Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • Rework

    I just finished “Rework” the latest book from the 37signals folks. If you aren’t familiar with 37signals you should be. They are a small, profitable, opinionated software firm.

    I read their first book “Getting Real”. Frankly, if you read that, you probably don’t need to read Rework. I read “Getting Real” while working at CS STARS and it immediately struck a chord. “Yes, that’s how I want to work”, was my immediate reaction. Nothing in the book was earth shattering to me, but it was very affirming.

    The nice thing about starting your own company with folks you like and who think like you is that without even trying, you end up with the kind of company you always wanted. Reading “Rework” was fun because I constantly said to myself, “yes, that’s exactly what we are doing”.

    If you haven’t read anything from 37signals, you should check out “Rework”. It’s a very quick read and is dead on.

  • Google ads vs Bing

    After a short period of comparable data (same time frame, same keywords) in a niche market, a quick comparison:

    Impressions (number of times our ad was shown)

    • Google: 1,122
    • Bing: 234

    Interestingly, that ratio is pretty comparable to the cost difference. You pay about 5 times as much per click for Google as for Bing (for our keywords – your actual experience may vary).

    Since there is much less competition for ads on Bing (again, for our keywords) getting top placement is cake. Which of course drives the lower prices for the ads.

    But over this short time frame, the clicks from Google are only twice that of Bing. So while Google is king, you get your money’s worth from Bing…

    (note to Microsoft, the above catch phrase is available for a nominal fee)

  • Evil Empire

    Is Apple the new Evil Empire? Closed system, war on Flash, treating iPhone developers like crap and suing everyone in sight.

    Kind of evil…

  • AdWords

    We recently started advertising OrigamiRisk with Google AdWords.  Nothing much, just an experiment to see how it drives traffic. If you aren’t familiar with AdWords, this is what puts a “sponsored link” next to your search results. The most fascinating thing about AdWords is the data. Google is great with data. And since you only pay if a user actually clicks on the ad, the costs are not much (and if you are paying a lot it’s because your ad is working).

    You can create multiple text versions of your ad. Google will automatically detect which one is getting more clicks and show that one more often.

    You can let you ad run and later Google will suggest other keywords that you might want to include in your ad. And Google will show you exactly how many searches you might get per month with that keyword. And how much competition there is to advertise.

    The most fascinating part about it is the whole algorithm for how it works. Every time Google displays ads it is running a mini auction. Every advertiser has specified how much they will pay for a keyword ad. Or you can let Google optimize your bid to the auction (and your budget). Then with a combination of the auction price and what Google views as your “quality score” (Google doesn’t want to be serving up ads that aren’t relevant) your ad will get placed higher or lower depending.

    I’m not sold on the “content network” though. You can advertise on Google search and you can include their “content network”. The content network includes web sites, blogs and gmail. But you have less control because Google is just trying to detect relevance. I recently turned off the content network because none of the sites really seemed relevant. We are in such a niche market.

    And one of the best things you can track is a “conversion”. That means that the ad actually got someone to click where you want. So if we are trying to get people to sign up for a free demo, we can track if a user who clicked on our ad actually went to the demo page.

    It’s quite fascinating, but again the best part is the data. I know how many times each of our ads was displayed for each keyword and how many times someone clicked on it. And based on the data I can modify the campaign on the fly.

    Kind of fun actually…

  • Interesting

    Apple revenue by segment

  • Apple to Flash: Drop Dead

    Everyone is talking about the iPad. Some people love it, some people are underwhelmed. Regardless of what you think, it’s a big deal.

    But here’s my side story. Apple is trying to kill Flash.

    It was one thing when you were talking about the iPhone. Not having Flash support was an annoyance but not a big deal. But now you are talking about a device that Apple says is “the best way to surf the web”.

    The best way to surf the web does not support Flash.

    Now there are a lot of issues with Flash. Search engines generally can’t handle them well, so Flash is discouraged for many web sites. Also HTML5 may ultimately push out proprietary solutions like Flash. But in many cases it works very well.

    Imagine you have a Flash heavy site. Anyone who buys an iPad can’t use it. That is likely to be a decent sized audience. What do you do?

    Hearing the pre-hype for the Apple tablet, I started thinking, “hmm, our family computer is ancient. This might do the trick”. But Danielle has been sick the last few days. She goes to the computer and goes straight to nickjr.com. Where she plays games. Flash games.

    She also plays games on my wife’s iPhone, so despite losing nickjr.com, she would probably like the iPad. And I think that is exactly what Apple is counting on.

    Bye Flash, nice knowing you…

  • Almost funny…

    …if it weren’t deadly serious. A British company came up with an amazing bomb detector. It works very mysteriously, kind of like a dowsing rod. The company makes lots of money selling it to the Iragi military, who is convinced that it works. Unfortunately it does not.

    It starts to get press (not good) and ultimately gets investigated. The BBC points out that the device is worthless and the founder of the company gets arrested for fraud.

    As a reminder to people who believe in this sort of foolishness. There has been a $1 million prize promised to anyone who can scientifically prove that any sort of supernatural thing (dowsers, psychics, etc.) works in a controlled environment. This challenge has been in place since 1964 (though the money started much smaller) yet no one has been able to claim the money.

    Much easier to get money from suckers…

  • News Flash: Customer Support is Important

    Google releases a new phone. You can’t buy it in a store, only online. And support is only available from Google via email?

    Was the plan to look bad on purpose?

    Seriously, anyone could have seen this coming. Users are users. Even with a perfect product, users will figure out how to screw something up, and no v1 product is perfect.

    So you were pretty much assured that there would be users who can’t get something working but they can’t take the phone back to the store or talk to someone on the phone.

    They clearly didn’t think this one through.

    We’ll see if they can work out the kinks before it’s available on Verizon. Otherwise I’m going Droid…

  • Bloomberg Opens Up City Data

    I missed this when it first happened back in October. Mayor Bloomberg opened up 170 city data sets to public application developers and sponsored a competition to see who could come up with the best app.

    How cool is that?

    There are a ton of apps that hit the NYC Restaurant Inspection results. I recommend not using these apps before you visit your favorite restaurant. Sometimes it’s better not to know…

    There’s an amusing broken parking meter iPhone app. You are legally allowed to park at a broken meter for an hour, so this helpful app helps you find one.

    And here’s a fascinating page showing home price statistics over time.

    Open up the data, let developers at it and interesting things will result…

  • Happy Winter Solstice

    OK, I lied. Another post before Christmas. But only because this post amused me. First of all, I didn’t realize the sunrise/sunset part (apparently the earliest sunset in Brooklyn happened on December 9th this year). And second, I laughed at the eggs standing on end reference. If you understand what he’s talking about, then you are a science geek like me…