learning curve like all software.

Problem #3 is the most insidious, b/c wikis do represent a shift in thinking. For example, you said: On the surface, it seems to add yet another layer of documentation to my work when there are already several layers in place.

This is indicative of some deeper level process problems. The purpose of the wiki is to centralize data. The wiki should be removing all layers b/c it should contain basically everything. If you're consistently writing the same stuff both inside and outside of the wiki, then the issue is simply one of understanding.

Congrats on firing the "non-documenter". I'm a programmer and failure to document adequately can become a company plague. But really, anyone who fears losing their job as a result of documenting it is not someone you want on your team.

Personally, I would have told them that the documentation needed to be in place so that they could spend their time doing more important, valuable and high-paying tasks.

My current office actually has an internal wiki to manage these documents. They're invaluable for things like accounting processes. Wikis are likely the future for this type of work.

What became clear almost immediately was the little bubble that I exist in.

I figured that this was a universally recognized trend in the Valley. When you live on the leading edge of the tech, you'll always be riding these little bubbles. This is true of new programming languages, new hardware and new methodologies in general. Tons of technologies will die in their little bubbles before they reach "the masses".

So if the various online social activities I’m involved in don’t really build much value outside of personal gratification, where is the value?

Your value is information processing. Somebody needs to live "in the bubble" and "report back" to the real world every once in a while. You don't always need to be "first to the punch", you just need to be the "definitive resource".

If you can separate good tech from bad tech, if you can identify where each tech belongs in various industries, then your brain is ridiculously valuable.

So when all is said and done ... who will really end up the winners?

The ones who can actually leverage and manage this morass of information. The job done by Tech Crunch will soon become an "information commodity", just like hardware is now a "commodity" and software flirts with that status. What's not a commodity (and likely won't be) is the technology that converts information in to dollars. Right now, that technology is solely stored in the human brain.

Convert data into dollars and you end up the winner.

Hey Nick;

I assume you're familiar with 4-hour workweek. Sounds like you're using EarthClassMail.

I'm slowly moving to the digital life myself. Much of my work is accessible from a web dashboard even my mailbox is there now. Appointments & e-mail move to Google, Wetpaint is now my personal notebook (instead of a Moleskin or Blueline).

My filing cabinet is being scanned into PDFs, and we've already converted much of the mail to electronic statements. My Audio / Video collection is slowly being digitized, soon it will be backed up on a Windows Home Server, which will in turn be backed up a removable drive and "to the cloud".

I'm sure that VMs of my development machine will follow. Soon, the "working machine" will be just any machine to which I can download the VM image.

I'm not quite the nomad you are, but I can see making much of my life mobile. I'd personally love to only need to be in the office a few days / week. You're on the leading edge, but soon the world will see an explosion of "mobile knowledge workers". Everything will be replicated "from the cloud" and you'll be able to find the "oversight-free" individuals by checking your LinkedIn account.

OK, maybe it won't be all that, but it will be exciting to see :)

@Natalie
Welcome to the new economy! (I hope that your rant was cathartic, now get over it):
Managers earning $10,000 a MONTH. Executives earning literally $20,000 to $30,000 a MONTH...American corporations are laying off 700 people who earn $25K to $50k a year while they need to cut back on executive and management salaries.

Calling managers over-paid is no more or less short-sighted than called the "drones" underpaid. It's a free economy. If firing executives and managers was actually the solution to the problem, one big firm would already have done that and now they'd be out-performing the competition.

Honestly, what you're missing here is that those people making 10-30k / month are likely indispensable at even that salary. They are operating high-responsibility jobs that likely hinge on knowledge and skills that you don't currently have. In almost all cases, they've earned that position through extensive education, training and experience.

You're right about what you tell your nephew: "I am training my nephew (who I am raising) to be self sufficient b/c his loyalty will mean nothing to an American company.", this is indeed the new economy. But there's more to it than that.

You're an intelligent, obviously literate person, your post was basically free of spelling errors (and that's saying a lot these days). You're hanging around a pretty heady (if eccentric) website like Tim's blog. So my question is, what are you doing?

Why are you working A/R and call centers? Why aren't you worth 10k / month? What did you do last month to make yourself indispensable to your company? What did you do last month to grow revenues? Are you getting a fair cut for these efforts? Why not?

It's fun *(& popular) to say that business executives are "overpaid". But people have been making that argument since the dawn of time. You live in a world with about as much free choice as any that humanity has ever known, so you don't really have the "evil tyrant" excuse to fall back on.

For every argument you can make about rich, fat-cats ruining America and sending jobs overseas, I can make a counter-argument about lazy American workers who don't carry their weight, don't get enough training and don't take enough initiative. This is not a "winnable" argument, we're talking about a global balance built in a highly dynamic framework played out over generations.

The fundamental reality remains unchanged. You can either generate money and become indispensable or you can bleed money and get laid off. Companies don't lay off generators unless they're in their death throes. Generators don't have a rough time finding work, b/c some rising ship will pick them up (they're like found money).

It's nobody's fault, it just is.

Thanks for the great vids Tim.

@Steve Dalton: "Computer programmer" here and I think that you're half-way right about your "Agile" comments. Yes, Agile is the new way in which we will develop software and yes, some people in other countries may be "behind the curve". But honestly, companies in the US are not necessarily on the curve either.

Most programmers I know (and have met) do some hashed-up version of waterfall and agile because they're not really comfortable at either. They've never written unit tests, they don't talk to clients, they don't storyboard. Heck even some of the agile people can devolve into "Agile as an excuse to be sloppy" (link)).

At the end of the day, becoming an adept and productive software developer requires a host of skills, a lot of education and even more experience. Building good software currently needs at least a few talented and skilled people. The best software developers are still 10 times more productive. It's easy to claim that outsourcing software has been a failure, but most Western firms aren't exactly in a position to claim success. Software development is still horribly misunderstood and generally poorly managed even at top firms.

And don't think that Agile provides anything more than a temporary edge. Cheaper workers will also "discover" Agile, they'll catch up too. Remember, you're in a knowledge worker's economy, but you're living in a country where the motto is "no child left behind". My friends who grew up in the Ukraine learned derivatives, integrals and linear algebra in high school... at age 16!

This guy's an out-of-work computer programmer and he's been out of a job for at least a month (based on the intro). What's he doing? If he didn't have interviews lined up the day he got laid off, then he should have at least been doing professional certifications while he hunted for a new job.

Also see
http://www.ultramarathonman.com/

Similarly intense.

OK, Rolando is definitely a very cool game. I'd honestly love to see it on a large touch screen like the HP Touchsmart.

However, I think you may be working in an "echo chamber" with this statement. I think we are only one step away from many of these games transforming social gaming.
Useful numbers: Since its launch in 2004, the DS has sold more than 35 million units worldwide, compared to the PSP's 25 million. In the US alone, total DS sales stand at over 15 million.

Apple has crossed the 6M units marker and they'll probably sell more than 10 M the end of the year. But that doesn't even match the DS for market penetration. And the price point on the DS is several hundreds more.

If you want to "transform social gaming", you need way more than 10 or even 20 million units. All of your friends may be using iPhones, but this is not the case for most people. 6 M US units means that 1.8% of the population own iPhones. Right now, 30% of Canadians have Facebook accounts, that's enough penetration to be transformative. But 1.8%, isn't going to cut it.

At best we're looking at tools like the smart phones in general being able to "extend the reach of existing social gaming". If Social Gaming is going to make big changes, it will be across devices. RIM sold 5.8 M Blackberry devices in the first quarter of 2008. That's as many Blackberries in 3 months as iPhones all time. Recent news has the Blackberry winning the US market.

Thanks for the great videos though!

Josh and Tim: Thank you.

It's great to hear these book names thrown around, it's great to see these communities form. (I got here from ZenHabits in fact, I read both feeds).

Yes we are failing our children in the manner we teach them. But honestly, we are mostly failing ourselves in the way we treat and teach ourselves. I've been telling this to people these same things for years. But at an administrative level, at the highest levels, there has been no interest in generating anything other than worker drones (now at their appropriate levels of mental capacities).

This isn't a minor problem, it's a failure of agreement at a societal level.

And video games are not the key. Bombarding kids with bad video games is no better or worse than bad TV or "bubblegum books". Reading 100 different Nora Roberts novels isn't going to make you the next Hemingway any time soon. Of course, playing Brain Age or DDR is clearly going to have benefits.

This isn't an ADHD problem or an "information overflow" problem. It's a boredom problem. Most kids spend most of their time inefficiently at school, but it's not like their parents are doing much different.

Yes you can compound time, we call this experience. The limitation with most "time" compounding is that it's not necessarily exponential or continuous. Anything involving physical labour tends to "peter off". I've seen experienced McWorkers make hamburgers at 2x the speed of the regulars, but nobody does it at 4x b/c the basic physics prohibit it.

However, when working with technology, particularly software (my field), these limitations are far less pronounced. I know programmers that are literally 5-10x more productive than the average one. In fact, the best ones accomplish tasks on the weekend that the weakest ones could not accomplish given a month.

Part of that success is just inborn, but a big part of it is hard work and building your "toolbox". Good time managers build and refine their toolbox. Good engineers handle more projects in less time. The best programmers build "toolboxes of efficiency" that they carry around with them.

To whit, my company recently lost a support person. I spent twenty hours expanding the tools we use to do support and now I'm doing his job in less than 2 hours / day. We'll still replace him as we're growing, but I've just compounded time. The tool I've built not only increases manageability of support issues, it also provides mechanisms for allowing the incumbent support to "self-optimize".

The best at any knowledge-related field are identified as such by their ability to complete actions in less time. We call this experience and skill (and sometimes education), but it's basically time compounding.

Jason got me on this one. I've converted to "you ladies" or "you [of some reasonable grouping term]". I still slip into "you guys", but I don't like how it sounds.

Hey Tim;

Are you going to be at e-tech for most of the week?

I'm going to be at a different O'Reilly conference in the same hotel, but it's only on Monday/Tuesday. If you're going to be around, I'd love to say hi (and maybe get a book signed :)

I look like this :)

Hey Tim;

I started working in a new office 6 weeks ago. It's a software joint (with a surprising amount of stunning women). the whole office is a big circle around the building, so you're always crossing paths with people going the other way. I've taken to the smile/wave/nod with pretty much everyone. But it's really impressive how many honest smiles you'll get from the ladies if you actually look them in the eyes when you do smile.

A buddy of mine is a "religious group" that actually have a "drill" for this. They actually have to learn to stare at each other and they have to approach random people and start up conversation. The "experienced practitioners" have these deep stares and like no fear about talking to people.

I think the average person could really benefit from doing such "drills" (which you talk about here and in the book). Point being, you don't need to join an "interesting" group of people to learn these useful skills, just listen to Tim!

Hmm Tim, here`s a quick 1, 2, 3:

1. I did a research project in the ninth grade about chocolate. It was one of those "learn to do a research project" courses, so I picked chocolate as my topic. I love chocolate that much!

2. The best chocolate I've ever had was stuff I picked up in Geneva @ a chocolaterie. Everything else since has just been "plain old chocolate". My location-independent plan is still about a year from completion so I'd love a taste of the good life (and chocolate from the DR definitely counts).

3. My wife doesn't like expensive chocolates! And I'm not kidding you here. She has the most sensitive palette of anyone I've known, but she still prefers "plain-jane" chocolate. I've fed her much of the standard imported Belgian and Swiss fare, but the only success I've had are the Red Lindt truffles (seriously, just the red). I've never heard of Joseph Schmidt until today. Hooking me up won't just make my wife happy, it's a definite new customer opportunity for Joseph Schmidt.

Hey Tim;

I really like the website, so the only layout change that I can think of is: white on black or similar. I read my share of computer text during the day (I'm a programmer) and setting my code window to white and pastels on black has made life much easier on the eyes.

I know it sounds kind of corny, but it may be worth a try. It should also help make the comments easier to read.

saving money is basically like dieting. Quoted for truth.
In fact, looking around, there's definitely a lot of overlap. The same mentality drives being overweight and being poor (in debt). Long-term weight gain, like most debt is typically the cumulative effect of the decision to "spend" slightly more than you earn/burn.

People who are inherently efficient at "spending less" are typically very good at "eating less", which leads to easy weight management. Dieters often suffer the same binge / purge habits as debtors, who will rebound back and forth between paying off chunks of the debt and adding chunks to it. Blueblah really captures this failing.

Long-term, I'm on some form of the "calorie-diet", but I believe that the important key for dieters and debtors is to live a fulfilled existence within your means. If you're in debt or overweight, you will have to suffer for your transgressions as you work back towards health. But if the money you have doesn't make you happy, then no amount of diet/debt will improve your life and you'll be stuck on the rollercoaster until you figure out why you're unhappy.