that canadian girl

It’s Wednesday night. Well, no. It’s Thursday morning 4:30am in my head & body. But it’s Wednesday night in Austin, Texas.

I’m at South by SouthWest Interactive for the third year running, having arrived, via far too many security gates and angry Customs people, a couple of hours ago.

Tomorrow should be fairly laid back, but Friday, everything kicks into high gear for 5 days of intense conference presentations and panels, evening parties and non-stop meeting new people and seeing old friends.

As old Ottawa friend and Austin roommate Kelly suggests, no need to unfollow me on Twitter, you can just mute me for the weekend if you’re not interested in details of my every move during SXSW.

I’ll report as well as I can from panels, serendipitous meetings over the week and will hopefully post some pics – or at least link to other kind photographers’ shots.

If you’re also in Austin, do tweet me (@vero) and we’ll meet up somewhere, somehow.

The past few days have been just a bit of a mad ride, following the launch of our Mac quicklaunch application, called Alfred, which garnered +2500 users in its first 48 hours.

We created the Alfred App to fill our own need: A quicklaunch tool that can search your local computer as well as the web, that is fast, looks good and, most importantly, doesn’t chew through memory like a hungry hyena.

After some intense development weeks, we launched it on Sunday night, while watching the Canada-USA Olympics hockey final (wooh!). With the intention of sharing it with a few friends for a “quiet beta”, we mentioned it on Twitter and went off to bed.

Little did we know, on Monday and Tuesday, the stats were on fiiiire with over a thousand downloads per day, great feedback via Twitter and a bucketload of feature requests by email.

Users have described us as a perfect Quicksilver replacement which, as a long-time user of Quicksilver, is a true honour. It was with much sadness that I read at the end of 2007 that developer Nicholas Jitkoff would no longer be evolving Quicksilver (considering I recommended it to every new Mac user I met) so when Andrew suggested that we develop our own flavour of quick launcher, I was over the moon! Designer Ollie Kav created the fab look of the site, working closely with us.

If you fancy trying it out, you can go to Alfredapp.com to download the beta version – the main reason we need your email address is that we haven’t yet built in an auto-updater so this will allow us to let you know when the next version is available.

We’ll launch an Alfred blog in the near future to keep a roadmap of features and let users know how things are progressing, but for now, you can keep us company on Twitter!

Not so long ago, having had a pretty good day at work, we managed to leave the office at a reasonable hour. We popped down to Sainsbury’s to quickly pick up food for a few days. Before we knew it, our shopping trolley was full! When it came to pay, the very few cashiers were busy.

A smiley young staff waved us over to the self-checkouts. Hesitating, we pointed at our full trolly, but she laughed and said “I’ll be there to help!” Sure you will…

It was an experience, to say the least. We were held hostage by the constantly unhappy self-checkout, which seemed to be randomly shouting Tourette-style, “Unexpected item in bagging area!”, “Please remove item!” and so on, so forth. By the third time we had to wait for a staff member to come and authorise a bag of lettuce, I begged her to PLEASE stay until we were done. (Please, mummy, don’t go!) My patience was wearing thin and Andrew was making barely-joking threats that the next unexpected item in the bagging area would be his foot.

On the way out, we talked through the user experience of these nightmare machines…

The objective of the machines is to reduce the amount of cashiers tied to tills, so that staff costs can be reduced, and making more efficient use of space so that 4 self-checkouts can be fitted in the space of two traditional cashier areas. For each section of 4 self-checkouts, there is – at least in theory – one member of staff there to help people with the process.

Sainsbury’s denies that anyone has been made unemployed as a result of the installation of the machines, and that the now excess cashier staff have been moved to ‘restocking and cleaning’ duties. (Source: Daily Mail, 5th March 2009)

Our local Sainsbury’s was renovated in September, coinciding with the opening of a large Tesco in the centre of town. Four tills were replaced with ten self-checkouts. There certainly weren’t four eager staff members looking to help the self-checkout victims.

Even as the highly tech savvy person that I am, I’ve been bewildered by the checkouts. As Bashford points out, the machines speak Engrish at best and are very temperamental. Every item MUST be put down in a bag and weighed before the next item can be scanned – this becomes a slow, laborious process when the bagged salad doesn’t weigh enough and the checkout complains.

To say the least, this is a first world problem on par with having to use my old iPhone while waiting for my broken one to be replaced on insurance claim. I realise that it’s a pathetic thing to moan about when Chile’s just been rocked to its core by an earthquake. Petty, petty, petty me.

That aside, the way I see it is that a team of engineers designed this software, another company whitelabelled it for Sainsbury’s, then a business manager decided on what scale to roll it out in stores. At what point did their standards slip so low that it was deemed good enough to replace real people? Granted, our local staff wasn’t always smiling or terribly knowledgeable, but they were human and able to deal with unexpected issues. (A nice lady even shared her tips for great pancakes. “Mix the butter into the batter so you don’t have to butter the pan!” I’d like to see a computer give me a tip that smart!)

Unless stores offer a real benefit, like further discounts or faster, more reliable software, when going through the self-checkout, consumers will continue to feel let down by the hellish experience. Personally, I’ve taken to ordering food online from Tesco – not a perfect experience either, but certainly a simpler one!

Next week, I might go stand by the checkouts and ask consumers what they think. Or maybe I’ll ask you here… What’s your take on replacing checkout staff with machines?

[Image credit: BBC News article, Rex Features picture]

Last week, I was kindly invited to attend LeWeb 09 as official blogger. LeWeb is a yearly, two-day conference in Paris, which takes a deep look at the web now and in the future. It’s a frenzied opportunity to meet new people, see old faces and hear great talks.

While watching the world go by at Ebbsfleet Eurostar station, (the best kept secret of European travel) before heading to Paris, it hit me that we nearly halfway through December. I started thinking back on 2009, the successes and failures I’ve experienced or witnessed others experience. It’s been an interesting year, with a few victories, but a few scraped knees also.

Then yesterday morning, in one of the first talks of LeWeb, Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder said:

“The hardest thing about an idea is to get it started”

I’ll tell you a secret: I used to really hate being rubbish at something, to the point where, when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t even rehearse for my vocal music classes in front of people for fear they’d hear me do something wrong. Yet I’d happily sing in concert in front of a huge crowd at the end of the year! And I didn’t speak English til I was in my teens, not because I couldn’t, but because I was embarrassed by my accent.

It doesn’t take much to realise that nearly everyone feels that way to a varying degree; the fear of failure can paralyse us and stop us from doing things we REALLY want to do.

LeWeb is filled with people who’ve taken that jump, who’ve conquered their fears, their peers’ fears, or at least sidelined them long enough to give their ideas a go. Whether it’s launching a startup instead of staying in a cushy-but-boring megacorp job, launching a new wacky iPhone idea or creating and manufacturing a small-run Psion-revival pocket computer.

These people and startups risk money, energy and years of their life for something they’re passionate about or think might change the world (or at least make a dent of difference). They use events and conferences as an opportunity to gain visibility, get feedback on what they’ve created and meet existing and potential users. Needless to say, they also leave with a few bruises from those who don’t “get” their idea and either say it bluntly or tweet it publicly.

Of course, only one out of five* will break even, and only a handful will become rockstars. But some of those who failed will get back up, try something else and one day, succeed.

So as we hurtle towards 2010, why not let ourselves get inspired by brave startups and self-employed ppl who’ve flown the nest of safety and try doing something awesome?

Hopefully, some attendees (or some of the thousands of online viewers of the LeWeb video stream) will be inspired to do something for the greater good in the process. Whether it’s organising a BarCamp event, running a charity-focused event in support of 1GOAL (as presented by Queen Rania) or providing charitable organisations with free coaching, share your wisdom with others.

As Gary Vaynerchuk said, in his usual blunt way, “Everybody’s got a shot, I don’t care if you are in Sillicon Valley or in France” (See his talk here) As Gary has done, from being co-owner of a New Jersey wine shop to becoming a web celeb, he’s shown us that with enough passion and drive, we can achieve just about anything.

Talking about driving… Heading down to Ebbsfleet station, I couldn’t help but be amused that it was a fairly leisurely drive, albeit one involving some of the busiest motorways in the country. Two years ago, the thought of having to drive down the M25 gave me cold sweats. I could have gone on to avoid driving like I had done until I was 25, but I reluctantly went through the scary challenge of driving lessons (it was scary in my eyes, alright!?) A few years on, I couldn’t be happier that I’m on the other side of it all. In hindsight, the hardest thing was to get started.

We all need to occasionally tackle a few fears or go above what we believe we can achieve right here and right now. It takes a while, trudging through how frustratingly bad we are at something at first, but then… oh THEN we feel like we’ve really achieved something great!

What will YOU do with 2010?

To read more from other LeWeb official bloggers, visit the aggregated posts page – with most of them doing a far better job summarising the event than I have done!

[* Stat entirely pulled out of thin air to be representative, don't quote me on that one and see the experts for real stats]
[Photo credit: LeWeb 09 by Blogowski on Flickr, Creative Commons license]

As an early birthday present to myself, I bought a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen earlier this week. It arrived yesterday and I’ve just been blown away by it so far.

The pen improves on regular pens in two key ways:

1. It registers anything that is written on paper, effectively scanning my handwriting as I go, which means that as soon as I get back to the computer, the pen transfers it to the LiveScribe software for future reference.
2. It records all audio in the room, which means I can take a few headline notes without writing down every single piece of information.

Back in university, I had some form of RSI in my right wrist, so I made it a habit to record lessons on tape so that I didn’t need to write everything. In reality, I could never find the time or energy to dig through the 3-hour lecture recording to find the 5-minute segment that interested me, so it was pretty much a pointless exercise.

With the LiveScribe, it all becomes much easier: Tap the pen on the headline note relating to the audio clip you need, whether it’s a title or a graph, the recording will automatically go back to that point and start playing.

Normally, I’d shrug and say that this is a gadget for geeks and will never reach into the real world. Past similar gadgets have existed and gone nowhere fast. The biggest difference? This one prices its accessories reasonably.

The pen itself is £120-£150 so it’s a small initial investment, but Moleskine-style notebooks cost about £1 more per unit than their traditional Moleskine counterparts, and the A4-sized school notebooks are £16.99 for a pack of 4. The paper is thicker than with the Moleskine, which makes me happy as I’m a heavy-handed writer. Next time I need to get some notebooks, I think I’ll get a 4-pack of the pink flip notepad which is far cheaper than Moleskine journalist flip notepads. (Plus it’s pink, wayhey!) The ink isn’t overpriced either, and in a pinch, since it writes like a normal pen, it’s possible to use the pen without the fancy paper (unlike stylus-based systems).

The pen does raise some interesting ethical and legal questions: What if I forgot to mention to someone that I’m recording our conversation? Or maliciously chose to record a private conversation? Of course, I have no intention of doing that, but the technology is now becoming available and affordable to people who aren’t MI5 or hired spies (albeit in a pen the size of a large cigar!) so we’ll undoubtedly be seeing these issues show up on the Information Commissioner’s agenda in the future.

As far as I’m concerned, this is a great new addition to my arsenal of tools to support my sieve-like memory and no one needs to worry about me using it stealthily. I’ll be too busy showing off the piano party trick it can do!

Now you can watch my first pencast below…

[Note: Before you ask, this isn't a sponsored post and LiveScribe didn't give me a free pen. I just am that much of a geek that I get excited over pens.]

Every office has them; the people who seem to freeze as soon as they’re exposed to new technology. They throw their hands up at the first sight of anything wrong with their computer, always assume it’s “been hacked” and furiously click the mouse or bash at their keyboard louder rather than look for the virus-scanner that’s slowing down their machine to a glacial pace. They’re the tech illiterati.

I must have a friendly personality because, while I’m not in the IT department by any means, I seem to be anyways have been a first port of call for tech support (especially on Macs) in offices I’ve worked in. I usually don’t mind helping out, really!

I used to find myself grinning at the thought that someone needed to be shown something that seemed so obvious to me. Then just over a year ago, I discovered the Quickbooks accounting software, and felt humbled again. It was my turn to have NO idea what I was doing. With monk-like patience and a few pointers from my brilliant accountant, I managed to learn my way around so that I’m now reasonably proficient with Quickbooks.

The experience made its mark though: Learning something you’re new to when you’re scared of screwing up is tough!

Now imagine being freaked out by technology in general rather than just Quickbooks or Photoshop? That’s the relationship many (most?) people have with computers, even today. The difference between them and us is that we’ve developed the confidence to try things, knowing that (generally) it won’t break the computer.

So how about taking 15 minutes to sit down with your tech illiterati colleague to show them how to do something this week? Think of it as time investment: If they learn how to do it and gain confidence, they’ll stop panicking every time that task arises.

How to successfully teach a tech illiterati

1. Before starting, make sure you’re in a good, open, positive mood.
2. Before starting, make sure your illiterati is also in a good, open, receptive mood.
3. Remove distractions: If you can, forward their desk phone to someone else, close email and “misplace” their Blackberry. Without their full attention, you’re wasting your time.
4. Ask them what they need to achieve and where they’ve been stumbling. Listen to their answer to see what spooks them most.
5. Take a deep breath. Take another one. Then start teaching.
6. Go at half-speed: Speak slowly, avoid jargon and show them where you’re clicking. You may know the software or website by heart, but they don’t, so let each step sink in.
7. Encourage them to take notes: Your student should make their own notes, since your notes or step-by-step most likely takes certain things for granted, skipping steps that are essential in their eyes. For particularly complex tasks, print a screenshot of the page and let them scribble directly on it.
8. Do it again: After you’ve done the steps once, if you can, let the student do it a second time under your supervision but without any hints/tips from you. This will help the process sink in, yet provide them with the confidence that you’re there to ensure they don’t screw up.
9. Praise: Give them encouragement, but don’t be patronising.
10. Go grab a glass of wine and have a giggle at Eddie Izzard’s video on technojoy & technofear.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL2blQ2PlU4[/youtube]

Last week, I ran a competition, inviting readers to leave comments and share their best home office or lifehack tip in order to win an LG 23″ monitor. As it turns out, my readers are just as awesomely geeky as I am.

Once the competition ended, I used the Random Number Generator to choose a comment out of the 38 valid comments, with a view that if my own comment came up, I’d draw a number again.

And the winner is… *drum roll* Zoe Rose from Cambridge. LG will be sending Zoe a monitor very soon, and I’m sure Zoe will send us pics of her new home office setup.

As for my views of the LG screen, well…  I think the reality speaks for itself: I’m still using it instead of my 24″ Samsung screen. The main benefit of that switch is the huge difference the brightness sensor has made; it’s been a summer of days that varied wildly from very bright outside to cloudy and dark, yet at no point did I get that searingly bright light feeling. Also, being such a wide screen (1920 x 1080), it fits plenty of my crap on a single screen.

I won’t harp on because I always feel awkward when the schwag is given to me, but all in all, the LG monitor comes pretty highly recommended for its reasonable price (around £150). We spend such long hours in front of a screen, it’s worth getting a good one so as not to go blind by the age of 40!

Since the comments from the readers were so good, I’ll most likely make an entire post summarising them in the near future. In the meantime, go read them for yourself here and, while the competition is obviously over, feel free to add your own tips and tricks.

This morning, I came across the excellent “10 Harsh Truths about Corporate Blogging”, published by Paul Boag on Smashing Magazine. I was nodding emphatically at each point, until I hit the 5th one, which jarred me in the back like a bad pothole in the road when you’re daydreaming on the drive to work.

Funnily enough, a year or two ago, I would have militantly agreed with Paul.

5. Press releases shouldn’t appear on a blog

[...] a press release preforms [sic] a different role to that of corporate blog. As the name implies, a press release is meant for professional journalists. It is designed to encourage journalists to write about your product or service. It is not designed for your customers.

A blog, on the other hand, is meant to be read by prospective and existing customers. It should be engaging, informative and helpful. When writing a blog post, you should always have the end reader in mind. What will they learn? What insight will this give them into who we are? How will it help build our relationship with the reader? You should never simply copy and paste press releases or news stories.

The other problem with press releases is that they are corporate statements. A blog should have a more personal tone.

Here’s why I now disagree; Bloggers are both journalists (in the broad sense of the term at least) and, one can assume, interested customers or prospects. Yet bloggers are journalists who often don’t get paid to deal with PR agencies’ bullshit (eg. embargoes) and don’t necessarily have the research resources that a professional journalist has access to.

Realistically, a corporate blog won’t be read by the vast majority of customers. Even with cool companies like Flickr, 37Signals or Twitter, what percentage of users really care about what’s being said on the corporate blog? [Note: There is a difference between a corporate blog & a blog directed at the end users. On a blog solely directed at end users, press releases are unlikely to have a purpose. This post refers to corporate blogs specifically.]

The beady eyeballs who will find most relevance in a corporate blog will be:

• Existing and potential investors;
• Competitors (As Paul says, get over it!);
• Potential employees;
• Active developers & geeks who want to use your API;
• Journalists & Bloggers;
• The occasional day-to-day user.

Don’t fool yourself, the majority of users will only care when the service goes down. As long as your site/ service/ product is available, they don’t think about what you do as a company an awful lot.*

So why does it still matter so much? The bloggers and the passionate users give a damn. They’re a key player in spreading the word about your business, and when they want to write about you, you should provide all the information you can so that they can feel smart and well informed. Yes, including that nasty old-world press release. Why? Bloggers cannot divinate information. Bloggers find themselves with only a short amount of time to write an entry and will be grateful for the stats you provide or the CEO’s past startup that can be confirmed via the release’s boilerplate.

So go for it, publish that press release. But wait! Don’t publish it alone. Accompany it with a summary in informal tone, some context to help readers understand the relevancy of the PR push, and a bucketload of useful resources (links, images & further information).

If your press release is so officious that you’re embarrassed to publish it on the blog, could it be that you need to rethink your releases altogether? Journalism is changing too, and a fresh, no-bullshit press release will most likely appeal to traditional journalists too. Why not try that for a change?

[* Here's another tip: If your livelihood is dependent on being available on the web, host your blog elsewhere so that you can still provide status updates when your service goes down.]

It’s never been a secret that I’m a bit of a GTD nerd, and since working from home, have tried to tweak my home office to be as welcoming as possible.

So recently, when LG offered to send me a 23″ W53 monitor to review AND one to give away to readers, I couldn’t resist saying yes. I’ll be reviewing it soon, but first impressions are excellent and it has taken prime spot on my desk (replacing a Samsung 24″ I’d only bought in January).

How to win the monitor

I’m keeping the competition nice and simple, so that it only takes you a minute to take part: Tell me about your best office or life hack. Whether at home or when sharing an office with others, we each have our own way of making our working life slightly more comfortable/enjoyable, so tell me what your tricks are. I’ve published a few tips of my own before, and would love to hear yours.

Leave a comment with your own tip by August 4th, and you’ll be in with a chance of getting a brand new LG W2353V monitor (retailing at about £149) delivered to your door in a few weeks. This competition is now closed, but feel free to leave more interesting tips and tricks. Maybe I’ll give you a cookie.

So go on, let’s hear it!

Terms of the competition

1. The competition is open to anyone on the UK mainland. Sorry to my other readers, I promise the next competition will be open to everyone! I think as long as you don’t live in Alaska, we might be able to sway the PR agency to ship to you so give it a try
2. You can take part as many times as you like, so three comments will mean three entries. However, I reserve the right to scrap your entry if you’re obviously just trying to make up numbers.
3. The competition runs until August 4th at 11:59pm UK time, so as long as your comment is timestamped before then, your entry counts, even if it’s in the moderation queue until morning. I’ll announce the winner shortly thereafter.

Over the past 10 days, Morgan Stanley, an established global financial services provider with offices across the world, saw a 15 year old teen create a lot of noise while interning at the firm’s London office.

Matthew Robson was tasked with the project of writing a report on how teenagers consume media, the kind of job you give the son of a friend who’s asked for a summer internship. “Isn’t the boy sweet? Make sure the office manager offers him a glass of juice, will you?” Anyone who’s worked in an office has had this kind of intern around, kids with an interest in business who’ll gain more insight than you can ever imagine from a few weeks around.

Usually, however, these students leave as quietly as they arrived, having organised a few filing cabinets and tended to a few menial projects.

In this case, Matthew was given the opportunity to write a report on media consumption, which could have very well fallen on deaf ears, but not only have Morgan Stanley paid attention, the Telegraph published the report in full.

If you spend your life bathing in online media as I do, none of the observations in the report are mindblowing. What is remarkable is that, this time, the CEO’s, directors and people in charge of company direction have listened to Matthew’s report.

It’s a chronic problem with management: The higher up you get, the more out of touch you become with the reality of your users, current and future. You think in “audience”, “viewing figures” and other amorphous blobs of numbers, you forget that you’re dealing with people, intelligent and curious and ever-changing people.

This boy’s report highlights some interesting realities.

• Newspapers: This generation doesn’t want to pay for news. The Sun (20p) will occasionally get picked up but free papers or other means of consumption like the web or TV.
• Directories: A dying medium, the print directory has never been used. Being Google-savvy means the teens can easily find what they want, again for free.
• Viral/Outdoor/Guerrilla advertising: Teens welcome these unusual, exciting campaigns, so while they might shun banner ads and conventional TV ads, they enjoy guerrilla marketing, in-game ads and quirky ads that don’t tell the full story.
• Music: Again, free and digital are preferred. Music that is accessible offline is also preferred, so the streaming model may not be right for them.
• Mobile: Pay as you go, reasonably priced devices are topping this market. iPhones are nowhere to be seen due to cost and likelihood that the teens will lose them before the contract is up.
• Games consoles: Surprisingly in this teen’s research, only a third of the teens had games consoles at home, with 50% owning Nintendo’s Wii console, 40% an XBox and a measly 10% with PS3’s, Sony’s prohibitively expensive console.
• Social networks: Less surprisingly, Facebook is the clear winner in terms of favourite way to spend time online. Twitter doesn’t ring true with these teens, probably due to the time it takes to get to a stage where the service feels gratifying, versus Facebook that excites as soon as a friend or two are added.

For some unknown reason (slow news week?), this report got far beyond the teen’s direct summer manager and was truly acknowledged by City bosses.

While I think many of the observations don’t necessarily reflect the rest of Britain’s teens’ reality, it was a great read: Uninhibited, honest words, without the usual adult filter that causes us to speak in much less absolute terms. I think we should all try to see the world through a 15 year old’s eyes every so often, we’d notice amazing things.