Juixe Techknow

Blippy is a site that allows you to automatically share the purchases you’ve made and the products you’ve bought with friends and followers. The way Blippy can detect products and services bought is by monitoring the transactions made on a given credit card. Blippy has been around for a while and many of the questions concerning privacy and security have already been asked. Blippy is just the next logical conclusion of all the information we make public on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. With some common sense, extra precautions, and the correct privacy settings, people feel more and more comfortable posting about the products they purchase, the locations they visit, and their private lives including relationship status and political views. Blippy is one of few companies in the social commerce web space and it complements with the strategy at Amazon that I think Amazon should make an offer of no less $100 million dollars to purchase Blippy before it gets snagged up by a competitor. The social commerce space has just been validated by Apple Ping. Apple Ping complements Apple iTunes by being a social commerce community around music and possibly other entertainment media such as movies and books. Similarly, Blippy can complement Amazon by being a social commerce engine for the products sold by the online retailer giant. Blippy also compliments the large amount of product reviews Amazon has amassed and can easily be turned on for all the users accounts at Amazon with little effort, because essentially every Amazon user has already entered one or more credit card.

More and more companies will have niche social applications around their core business, right now news networks to car companies and everything between are using social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they will soon ask for more and more control over users data than these sites provide. Instead of being a Twitter or Facebook client to post likes and status updates, large ecommerce sites will develop their own social niche sites around their core competencies, like Apple Ping. Just like Apple has released Ping as a social engine for discovering new music, Amazon needs a similar product to compliment it’s online retail business and it’s social media strategy. The social graph provided by Blippy augments well around the data Amazon already has, such as previous purchases, reviews, and the information to generate recommendations. All things being equal, Blippy adds more value to Amazon which sells product than to Facebook that which impressions.

I’m not an insider, investor, or friends with anyone at Blippy or Amazon, but I just feel that these two businesses compliment each other very well and can take social networking to the next level into social ecommerce. When ecommerce goes social and viral it will mark the beginning of ecommerce 2.0.

I use Google Documents to manage drafts of blog posts, to keep track of house hold finances, and even to manage an invite list to gatherings at my house. You can do a lot with nothing more than Google Docs. Recently I had to help a friend create a small informal survey to use with her clients and we choose Google Docs from her Google Apps for Domain account. In this article, I’ll go through the motions of creating and using a simple form in Google Docs which can be used in polls, surveys, or questionnaires.

Create New Form in Google Docs

Log into you Google Docs account and create a new Form document. Creating a new Form document takes you to the Form builder which allows you to enter a title and description for your form and any number of questions. For each question, be sure to enter the question itself, any short description to describe the question further, and the question type. There are several question types, most common are the text, multiple choice, checkbox, list, and scale. You can use the text question type for things like persons name, addresses, city, etc. The multiple choice question type is also known as the radio button, meaning that out of several choices you can only select one. The checkbox allows you to check multiple choices at the same time. The scale question type can be use to identify a range between 1 and 5 of how much a person liked the product or service being asked about.

Google Docs Form Editor

Once you filled out your form, you can choose a theme. As of this writing there are over 90 themes available, from plain to whimsical. With the form done you can email the form, make it public, or embeddable in a blog or website. If you reopen the form, you will be presented with the spreasheet view of the form. The form data is saved in the spreadsheet, to view or edit the form again, click Form | Edit Form under the main menu.

Google Docs Form Sharing Settings

You can have three basic sharing options. You can make the form public to everyone in the web, or available to only those that have a link for it, or those you explicitly grant access to.

If you run a small business or a large family, you can use Google Docs to create forms for surveys, polls, questionnaires, or even a small customer relationship management system.

If I’ve had a dollar for every time someone come to me with a half baked business idea, that wouldn’t make for a good business plan but I would have enough for a latte. Everybody at some point has had a great idea about a new business or product, but very few people do anything about it beyond telling a friend. I’ve had way to many friends and family come to me telling me about how if we can get into such and such market and sell such and such product we could make such and such amount of money. It’s almost funny to see people like this just make up numbers up how much money we would make. Every time I hear someone make up a number, I ask for for simple spreadsheet with some basic formulas that describes the business case model. To understand the business risk, you need to understand the cost and benefit of the business.

Let’s imagine we are thinking of getting into the online t-shirt business, we can use a spreadsheet to calculate the estimated costs of running the business to profitability before even getting started. If you are thinking of selling t-shirts online its good to track the base cost per shirt, the markup per shirt, shipping costs, the monthly operating cost. Having these figures you can calculate the total price of the shirt (base cost + markup + shipping) to for each item and how many shirts you would need to sell to cover your operating costs. If your business plan is simple, such as this, the minimum you can do is create a spreadsheet to describe it and model your business.

You can use Microsoft Excel or with spreadsheet document in Google Docs. I’ll be using Google Docs but the following would also work in Excel. In Google Docs create a new spreadsheet. In the new spreadsheet add a header for each variable you would like to track, such as base cost, markup, shipping, operating cost, expected sales, and expected gross profit.

Let’s say that it costs $10 for the each shirt, and we would like to make $4 off of each shirt sold, and that on average it costs $3 to ship, we can easily calculate what our recommended sale price of each shirt is by adding all of this together. To add it all together in the Cost/Item cell, type into the cell and enter the equal (=) symbol. This would allow tell the spreadsheet that this cell will be a formula. You can add two values from two different cells by the something like the following = A2 + B2 + C2. The formula will add the value at A2 with that of B2 and C2 and put the computed value in the cell with the formula.

Using Formula on Google Docs Spreadsheet

If we expect to sale 50 items at this price we can calculate how much money we will take in by using another formula, the cost per shirt times the number of shirts you plan to sale, and in this example the formula would be the following = E2 * D2.

Calculate Expected Revenue

Now the value of simplifying your business into a spreadsheet like this is that if you can easily visualize the effect on your business if the base cost per shirt goes up or if you don’t hit your target expected sales numbers. If you model your business in a spreadsheet in something other than a cocktail napkin you can simulate different business scenarios more easily and come up with numbers closer to reality and based on some thought. Of course, when modeling a business you will have a lot more variables to take into account, but fortunately spreadsheets like those supported in Google Docs and Excel have a wide range of formulas and functions.

When it comes to Apple you have two camps, the fanatical Apple fanboys and the Apple haters. The divide in between these two camps is wider than the digital divide and when it comes to real points both sides usually get them wrong. Since Apple announced iTunes 10 and its social commerce component Ping, I’ve seen this debate flare up again with new FUD and fodder. The first misconception between Apple fanboys and haters alike is that Ping is another social networking site. Ping is very much social, but it is not a networking or a site. Ping is a social commerce component integrated into iTunes via the iTunes desktop application and the iOS iTunes app available for the iPhone and iPad. Ping is a game changer, just like the Apple App Store was before that, and the iTunes before that, and the iPod before that. Ping is a game changer and tech pundits and press are trying to make it out with old rules from previous games/products, that’s their first fallacy. It is clear that one will use Ping to contact an old high school buddy or stalk an ex, like they would on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Ping is all about social commerce, not social networking.

Unlike Facebook, that is forced to make money by extorting advertiser to buy ads to their own Facebook Pages, or forcing application developers in using their Facebook currency that is as worthless as a $10 billion Zimbabwe bill, Apple Ping is not about connecting you to friends and family and it sure doesn’t care about your social graph, it care about your consumption graph. Ping won’t compete for users with other social networking sites at the same level that Facebook does with Google Buzz or MySpace. For the most part, social networking sites like Facebook aim to be nothing more than a time sink, and they have grown in large part by social games oblige users to poke and send virtual lasagna to each other. Ping complements the users iTunes experience when they are already on iTunes looking for new music. This is evidently clear especially when you look at how social networking sites like Facebook uses numbers to describe their growth. Facebook describes their growth by counting the number of users that were active in a given month and trying to track the average number of hours a user is on Facebook. Apple tracks its growth by the number of products it has sold. Facebook is designed to simply waste peoples time and have them click on clicks, and Apple designs products that appeal to users.

I want to be clear about the following fact, especially since it is what most Apple haters get wrong. Apple does not need to be the marker leader to make the most money!!! Even though Apple has seen a growth in its market share in laptops, for example, it still has a small slice. But with double digit margins, it means it can sell less product and still make more money than commoditized competitors like Dell or HP. Apple has played this card well before, for example it is choosing a similar approach in the mobile space. It would rather have a small market share, and simply have a better profit margin and more control over its products. Unlike Facebook, Ping doesn’t need market share to be profitable. For example, Facebook requires millions of impressions to make a buck or two on ads.

In its current release, Ping reminds me a lot more to the first generation iPod than the iPod Touch. Currently, Ping feels clunky, is sparely populated, doesn’t have enough bands listed, has a ton of spam, doesn’t support music or apps, etc. At this stage, Ping is still lacking many features to make it comparable to what we expect from a social networking site. For example, when it was released numbers where not formatted with a comma for values larger than a thousand. This issue was fixed within a day of release. I would also like more personalization of my profile page, the ability to add my homepage URL, my other social networking sites, etc. Basically Ping needs a lot more polish, but I’ve heard that Steve Jobs has done that once or twice before for a new revolutionary product line.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Tests? We ain’t got no tests. We don’t need no tests! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ tests!
• Test. Code. Debug. Refactor. Repeat.
• Party like a rock star, code like a _why.
• Code has a center of gravity.
• There are features that become products, products that become companies, and companies that become revolutions.
• To increase productivity when working with buggy software tools, don’t focus on how it should be done but the work around to get it done.
• Can you imagine only getting paid if there is no bugs in your ode?
• One developer’s bug is another user’s loss of faith in technology.
• Delivery dates for feature sets that there are no specs is a death wish list.
• Running software trumps unwritten specifications.
• I drop fools like I drop database tables, with one SQL statement.
• Memories are backward compatible.
• I dream in quantum bits.
• My dreams are hosted on the cloud.

Team Leadership

• 80% required in swimming is just to have your head above water, the rest is about moving forward.
• I know Google offers employees 20% time, that must be why 80% of their products feel like 80% done.
• Having your head in the clouds is better than your head in the sand! Hold up your head up high and you will see further.
• Make your own path, build your own bridge, be your own light.
• Make work be more wow!
• Future proof your thinking.
• Meeting don’t generate momentum.
• It only takes a single dash to turn a minus into a plus.
• Some set out to follow a leader, others follow his vision, and still others his path. Why not triangulate his geolocation based on all of these?
• A high IQ does not equate with success. I developed a new algo to measure likelihood of success, Kick-ass Quotient, or KQ instead of IQ!!!
• Sweep me off my feet, not under the rug.

Product Placement

• If Zuckerberg would not have created Facebook, he would have been just another picture collector on Craigslist.
• If Facebook would had been invented in the time of Hitler, Zuckerborg might had been a collaborator, aka Little Fuhrer, and would have geolocated Ann Frank
• Facebook is said to release geolocation check-in feature soon, default setting is to notify your parole officer or ex your current location.
• Why isn’t common sense the default at Facebook when it comes to users’ privacy rights.
• BP handling of the oil spill is what I called fail whale, I mean if you kill a whale it is an automatic #failwhale.
• Two guys walk into an Apple store to buy an iPad… This is not a joke, this is a tragedy, they walk empty handed because they are sold out
• Happy Quit Facebook Day!!!
• Flash, there is no app for that.
• Can you imagine a 20 inch iPad? This shall come to pass.
• The iPad is the iPC.
• At Home Depot, just came from Office Depot. Are these stores like related? Can’t wait for Gansta Depot!
• Disney wants to kill your creativity!
• People used to clock-in to work, now they check-in.
• Which is the most hated tech company, Apple, Google, Facebook, Abode???

Quote

• I love the smell of napalm in the morning! – Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore
• You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. – Rahm Emanuel
• Billionaires rule supreme. – P. Sainath
• We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them. – Steve Jobs
• I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products. – Steve Jobs
• Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere… and I thought I saw a two. – Bender
• A documented bug is not a bug; it is a feature. – James P. MacLennan
• The invisible hand of the market is actually a very visible bunch of grubby paws if you really look. – P. Sainath
• Languages shape the way we think, or don’t. – Erik Naggum
• Shawty is a eenie meenie mo lova – Sean Kingston
• If at first you don’t succeed – call an airstrike. – Banksy
• Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales. – Larry Ellison
• Baby there is a shark in the water. – VV Brown
• The market is no longer driven by shareholders. The market is driven by formulas. – @mcuban

The iPad has garnered the most press I have seen for a electronic device since, well, the iPhone. Just after a day after it’s release, it has already been jail broken. Here is a list of my favorite iPad reviews, resources, articles with tips and tricks, etc. I hope you are reading this in your new iPad!!!

• The iPad Gets Jailbreaked In Less Then A Day
• Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The post-book book
• Apple iPad Review
• iPad Verdict After One Day
• iPad is to iPhone as…
• iPad Teardown
• Official Gmail Blog: Gmail on the iPad
• The iPad needs its HyperCard
• Landing Pad — an iPad Design Gallery
• How to Make Money on the iPad
• Netflix Streaming App Coming to iPad
• iPad Arcade Cabinet
• 10 Ways the Apple iPad Will Change Our Lives
• Check if Someone Hacked Your GMail Account
• Best iPad Review Ever
• So, iPad
• Summary of iPad Review