And now for something completely different: a selection of useful-but-not-quite-big-enough-for-a-whole-column bits about things technological.
Quora: I first wrote about Quora back in June 2011. At the time, it was one of several new sites that attempted to organize the process of asking and answering questions. It’s harder than it sounds, since there are many ways to ask the same question. Quora seems to be doing a good job with this, and people are clearly using Quora to ask questions. In many cases, the questions don’t have a single answer but rather seek to poll collective (or unique) experiences (e.g. Is getting rich worth it?). I have yet to ask a question on Quora, but I regularly find myself following the links from their weekly email digest to read the answers to interesting questions asked by others. Recommendation: sign up for Quora and get the weekly email digest.
Readin’, writin’ and programmin’: When I was in high school, we had shop classes, the remnants of a time when knowing how to build things with your hands was a valuable skill, thanks to an economy based largely on manufacturing. But today, so much of our world is now expressed in software, that a basic competence in building a software application has become an imperative. If you’re thinking about learning to program, there are two good choices. Python and Javascript (not Java). A great place to start is Code Academy, which has (free!) courses on both these languages. In particular, take a look at their “Code Year” program, which builds on Javascript to teach you how to deliver a sophisticated interactive website that embodies your ideas.
Amazon wine: After an earlier attempt to sell wine online ran afoul of government regulations, Amazon has quietly returned with an plan that respects the limits placed on third-party wine marketers. Originally, Amazon planned that wineries would ship wine to Amazon (who would then ship it to customers). Wineries would set their own price, subject to sharing a reported 50 percent of the revenue with Amazon, which is what sank the program with regulators. Amazon’s new plan is to provide an online store for wineries, for which it will charge a monthly fee—reported to be $39.95 by Wine Industry Insight. Additionally, wineries will pay a “reasonable” commission on total sales. Wineries will be responsible for fulfillment and compliance, but Amazon will negotiate shipping rates for participants (and this is an area where they wield a pretty big stick). It should make 2013 an interesting year for wine sales.
Reliability: We expect our technology to be insanely reliable. The processor in your laptop or desktop computer performs millions of operations per second flawlessly, for hours on end. And yet we think nothing of it. Software is composed of millions of bytes of instructions and data, and if only one of those bytes is wrong, it doesn’t work. At all. As a programmer, I often reflect on the fact that there are very few human occupations where an error rate of one in a million makes an appreciable difference. We talk about “five nines” of uptime (99.999% availability), yet fail to grasp that it actually means that a system meeting that requirement is only down for 5.26 minutes per year .
Sparkfun: Just as people are seeking to teach others how to translate their ideas into working software, Sparkfun Electronics is in the business of making it easy for people to translate their original ideas into working hardware, whether it’s a do-it-yourself, unmanned aerial vehicle or temperature-sensing clothing. The thing it does best is educate its (potential) customers with lots of videos and clear writing. If you’re looking to challenge yourself, this is a fun dive into the deeper end of the pool.
Losing Weight: Surprisingly, I’ve managed to lose more than 12 pounds over the last three months. It’s a fact that we can consume calories much faster than we burn them off, so learning how to control intake is a key success factor. Supporting that notion are studies which say a common habit among people who lose weight successfully is keeping a food journal, making it harder to overlook just how many calories sneak their way into our mouths. For me, the myFitnessPal application on my iPhone has helped me keep track of what I eat. I choose a food (the app has most brands and restaurants covered), and select how much I ate. The app usually knows the serving size and offers alternatives like ounces or the whole package (God forbid). The fun part is that it has a built-in bar code scanning feature, so I can just scan the container of whatever I’m eating, avoiding the tedium of a) figuring out the caloric content of a particular food, and b) writing it down. We’re about to the enter the Diet Season (traditionally, January through March of each year), so I offer you a tool that has worked well for me.
Maps: Maps have become a welcome (and essential) part of the digital landscape. Now we can not only locate a place, but get directions, information about what else is nearby, and even a street-level view of the location. It’s easy enough to embed a map of your business location into your website, but what about something more sophisticated, like a map of all your outposts across the United States (or the world!). BatchGeo has a very simple interface that lets you anchor your data on a map. Although Google Maps and other map providers have application programming interfaces (APIs), they require a knowledge of programming (hey, didn’t I just write something about that?). BatchGeo takes a spreadsheet-like approach, which may be more familiar to non-programming types (although it’s also less capable). BatchGeo has a free basic service which is quite useful. It also has a “pro” offering with additional features.
A slightly different approach to exploring map data is CreateAClickableMap.com, another free offering that lets you associate your own URL (i.e. Web page) with each state in the nation. It’s simpler in most respects than BatchGeo, but is aimed at giving you control over what your website visitors see when they click on a state. Both these services are worth your time.
Coda: For me, December marks the end of another year of writing for NorthBay biz , and this column closes out my 12th year as a columnist on these pages. I’m grateful to each of you who takes time to read what I write, and I encourage you to send me your questions at mduffy@northbaybiz.com. See you next year!
