Umamiblog

At least in this analogy it is.

JD has posted some good commentary on Facebook’s $15billion “valuation”. And as usual he couldn’t be more wrong for the most part I agree.

However, I can’t help but think we would have said the same of TradeMe’s eventual valuation of $700-and-something million. To me it means we should really look at the other side of the equation and just consider: “what if?”

At $15billion, Facebook’s 240million users would be worth $62.50 each. Now if you have an average profit per user of $6.25 per year then maybe the $15billion “valuation” is more or less valid (at least for the purposes of this article).

The obvious observation is, of course, there ain’t no way Facebook is earning a profit of $6.25 per user right now or anytime soon. JD rightly points out that even “Google’s latest conference call included hints that they were having trouble monetizing social traffic” and I think it’s not hard to agree with that point for the whole social media/networking/traffic kit and caboodle.

Which leads to my title and analogy:

Social media is like a money making machine. Only we’re all too stupid to figure out how it works. We can recognise that a lot of smarts, effort, and thought went into building these networks. We know the output is money. We just don’t know how to do that tiny little bit in the middle.

I eagerly await what happens next.

The smartest thing a brothel could probably do is campaign against itself.

Yesterday I found out I live in the same suburb as Simple and Loveable ‘s Nat. As she reported, Mt Vic residents received a letter from the banana-republic-styled “Mt Victoria Resident’s Association about Brothels in Mt Victoria”. It was a simple petition/submission letter asking you, as a resident, to let the council know you don’t want brothels in our suburb.

I really don’t know if I could care less. Moral panic is boring and generally turns me off. If a brothel respects the regulations those business have to follow… then the law says it’s a completely legal enterprise.

It’s an interesting contrast with Mt Vic’s recreational drug users, from the social dope smokers to the drum’n’bass munters. While some of these are probably next in line for legalisation (once Jim ‘need to protect you from yourself’ Anderton departs) and tolerated like they already are legalised… the law does quite plainly state… they are illegal.

These concerned residents and other moral outrage activists never seem to learn from each other that the very thing they crusade against is what they end up helping the most.

I remember when the “Society for Promotion of Community Standards” protested against Baise-Moi being screened in NZ. Essentially all it did was bring attention and coverage to the film. If they wanted to stop people from watching then they suffered an excellent failure. Their rampant attention grabbing probably increased the film’s patronage in NZ by a factor of 100.

Which makes me think: if I was a brothel, the cheapest most effective way to promote myself would be… to campaign against myself. It would be brilliantly effective at grabbing attention compared to the newspaper ad examples included in the petition, has amazing stickiness, word-of-mouth appeal, efficient (read: cheap).

These guys have just advertised “convenient” brothel services to Mt Vic’s 5000+ residents for the price of a ream of A4 paper. Well done.

It has all the makings of a brilliant guerrilla marketing campaign. Remember, you read it here first.

Woo!
In a few hours our first 10-Day Design Challenge open round draws to a close. We’re experiencing quite a fantastic response. We focused on jewelry or wearable art for our first challenge and looking through the pages of entries I’m blown away with the effort people have put in.

From here 25 are chosen to be made for the invitational round. Then it gets down to the business end with 10 runners up selected, each winning USD$300 and a grand prize awarded to the best overall design for USD$1,000.

It’s still technically possible to enter into the challenge. Start here, then watch the clock… 2.5 hours to go.

Moo!
Moo asked Ponoko to participate in their Moo Egg Hunt, we agreed. They’re running a really cool promotion which involves finding these eggs. Some in the real world, some in the unreal virtual world. Yours truly hid some around Wellytown – I think the photos are too easy and give it away, see for yourself.

Boo!
I’m popping up to Auckland on Thursday for the Auckland Web Meetup to talk about Ponoko. I hope to see some familiar faces. Anyone going along? Anything in particular about Ponoko you’d like to hear about?

Phew!
Then this weekend it’s WOMAD. Anyone else trekking up to the Naki for this?

I never managed to get around to a timely update of the fun I had Webstock. It was, as I’d hoped, a most excellent, inspiring, re-energising and fun conference – just like the first. The crew behind Webstock managed something that isn’t as common as we hope it to be in NZ.. which was to prove it wasn’t a fluke and pull it off for a second time. Well done guys, it’s no easy feat.

My highlights from the conference:

• As I said before Webstock, I couldn’t wait to see Kathy Sierra again. While she did have a hard act to follow, thanks to Damian Conway, it was great to hear her talk again about creating passionate users. Our apps do have aspergers and I’ve been thinking ever since how to include a WTF button in Ponoko. Nobody is passionate about something they suck at.
• Michael Lopp’s presentations on managing design and primal software development were great. Key takeaway for me was the “pony meeting”. Enjoyed talking shit about the iPhone outside Vintage with him at 2am too…
• Damian Conway was freaking awesome, if you only watch one Webstock video (when they are uploaded) it should be this one.
• Tom Coates – “Twitter is a service that displays error messages on the Internet”, “You can never have too much data”.
• Kelly Goto’s getting unstuck was incredibly thought provoking.

My feedback for the conference is fairly similar to some other bits I’ve seen around the place. A ponder at why LukeW and Michael Lopp or Amy Hoy and Dan Cederholm were streamed while Molly Holzschlag wasn’t. No need to mention the Wifi either

Only two more years till the next one, or is it?

Thanks to the ubiquity of things like iPhones and iPod Touchies all trying to connect to the WiFi as well as the usual laptops has meant no internet access for me since my first post this morning. I have been taking notes so the speeches from the afternoon will make it on here… eventually. Some of them were awesome!

Here’s a rather enterprising way a person let others now how he/she felt about the WiFi, cute:

Whoops. Got here way too late this morning and missed the welcome speech plus the first 20 mins of Nat Torkington’s speech. The goodie bag looks great and things around the conference hall look similar to 2006.

Nat Torkington
Nat presented well and only had minor hickups with his presentation with font issues that meant lot of text didn’t make it onto the slides. But he did really well dealing with it and probably had better audience attention because of it.

Nat talked about designing for the future using analogies from Victorian-era England. Strong messages were on measuring, gathering, and analysing data, then acting on it. The key trends he talked about were:

Growth
Growth in computing power just gets soaked up. We will use any addition power we create.

Media
Newspapers are dead and TV is starting to realise they have no control over their content. Journalism on the web (not citizen journalism) and what we’re seeing (more on the data message).

Immediacy
Users expect immediacy. Design for mobile devices! Ubiquity BUT they can be walled gardens.

People
They may be lazy and irrational but learn how they will act and react. Read Mind Hacks by Tim Stafford. Important notes: people focus on short-term gain, fairness, and the thrill of overcoming a challenge for the first time (hedonic adaption). We also overestimate our confidence.

Reality-based
Gather info. Admit you were right/wrong. Act based on the data.

Thoroughly enjoyable speech and a great session to start the conference.

Molly Holzschlag
Molly talked on why web standards aren’t. It was a good presentation on web standards but may have been a bit too focused for the whole audience. Slide design wasn’t necessarily poor but could be improved. Some really good questions were asked such as “have we failed on the ideology or has the ideology failed us?” “Is it standards vs. best practice or standards vs. interoperability?”. Molly has been working with web standards for 10 years!

Shawn Henry
Shawn spoke on making your website shine with accessibility. This was a tough ask with me because I don’t think anyone could beat Darren Fittler’s presso in 06. She used some great examples of people using mouth-sticks to type, or just their thumb. How is their experience compared to you assumptions on how people should use your site? The screen reader demo was good but it doesn’t top watching a blind Darren Fittler use it. Shawn finished with a good call to action – fight the good fight with accessibility.

Hands up who’s heading to Webstock this year? Cool! I’ll see you there.

I’ve been looking forward to Webstock for a long time now and I still question their decision to hold it every two years. But the wait is over and tomorrow the conference proper starts and then wraps up on Friday evening. Sibylle has already attended one of the workshops and she got to show off her goodie bag at work yesterday. They look insanely cool!

I think I’m most looking forward to Kathy Sierra, she was f…ing brilliant last time and I guess I’m not expecting anything less. She is breaking her “silence” at Webstock too. I feel quite honored she chose Webstock to do so.

Last time I tried my best at live-blogging the event and got quite a good response for it. I’ll see how it goes but there is a good chance you’ll see a dozen posts on this neglected blog for the next couple of days.

P.S. I’m still perplexed by that slogan. Are we really coding for freedom?

Dogfood is tasty. Well, sometimes it is.

The weekend just gone S mentioned she wanted to buy a bookcase for a specific nook in our lounge. After a fruitless search through the interior design shops on Thorndon Quay I remembered this cool web start-up I’ve been working at for the last 7+ months where you can make your own stuff!

It was great fun. Actually it was lots of hard work but sooo much more fun than I thought it would be. It spins me out a little that I made my own bookcase (and it works…).

So the process went something like this:

Measure area and scribble down ideas on paper.

Choose a material to work with and get designing in Illustrator. I ended up going for the Double-sided Whiteboard MDF 9mm

Get it laser cut through Ponoko

Get the pieces and peel protective tape off

Tolerance is never perfect first time and it took ages to get the pieces fitting together. A trusty hammer helped a lot…

Putting the pieces together it starts to look like a “real” bookcase.

Slowly the shelves start to build…

Almost complete… just making sure everything is fitting together snuggly… with no glue or screws either!

Here is the bookcase in the nook I had designed it for. It ended up being a whole lot tighter than I though it would be…

Now here is the completed bookcase, in place, and filled up with stuff.

If you like the look of it you can buy one off me or download the .eps file for free, customise it, and make it yourself.

My head is spinning with more Ponoko ideas now…

Last weekend we filmed our laser-cutter working on a simple Christmas decoration file we’d been preparing for this Instructable. Seeing the laser cutter in action is a pretty cool experience and it’s something I had wanted share with our users for a while. Kudos to Blair for helping us film it all. Wait no more:

The TUANZ Business Internet Awards are on tonight and I have the pleasure (?) of seeing two sites I’ve worked on reach finalist stage.

The DoC site is a finalist in the Information Architecture category and Ponoko (with Origin) are finalists in the User Generated Content category.

Poor old Sal (who, funnily enough, also worked on DoC) had an unmovable appointment with our public health care system yesterday. So it was up to Jase and myself to try and convince the 5 judges we are the generalissimos of the user-generated content generation. We’ll know later tonight if we were successful… wish me luck.

Update: We didn’t win our category but we did pick up the Craft Award!

We’re on the lookout for a (or is it an?) HTML/CSS rockstar to join the team here at Ponoko. I’m keen to find someone who leans towards the design end of the spectrum rather than development – possibly you have experience in design production too.

If you’re keen to get out of a services company, to work in the chaos that is a product company going global from Wellington with a truly game-changing idea, then we’d really like to hear from you. We can promise you chaos, experience, “frickin’ lasers” and a small bunch of fun crazy people to work with.

So the choice is yours. You could work with Jeff… or you can work with me

Get in touch if you’re interested: john dot lewis at ponoko dot com

This is probably the earliest I have ever turned up to an airport, ever, so I have some time to kill and hopefully an opportunity to try and make sense of my thoughts from the last week. As I type, someone nearby is listening to my iTunes library – I wish I could see what songs they’re listening to.

San Fran rocks. Period. There appears to be far less homeless people than what I remember as a kid in the early 90s. Would be interested to know if that’s just my memory or the truth. I had forgotten how cheap food can be also – although I’m feeling fairly toxic and a few pounds heavier as a result.

WiFi is available everywhere. It’s great. Even better when you have a WiFi enabled device like the iPod Touch. I’m very interested to see what features I end up using the most. So far, using Safari for email has been a lifesaver.

TechCrunch was a blast. Met some very cool people and lots and lots and lots of money – and it makes me want to move here. Now. Can a Kiwi company actually be successful without moving here? I don’t think so.

That said, Silicon Valley has little originality. Most presentations from TechCrunch were companies that were taking an existing process and making it better, or faster, or easier. There were few ideas that were trying to fundamentally change things. Don’t get me wrong – they’re really smart people, some of them will make a lot of money and their users will thank them for making their own lives easier. Operating from 10,000 miles away in a land full of sheep might not be such a bad thing.

People are unable to tear themselves away from their iPhones/Smackberries, etc. That said, having cell networks that support the efficient use of those devices is a major plus. Did you know iPhones, when you have a couple hundred in a room, all try to find the WiFi and thus crash it?

The Apple Store was a life-changing experience in terms of thinking about brands, tech, and how they can relate to and involve people. This was a massive highlight for me.

Yes, the coffee was shit – can’t have been going to the right places. Good coffee must exist somewhere.
Tequila shots don’t exist – they come in glasses and are hazardous. Proceed with caution.

Hammer was cool – Steven was lucky enough to get a photo with him. I had an absolute ball with Mr APHH ripping around the city and the conference with him.

Kawasaki is funny and a genius. Telling Xobni: “That’s a dumbass name. I hope you didn’t pay for it. If I was your investor I’d shoot you.”

Meeting people that burned through $50million during the last boom and are back for more (and investors are willing) blows my mind. Meeting other business and tech celebs was crazy but thats probably more to do with being a Kiwi and so far away than anything else.

The companies I liked the most were seldom liked by others. Kerpoof, for instance, was brilliant (or so I thought) and was aimed purely at kids to be creative online. WooMe was another where I thought “Cool!” – but others were less impressed than I was.

I’m humbled by the response at TC, online, and back home to Ponoko appearing at TC. Amazing. Engadget crushed our blog, not to mention Ars Technica, Boing Boing, Read/Write Web, etc. It blows my mind. A little gutted I didn’t bump into Peter Griffin at the conference.

Being told by a Kiwi millionaire to “forget about the f…ing Govt” was humbling and has made me think hard about my perspective on myself and NZ.

Oh, and I can’t forget… I’m need to send some Curiously Strong Mints to the people at Ink Comms.

Customs coming into the States wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. We’ll see what it’s like on the way out in a few hours.