slow brew cr-48 love

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Todd

So,when Google announced that they were distributing some 60k “google notebooks” for testing, I jumped on the web and applied, as I couldn’t imagine a better tester than myself.

I am:

  • an original Gmail beta tester (had my account since maybe the 2nd month gmail invites were being distributed)
  • a dedicated google docs user (personally and at Bubbalon)
  • a chrome user
  • online 8-12 hours per day (not so proud of this, but is the case)
  • a mobile user, I tether with my droid on the road for access (cr-48 has 3g built in)
  • a great beta tester (imo at least, but I test my own startup, tested for dropbox and am an avid beta tester for other startups)

With all that in mind I filled out my app, through together a quick video (here) and sent it in.  To my pleasant surprise, a week later I had a gift at the front door, my cr-48!

After my first 2-3 hours with the machine, I felt the following:

Cons:

  • trackpad totally blows! I couldn’t get over how poorly the trackpad worked, I felt like I couldn’t accurately click on anything, and scrolling was terrible.
  • the keypad labels are grey on black aka invisible at night.  add in a super bright screen (pro) and you are typing by feel.
  • where the f$%k is my desktop?  lol, this was funny, I just kept trying to “minimize” the chrome browser, but, GUESS WHAT: the browser IS the OS.
  • it felt slow… not terribly so, but not that great
  • no skype? oh no, thats a major impediment, and the first major “missing” piece

Pros:

  • wonderfully light weight
  • super bright and clear screen
  • very well thought out keyboard, love the hot keys, the lack of caps lock, and overall simplicity
  • redonkulous battery life.  I received it with about 75% battery remaining, which lasted for almost 5 hours…
  • chrome web store seemed to have a nice selection of available apps

2 Month Summary:

Well, I LOVE this little machine!  It’s the perfect, WORK ONLY machine.  I really can’t watch videos on it (unless they are html5), and it is most snappy with my google apps work. I can run rhapsody, grooveshark or soundcloud in the background with no issues, so music is covered.

Best news though?  IMO messenger app allows me to make SKYPE calls!  Video too…  Only thing still missing is group conferencing from my end, but I’m sure that is coming soon.

Do I carry this machine exclusively?  Some days, especially anytime I need to run out quick and I know I may NEED to get some work done.  Most days, I have the Macbook Pro running along side it for heavy graphics work, and I still prefer full on development on there as well.

I think Google made something interesting here:

  • something more substantial and less error-prone than a netbook
  • great screen (borderline TOO bright!)
  • decent keyboard, with more logical key placement
  • great connectivity
  • enough hardware to make the experience snappy and consistent (no matter how many tabs I run)

What would make it great?

  • better trackpad  - although I got mine tuned right by turning sensitivity all the way down, and disabling tap to double click, it still leaves a great deal to be desired
  • light up keypad – screen is so bright this becomes necessary, although they could try white labeling on the keys to improve usability
  • better video support

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ifttt.com something I never knew I needed

Posted on January 13, 2011 by todd

If you are interested in startups, then you will want to get hooked up with the private beta of ifttt.com.  ifttt stands for: “If this then that”  From their about page:

ifttt puts the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:
ifthisthenthat
Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that).

Here’s how it works:

  1. You activate “channels” of items, these channels include an oauth with your Twitter, the weather forecast, RSS, your e-mail, SMS, and more…
  2. You pick the “IF” (which is a GIANT “IF” on the “task creation screen, I LOVE the use of text on this site), maybe the weather, than the specific trigger, let’s say, the weather rises above 32 degrees F
  3. Now you can choose the GIANT “THAT”, how about: e-mail, then I fill in a subject: “The weather rose above 32f!” and the body: “Hell yeah! Spring is here (hopefully) [add in] [add in]”  Ok, so “add ins” allow you to add functionality into your message.  In this case, I was using a weather trigger, so I was able to add in: the forecast, the current temp, and the current conditions for the zip code I had chosen.

Thats it!

I see a tremendous, seriously, tremendous amount of utility that I can derive from building on the various channels offered.  The channel selection is good so far, Craiglist, Instapaper, Flickr, Vimeo and more in addition to what I mentioned above.  I think we will see a very rich selection of tasks developed to serve a variety of needs.

The design is super cool, text driven, HTML5 goodness. The interface is a great study in new ways to use this technology.  You start at the top of the screen, and clicks on link elements cause the page to slide down to reveal the next element.  Creating a task is like a waterfall of interface, you begin at the top, and slide down at each option until you can save at the bottom.  Very slick.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this startup and building awesome useful tasks the whole time.  Well done guys!

My Tasks Screen:


The Task Creation Screen:


 

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Bubbalon Art

Posted on November 3, 2010 by todd

Awesome Bubbalon art by Amanda Mauro

click to see the full size version

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Build a strong Twitter following, without “experts”

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Todd

The Recipe:

1 x strong communicator

1 x computer w/ Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or your favorite Twitter app

1 x set of clearly defined target markets

3 x hours per day

Yields: About 50% more twitter followers over 30 days

First, why Twitter?

One of the better descriptions of the business value of Twitter came from John Federico (@gadgetboy):

“Twitter is like the river by which everything flows, all other outlets and social platforms being estuaries, everything still makes it to Twitter where it becomes mainstream”.

Ok, so lets say Twitter is worth a business’s time, now what?

There are a million articles online that explain how “to do the twitter”, no lack of social media experts and Guru’s who promise to use Twitter to get you a bajillion hits for your .biz.  But, what if you are too cash strapped to hire a guru and your core team can’t be as consistent as a solid social media approach requires?  We ran into this at Bubbalon fairly early on.  Alex and I were both saavy, but our hectic days meant that our Twitter efforts were spotty at best and completely inconsistent.

The answer: Interns

A short amount of time, a craigslist post, 10 interviews and 20 phone calls later we hired Jessica (@jessrod354) based on her top notch communication skills, her experience operating her own blog and the social media work she did for her family’s wedding business.

Next step was to build the process she would follow:

1:  Proactively follow twitter users who are actively engaged in key vertical markets

2:  Engage said users.  No, really engage them, talk to them, help them, be human to them, not just treat them like “followers”

3:  Earn reciprocal follows by being REAL as described in step 2

4.  Unfollow users who are spammers, blatant self-promoters or who don’t engage in return*

Jessica chose a few markets she was interested in pursuing which we used to create keyword search streams in our corporate Hootsuite account**.  The markets she chose helped to give her a context for evaluating whether or not we should follow a user.   Next Jessica spent time watching the flow of twitter conversation looking for twitter users with a significant following, a close follower/following ratio and who were highly engaged with their twitter following.  Besides the main stream of people she followed, she watched the keyword search and trending topic streams.

She engaged in whatever real conversation inspired her, and contributed to these streams in the following ways:

  • responding to questions or comments
  • sharing links to Bubbalon objects that relate to conversations
  • exporting her actual Bubbalon ratings to twitter
  • being responsive to trending topics, creating corollary objects on Bubbalon and than sharing them to twitter

Her time was split between proactively following users, engaging her twitter community and contributing value to the twitter stream in the form of Bubbalon and non-Bubbalon content.

The Results

It took her a bit of time to get used to the process and nail down the “right” number of users to follow each day (it ended up being about 100). After a few days  a look at our Twitter analytics (via converse.ly) revealed modest results.  Satisfied that we were on the right track we let Jessica have at it while making adjustments as needed.  One month later the results spoke for themselves:

Twitter follower count over 30 days:

Traffic to Bubbalon coming from Twitter : July 13th – Aug 12th vs. Aug 13th – September 12th:

Overall

  • the Bubbalon Twitter account doubled followers
  • Bubbalon received 200% more traffic from Twitter

So thats how Bubbalon began a corporate twitter strategy that did not cost an arm and a leg, require the hiring of a consultant/guru and showed results in 30 days.

Some notes:

We hired Jessica as an intern to start with, but quickly realized she will be a strong part of Bubbalon’s overall social media strategy moving forward. Now she is a full time employee with the title: Social Media Queen :)

*Unfollowing is a funny thing, and everyone seems to have their own perspective on how to handle it.  We decided early on that we didn’t want to follow: spammers, blatant self promoters and anyone inappropriate or hurtful.  So, anytime we received an Auto DM or spam tweet we would unfollow them.  Since we were following sometimes 200 people per day we would reach the 2000 following limit fairly quickly, so each week we would have an unfollowing session to remove users who never followed us back.  The result is a dynamic twitter community that actually engages with us about our product.

**To facilitate this process we used a powerful Twitter tool called: Hootsuite.  Hootsuite allows a company to organize Twitter accounts to be able to be used by multiple people, keeping everyone aware of who is doing what, and provides more powerful twitter functionality.  One of the best things about Hootsuite is that you can easily create keywords search “streams” that are very easy to monitor.  HootSuite – Social Media Dashboard for Teams using Twitter

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Catching up in Fall

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Todd

The first leaves are starting to drop around my apartment and office in Montclair.  It’s a new season, and almost 2 months since I posted last.  Startup life at Bubbalon is such that I am starting to measure time by season changes, whoa.  Most people start new initiatives in January with the new year, but this new season feels like the right time to make a new commitment to blogging here.

Since I am starting new things, I think it’s worth making a new effort to bring something real and vibrant that people find useful.  So, I will attempt to bring some of the hard earned knowledge I am acquiring at Bubbalon to this blog for other entrepreneurs and people interested in building web businesses.

As children and adults go back to school for Fall semester across the nation, I will offer a bit of educational info to the internet.  I love feedback, so please feel free to tell me what you think of my information, ideas and thoughts.

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