I’ve burned up three Jawbone IIs in the past two years. Has anyone come up with a better Bluetooth headset that I should be looking into?
Category: Innovation (page 6 of 8)
I built our first real estate web site in June of 2001. I had just gotten my license that May, parking it with an apartment locating service called The Apartment Store. The folks Jeff Brown calls “house agents” like to laugh at niche players in the real estate world, but I passed on three residential brokerages to do rentals. Why? Because I knew I would starve to death — as 85+% of all new licensees do — waiting for my first home buyer or seller. Instead, I took a job where I stood a chance of getting belly-to-belly with five or six motivated people a day.
But: I built the web site because I wasn’t in love with the people I was meeting. Jack English, the broker, had built his business around serving extremely marginal clients — apartment seekers with bad credit, past judgements, felony convictions, etc. Everyone deserves a second chance in life, but, for the most part, I turned out to be a poor fit for the targeted clientele. I moved some interesting people I was delighted to help — for example, two recovered heroin addicts and the sweetest paroled murderer one could ever hope to meet — but I also met a lot of people to whom no one should ever have extended credit.
Even so, the experience was great. I got to talk to a lot of people, showing a lot of apartments and rental homes, and I got to learn, very quickly, what makes the frog jump. That’s why I built the web site: I realized that Jack’s business model was missing a better segment of the rental market. Less-than-ideally-qualified tenants needed help because they didn’t know who would take them and who would turn them down. But there was a much larger, much juicier, much better-qualified pool of prospects out there: People with plenty of money but no time.
That first site, TheApartmentStore.org, was a killer lead generator. No one was doing anything using forms in those days, and GoTo.com was still selling pay-per-click for as little as a penny a click. I was hauling in four and Read more
I wrote this eighteen months ago, when this economic recession was just getting started. I looked at it again tonight and found nothing in it that I wanted to change. I have more to say on the subject of a long recession, perhaps a depression, but this is a very good place to begin to look for optimistic portents. –GSS
Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…
I don’t do well in despair.
Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.
What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.
I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.
That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.
You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. Read more
From The Atlantic, an explication of economist Paul Romer’s idea to build modern-day Hong Kong-like enclaves to promote development in poverty-stricken counties:
When Romer explains charter cities, he likes to invoke Hong Kong. For much of the 20th century, Hong Kong’s economy left mainland China’s in the dust, proving that enlightened rules can make a world of difference. By an accident of history, Hong Kong essentially had its own charter—a set of laws and institutions imposed by its British colonial overseers—and the charter served as a magnet for go-getters. At a time when much of East Asia was ruled by nationalist or Communist strongmen, Hong Kong’s colonial authorities put in place low taxes, minimal regulation, and legal protections for property rights and contracts; between 1913 and 1980, the city’s inflation-adjusted output per person jumped more than eightfold, making the average Hong Kong resident 10 times as rich as the average mainland Chinese, and about four-fifths as rich as the average Briton. Then, beginning around 1980, Hong Kong’s example inspired the mainland’s rulers to create copycat enclaves. Starting in Shenzhen City, adjacent to Hong Kong, and then curling west and north around the Pacific shore, China created a series of special economic zones that followed Hong Kong’s model. Pretty soon, one of history’s greatest export booms was under way, and between 1987 and 1998, an estimated 100 million Chinese rose above the $1-a-day income that defines abject poverty. The success of the special economic zones eventually drove China’s rulers to embrace the export-driven, pro-business model for the whole country. “In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.
Of course, versions of China’s special economic zones have existed elsewhere, especially in Asia. But Romer is not just arguing for enclaves; he is arguing for enclaves that are run by foreign governments. To Romer, the fact that Hong Kong was a colonial experiment, imposed upon a humiliated China by means of a treaty signed aboard a British warship, is not just an Read more
Yesterday I put up a post on Marketing Videos and Real Estate. My plea was for more creativity and less facts. My point? An agent who gets creative and starts using video wisely might just take down the Goliath agent in their neck of the woods. The very first comment, from Tallahassee Realtor Barry Bevis, got me to thinking. He said: “Quality at a price is the struggle… Without going “Hartman” I can’t figure out how to make a good video at a reasonable cost.” I quickly sat down and jotted out a half dozen video ideas, then put the pad down and walked away. When working with creative ideas, I usually find it’s a good idea to let them breathe for a while and come back later. Often times, after rereading them, you discover even fresher and better ideas. No such luck today though… you get the original ideas and all their rough edges. 🙂
The goal here is to throw some ideas out and have the genius that is BHB add a lot more. If we’re lucky, this could turn into a “mini-library” of video marketing ideas for real estate agents temporarily running low in the creativity tank and staring at an empty screen. For me, it’s all about latching onto an aspect of the house and then running a little wild. Oh, and I love to steal already well-established ideas from the big boys.
VISA Take-Off #1 – there are a number of ways to shoot this. Show aspects of the house that shine and do the voice-over: “View of the mountains, $10,000; Jacuzzi tub in your masterbath, $3000; and so on. Then come in with the conclusion everyone knows: “Owning your own home, priceless.” The key is what you show during that line: Young husband carrying beautiful bride across threshold. Or, husband painting vertical, purple stripes in the living room while the kids nod approvingly. Or, an exterior evening shot of the house with every window warmly lit while we see the sights and sounds of a fantastic party going on inside. Single site web address appears at the bottom of the screen.
VISA Take-Off #2 – Same idea, but a child’s perspective (especially Read more
More at DVICE. Much more from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Highlight: Netflix for the iPhone later this summer.
Last week, Don Reedy talked to us about the cool stuff Apple is doing with HTML5 on the iPad. Unchained alum Scott Gaertner followed up with me to talk about the possibility of doing the kind of content we do as single-property coffee-table books, only expressing that content on the iPad like the issue of Sports Illustrated Don had cited.
Take a look at this Apple HTM5 demonstration site. In seven very quick demos, Apple illustrates all the cool things that can be done on the web using only HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. The photo above was clipped from a live virtual-reality demonstration.
I’ve been talking to Cathleen a lot about the computer science paradigms behind this technology shift. It’s a big deal, actually, but Apple has been careful to sugar-coat it. Perhaps I’ll make a short video detailing what is going on.
The HTML5 demo requires the latest version of Safari, either desktop or mobile. Windazoids can play, too, by installing Safari. The rumor is that Safari 5 will be released this week, so there could be some more cool technology still to come.
A virtuoso performance of what is perhaps the sexiest song ever written:
Here is a Monk-based bebop Pandora radio station. Play it with someone you love.
So I had a spam email from a state-worshipping zealot I’ve never met named Sara P. Miller. Apparently Sara P. Miller is the modern-age equivalent of those noxious creeps you used to find preaching the gospel of Jheeezuhs! on buses and subway trains, self-imprisoned in a never-silent pantomime of exhibitionism and self-loathing. I cannot be trusted to find the truth on my own, so I must have it thrust upon me by benificent busy-bodies. Good grief…
Anyway, here is Sara P. Miller’s argument, all spelling and punctuation errors faithfully reproduced: “As the sludge roles onto Louisiana’s coast, suddenly, the anti-government bashers are silent. [….] And this morning, as that horrible, poison sludge makes its tragic, putrid, photo debut, we will all believe in ‘big government.'” She defends this by making reference to a number of Rotarian Socialist statists, absolutely none of whom are anti-government. They are all exponents of the government — past or current office-holders.
And that doesn’t matter to me. I’m assuming Sara P. Miller sent this nonsense to me because I haven’t said anything about the oil spill in the gulf. “Cum taces, clamas,” say my Roman friends — “When you are silent, you shout.” Not quite. The topics I don’t write about are legion. Hell, the things I think about writing about but don’t constitute a vast library of unwritten prose. I haven’t written about this oil spill because I don’t care about it, frankly, and because I am busy.
But: The actual essence of Sara P. Miller’s argument, which she is not smart enough to make, could not be more wrong. This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite. These events — and the cloying chorus of the Rotarian Socialists of both major political parties — do not argue for the glories of the state right now, but, rather, for its inglorious ignobility going back forever. The state is never anything other than crime, and the crimes being played out right now in the Gulf of Mexico are nothing other than further proof Read more
Busy as anything, ever, as I’m sure you can guess from my absence hereabouts. How busy am I? I still have not lain my own hands on an iPad. Tried to make time a couple-three times, but I couldn’t squeeze out the seconds.
But I have been paying attention to the aghastrointestinal noises made by the sputtering pundidiot class about the iPad, to some amusement. Translated into a language ordinary people can understand, the main objection runs like this: “These beach socks will look terrible with my tuxedo!” Could not agree more. But if you’re clamming or gigging frogs, you might-could find them a good fit.
Whatever. The iPad’s day is but barely begun, and one of the revolutionary things it will do is wash away this entire cadre of washed-up technology “experts.” Here’s hoping they can find a job worth doing.
Meanwhile, Richard Riccelli passed along this catalog of Grave Portents published by that citadel of techspertise, Slate magazine. Richard’s question is this: With the iPad and its closed software universe, has Steve Jobs committed an unforced error — unnecessarily created an obvious opening for Google and MicroSoft to compete?
My answer is no to everything.
Every kvetch about the iPad comes from people who will not be its audience.
1. It’s not a laptop. Duh.
2. It’s a closed hardware/software universe. Thus does Apple piss off 40% of the INTJs — 2.8% of the buying public.
3. It fosters a market opening for losers who could have beaten Apple ten years ago — except they’re losers.
We’ll have to wait to see it — Alice in Wonderland is an early mover (that munches up all of Brad Inman’s stale Vookies) — but the software built to take advantage of the unique iPad hardware will be killingthing.
Jobs is not wrong. Jobs is early. As always. Why? Because the future doesn’t exist until he invents it. Not hero worship, just an awareness of the amazing things the man causes to be done.
The two big iPad stories, going forward: How cool this tool is, and how lame are the clones.
Don’t believe me? Go buy an Android. Go buy a Zune. Google Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
The current Adminsitration has its target on one more component of the capitalist model; free labor. From today’s Wall Street Journal:
You might therefore expect a federal effort to encourage employers to give unskilled youngsters a chance. You would be wrong. The feds have instead decided to launch a campaign to crack down on unpaid internships that regulators claim violate minimum-wage laws.
“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” the Labor Department’s Nancy J. Leppink tells the New York Times.
Did you hear that? You might not be allowed to employ a willing student, who wants to learn a trade, without paying him minimum wage.
Consider these two summer job options:
1- Working in the Goldman Sachs mail room for minimum wage. That job certainly gets a young person in the door but the opportunity to learn, network, and accept greater responsibilities are practically nil.
2- Interning on a trading desk, for PIMCO, for no compensation. While that young person won’t make a dime, she has the chance to work alongside fixed income legend Bill Gross. She’ll speak to fund managers all over the country, meet people who might hire her after graduation, and accept challenges few people her age would ever see.
Anyone should be able to see that the latter is the equivalent of a free MBA while the former is an invitation to a labor union. Chris Gardner knew the value of an internship. He worked for free, when he needed fast cash to support his son. He willingly traded his labor for future opportunity-that’s an investment.
Read what Greg Swann wrote about the value of free, in the early days of Bloodhound Blog:
How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic.
Greg was talking about the disintermediation of the Read more
Jay Seville of JustNewListings.com in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. sent along this photo of the customs signs he is building for his team.
Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech: Sign calls sell homes. If you’re doing custom signs, let me know. I’m delighted to show off the hard work of hard-working dogs.
You heard that right. Morgan Stanley is predicting that as many as ten million iPads could be sold in 2010. A boatload of them have already been sold, and the iPad doesn’t even ship until April 3rd.
iPad news abounds, of course, and no one needs to be reminded about pudding and eating, all those caveats. But, as with the iPhone, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. We’re going to see a paradigm shift in computing even if the iPad “bombs” by selling only five million units. My 88-year-old mother-in-law is texting on her iPhone, and, no-doubt, will soon be trolling Facebook for friends and grandchildren. A whole new population of punters is about to join the online world.
Not convinced? I can but smile. We haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet, because the insanely great iPad ideas will require a few months of hands-on time. Meanwhile, Apple has posted some guided tours to the iPad so you can see what you’re missing.
My posts on the iPad (so far):
- Apple tablet computer announcement liveblogging now…
- The Apple iPad is a category-cataclysm and no one knows it yet: Double-thinking Steve Jobs and his double-suss of the hi-tech marketplace
- iPad observation #1: The iPad is the computer for the rest of us
- iPad observation #2: Find a bigger dead-pool: The iPad eats everything.
- iPad observation #3: If your baby — or a caveman — can figure out how to use the iPad, the user-interface works
- iPad observation #4: Looking for a smart way to connect with your clients in a pull-based marketing world? Update your iPhone/iPad app.
- iPad observation #5: Linking free slaves, sometimes, but the future of mobile real estate is unknown to attorneys from New York City.
- iPad observation #6: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
- iPad observation #7: When you’ve built a product that turns whole worlds upside down — what happens next?
- iPad observation #8: The death of mediocrity and, along with it, the death of contempt for the consumer
- iPad observation #9: I went digging through the heap of festering garbage that is the Vook and came home with Read more
Redfin.com is coming to Phoenix today — 6 am PDT, to be precise. And they’re coming as a VOW, which strikes me as being a potent marketing advantage, at least in the short run. And the news that might be most of interest here: BloodhoundRealty.com is coming along with them.
As I wrote in February of 2009, Redfin is entering new markets with referral agents as well as its own employees. Cathleen Collins, my wife and business partner, and I will be handling one quadrant of the referred territories.
From Redfin.com’s press release:
Redfin today expanded to the Phoenix metropolitan area, increasing the number of listings available on Redfin’s website by 8%. Phoenix is the third market Redfin has opened since December 2009, and the twelfth overall. Separately today, Redfin is announcing upgrades to its listing service, and new support for short sales.
With this launch, Redfin’s site offers customers the photos and marketing materials used to list properties that recently sold, information previously limited to real estate agents. No other website offers this data, known in the industry as Virtual Office Website (VOW) data, to Phoenix consumers. The new data, which consumers can use to develop their own market analyses, became available last year as a result of an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors.
Redfin has access to the real-time database used by brokers to list homes because Redfin is a broker that represents customers buying and selling homes. In Cave Creek, Fountain Hills, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler and Gilbert, the company provides direct service, employing its own real estate agents. In the East Valley and the West Valley, Redfin relies on partners. Redfin’s search site covers all of Maricopa and Pinal counties.
Cathleen wants the business. We’re growing fast, and she wants to grow still faster.
Greg wants to be an even-more-disruptive disruptor.
But among many other things I might talk about, there is this: Redfin’s internal praxis actually does impose a performance bar on practitioners. It’s the kind of corporate pencil-pushing I’ve always been lousy at, but Redfin tracks and measures everything. Not for pencil-pushing reasons, but in order Read more
Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.
Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were Read more