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Archive for June, 2014

The Importance of Cursive

Monday, June 16th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/derrypubliclibrary/3761481527Writing in cursive is considered slow and inefficient, not to mention old-fashioned, whereas computers are productivity tools.

They help people do stuff faster and more efficiently.

They can automate repetitive work and help organize complex projects.

But like most things, computers, and now other smart devices, have a dark side.

Computers can kill creativity and thinking itself, along with social skills like empathy.

Keyboarding is a good example; it eliminates the need to write, which people see as a good thing, because they can type much faster than they can write.

But that efficiency is a double-edged sword.

Research now shows that kids learn better when they write longhand using cursive, as opposed to printing or typing.

For adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information.

Beyond damaging the ability to learn, the inability to write cursive usually reflects an inability to read it.

While at first glance that may not seem important, a second look and you realize that it shuts you out of anything that was discussed in correspondence, first person journaling and dozens of other human interactions over centuries.

Even if Google was able to scan all the hand-written archives, they could not be read.

If you aren’t familiar with cursive, trying to read something written in it is akin to trying to read a Russian document when you don’t know the Russian alphabet.

If you don’t know cursive, find a place to learn it.

You’ll be surprisedatn the value it will add to your world.

Of course, you may be one of those people who believe that anything that predates computers and the Internet has no value.

If so, you deserve my sympathy—and my contempt.

Flickr image credit: derrypubliclibrary

If the Shoe Fits: Pitching Familiarity Blindness

Friday, June 13th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mYesterday we looked at content problems associated with over-familiarity with your products/services and that same over-familiarity can weaken your investor pitch.

Investors are similar to customers in terms of what they want to know—the difference is viewpoint.

  • Where customers want to know what your product/service will do to solve their problem, investors want to know how many have the problem, in other words, how large is the market.
  • Customers don’t care about your technology/IP; neither do investors other than to be sure that it is unique and protected, i.e., patented or, at least, patent pending.
  • Customers love it when you save them something—money, time, effort—investors love it when you make them something— money.

These days investors are far more focused on “how will you make money,” as opposed to “how will you acquire users.”

This is especially true if you are pitching a web service.

Bottom line; talk tech to the people you hang with, talk money and market to your investors.

Image credit: HikingArtist    

Entrepreneurs: Content Familiarity Blindness

Thursday, June 12th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/findyoursearch/7490295028One of the biggest problems I run into when I work with startups is what I call “familiarity blindness.”

I see it most frequently in the content I am asked to revamp, but also occasionally in the products/services themselves.

Familiarity blindness is the result of being immersed in an idea at its most basic level from conception on and the result is often a version of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Typically, tech entrepreneurs are in love with their tech. They love to talk about it and it often forms the basis for discussion with their peers.

What tech entrepreneurs often have trouble accepting is that most customers don’t care.

That’s why it’s so important to know how your product/service is actually viewed by your market and that means getting out of the incubator or coffee house into the real world and talking to your target audience—not just talking, but really listening to what they say. (See yesterday’s post for help identifying and understanding your value proposition.)

When it comes to content, for your website, ads, articles, etc., “less is definitely more.”

Skip the technology, no matter how cool or groundbreaking, or even what it does, unless you are talking about what it does for your users/customers.

The exceptions are articles and interviews with technical media and even then what it does is usually more important than the technical description of how it does it.

Generally speaking, the only thing your potential users/customers care about is how your product/service will benefit them.

And they want to know quickly and painlessly and to understand with little mental effort on their part required.

Join me tomorrow for a look at familiarity blindness when pitching.

Flickr image credit:

A Better Interviewing Approach for Candidates

Wednesday, June 11th, 2014

Startups talk about their “value proposition.”

Sales people present their product as the solution to customers’ “problems/pain”.

As a candidate you should do both.

The smartest candidates recognize this and position themselves as high-value solutions that will make the manager look good to the higher-ups.

Steve Blank’s video explains how to identify and evaluate the value proposition of your product or service, but with very little tweaking you can apply it to yourself.

Candidates who focus primarily on what the company will do for them a la compensation, stock, benefits, promotions, etc., will miss many of the best opportunities, because managers see that attitude as a form of narcissism.

In other words, managers have problems and hire the best solution, i.e., candidate, to solve them.

Or to paraphrase JFK, think not what the manager/company can do for you, but what you can do for the manager/company.

AO OnDemand 2014: Kevin Longa

Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

kg_charles-harrisAs I was entering AO OnDemand 2014 and moving toward the main conference auditorium, I ran into Kevin Longa, a young entrepreneur I had met two years ago at a Hackers & Founders meetup.  We got to talking and I found him very pleasant; having just graduated from UCLA he was on a search for what next he wanted to do.  Keving found that deciding on whether to join a startup, go traveling to experience more of his Asian roots (he’s mixed) or continue his education was challenging and in some ways confusing.

Well, whenever I meet young people at that stage in life I believe it’s important to impress upon them that taking some time up-front to experience life in other parts of the world and with other people than usual is often a good way to get perspective and get started on the next stage of life.  I believe it’s important to actually take some time to experience life, before being continually caught up in the hustle and bustle of one of the most stressful cultures on earth—American society.

To my surprise he listened attentively to my pontification and later embarked upon a long trip to Asia while also shooting a documentary series encompassing the four passions of his life – food, entrepreneurship, travel and film.  He has now reached the point where he is in post-production with some of the work he has created and is continuously adding to his body of work.  And above all—he seems happy.

Encountering him now, two years later, was a great experience for me.  After his travels he received a scholarship to Draper University where he further immersed himself in the art and craft of entrepreneurship.  His greatest takeaway was how to think about problem solving, team building, adversity and loneliness as an entrepreneur, rather than hard skills such as law, market research or accounting.

There is no doubt in my mind that Kevin will be successful.  He has an ability to learn and to adapt to new situations in a way that’s unusual for a lot of people.  In addition, he has that quality that is absolutely necessary in an entrepreneur: tenacity. 

I’ve seen so many get out of the game just as they were about to break through.  The level of determination and sacrifice necessary to succeed is rarely stressed enough, but anyone who has succeeded knows that success would often elude us, without “stick-to-itiveness” and an almost masochistic ability to increase commitment when others would judge it hopeless. 

This is true regardless of industry and calling—the cost of entrepreneurship is high and fraught with failure.  People like Kevin will succeed because he works tirelessly, learning and pushing forward even when things are difficult. 

AO OnDemand 2014: BeyondCore

Monday, June 9th, 2014

kg_charles-harris

This week I attended AO OnDemand 2014—a good conference for understanding how the enterprise SaaS ecosystem and its up-and-coming young companies are developing.  The conference also details market changes that are happening around mergers and acquisitions and the strategic moves that large enterprise software players are making to position themselves.

As usual there was an interesting group of people there, everything from startup executives to representatives from EMC, SAP, Oracle and others, which made for good networking with a variety of people from interesting companies.

What I’d like to highlight today is BeyondCore, a very interesting data analytics company I’ve been following on the Internet for more than a year.  Since I’m in the big data analytics market myself, I spend a lot of time getting to know the environment and make it a point to follow the most interesting new companies. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the newly hired VP Marketing Sandra Peterson and their CEO Arijit Sengupta.  They’ve created a brilliant piece of software that truly solves some of the problems in the data analytics world—especially when directed at the business user.  Not only does it automatically look for what’s interesting in the data and present it to you, but it also provides you with an automated analysis to help you better understand the relevant points in the data. 

These are exactly the types of functionality that Sandra highlighted when I asked her why she joined the company.  She had only come on board three days prior, so of course it was interesting to understand why an experienced senior marketing executive would join a young company (other than the options package and pay, of course…).

What she brought up was the unique combination of personal characteristics of Arijit, the founder.  His tenacity as a technology visionary to struggle with the problems of building a company against all odds and his infectious communication of the advantages in the product he’d created in a way that average people could understand were clear attractions for her beyond the technology itself.  I certainly saw both when he briefly demoed the product for me.

BeyondCore has an impressive product with a good team; I wish them good fortune and will continue to follow their development and successes.

If the Shoe Fits: Women on Your Board

Friday, June 6th, 2014

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mDo you have or are you planning to put a woman on your board as you grow?

If you are like most of tech and many other companies you aren’t/won’t.

What if it wasn’t about diversity, but about money?

What if having a woman would actually increase your ROI and valuation?

Most boards—public or private, tech or not—fit perfectly into the description offered by one governance expert: “male, pale and stale.”

The last thing most tech people consider themselves is stale, but when it comes to what women want in a product/service or how to engage them they usually come up short.

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies learned the hard way that drugs act differently in men and women.

The automobile and many other industries have traveled a slow and painful road to understanding how and why women buy their product, as well as what they want.

But can just one female board member make that much difference?

One recent report from Credit Suisse analyzed 2,360 companies around the world over the six years ended in December 2011. It found that companies with one or more women on their boards generated higher average share prices and better returns on equity during that period than companies with no women as directors.

As a startup your board is small and usually made up of investors, but that doesn’t stop you from having women on your advisory board, executive team and in senior positions.

Just please don’t use the tired old excuse of “no qualified women available.”

It isn’t true, but it certainly drives home your “stale” mindset.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Entrepreneurs: Medical Breakthroughs

Thursday, June 5th, 2014

Cerviscope

Cerviscope

Not all entrepreneurs start companies and develop apps, just as most world-changing breakthroughs are not software-based.

Many of the most inventive idea that will affect millions of people around the world are being done in giant corporations, academia and non-profits.

This is especially true when it comes to medical breakthroughs that are truly the stuff of humanity’s dreams.

20 years ago Dr. David Walmer went to Haiti to help paint a church. What he saw was so appalling he spent the next twenty years developing the CerviScope, an affordable tool to diagnose cervical cancer.

In the United States, cervical cancer is considered a preventable disease. “You have 10 years to detect this disease before it becomes untreatable,” Walmer says. “And it’s easy to detect. It develops on the outside of the cervix, which you can see.”

For those who watch Gray’s Anatomy this story about using modified HIV may seem a bit familiar.

There was nothing else to try. Nothing except a crazy experimental treatment never before given to a child: Blood was taken out of 6-year-old Emily’s body, passed through a machine to remove her white cells and put back in. Then scientists at the University of Pennsylvania used a modified HIV virus to genetically reprogram those white cells so that they would attack her cancer, and reinjected them. (…) [When the reaction almost killed her] Doctors gave Emily a rheumatoid arthritis drug that stopped the immune system storm–without protecting the cancer. Emily awoke on her 7th birthday and slowly recovered. A week later her bone marrow was checked. Emily’s father, an electrical lineman named Tom Whitehead, remembers getting the call from her doctor, Stephan Grupp: “It worked. She’s cancer free.”

Another approach is to tweak the body’s own immune system to stop cancer.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute sequenced the genome of her cancer and identified cells from her immune system that attacked a specific mutation in the malignant cells. Then they grew those immune cells in the laboratory and infused billions of them back into her bloodstream.

Yet another effort uses genetically modified bacteria to target a specific protein found in most brain cancers.

The vaccine, known as ADU-623, uses a genetically modified version of the bacterium listeria monocytogenes — the bacterium that in its native form causes the listeria infection — and a specific mutated protein found only in cancer cells, said Keith Bahjat, a researcher at Providence Cancer Center in Portland. The protein used is found in more than half of brain cancers (…) The idea is to provoke an immune response to the bacterium, assuming the immune system will then also target the proteins found in the cancer cells. The goal is to wipe out the pieces of tumor that are so intertwined with brain tissue they cannot be completely removed by surgery.

Also to be noted, cancer diagnostics are going to the dogs.

Tsunami, a regal-looking dog with attentive eyes and an enthusiastic tail wag for her trainer friends. University of Pennsylvania researchers say she is more than 90 percent successful in identifying the scent of ovarian cancer in tissue samples, (…)  The largest study ever done on cancer-sniffing dogs found they can detect prostate cancer by smelling urine samples with 98 percent accuracy. At least one application is in the works seeking U.S. approval of a kit using breath samples to find breast cancer.

Pretty cool, and a friend/researcher in the industry tells me that rats are used to do diagnostic testing of sickle cell anemia.

On another front,  paralysis isn’t being ignored, either, leading to an amazing discovery.

But now, scientists are developing technology that can read signals directly from the brain and restore motion to a paralyzed hand — no healthy spine required.

Last, but not least, a look at how dentistry has seen the light in a way that could change a lot more than tooth replacement.

A Harvard-led team just successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. (…)  The ability to naturally regrow dental tissue could transform dentistry, making it possible to regrow teeth instead of replacing them with a substitute like porcelain. But even more amazingly, once it’s better understood, this same technique could potentially be used to heal wounds and regenerate bone, skin, and muscle.

Truly amazing, life-changing innovation happening in our lifetime.

Flickr image credit: Family HM

Miki’s Rules to Live by: Diffusing Disappointment

Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fatbwoy/2380628441There will always be people who disappoint, whether in your personal or professional life.

If their presence is outside of your control and/or they are part of your long-term world there is a simple-to-understand, but difficult-to-implement approach to dealing with them.

 

You can not control other people’s words or actions.

You can only control your expectations and reactions.

Any form of self-control is a hands-on effort that can’t be outsourced or multi-tasked.

And while both involve control, investing your energy in the second type will provide far higher ROI.

Flickr image credit: fatbwoy

Ducks in a Row: Do You Use Humor?

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

4155116655_9596d1aa1e_mWhen you want your people to do, or not do, something how do you approach the topic?

  • Plead
  • Make statements
  • Pronounce edicts
  • Create policy
  • Threaten as in ‘or else’

When presenting, selling or just speaking are you serious, passionate, off-the-cuff or pragmatic?

No matter your approach, learning the principals of comedy will improve the results.

…skills that all good comedians know—such as storytelling, reading nonverbal cues, engaging an audience, dealing with hostility and silence, and more.

When I was a recruiter I always started my cold calls with the same words—“Hi, I’m Miki Saxon and I’m a headhunter;” they always laughed and when someone laughs you know they are listening.

Like this sign, humor gets more attention than threats, a more positive reaction and better compliance.

do-not-park

Humor can pierce attitudes and pry open minds.

Using humor isn’t about telling jokes; it’s about finding lighter ways to engage your audience even when the subject is serious.

Few people would find the death of the groom during sex on his wedding night to be funny, but if you remember Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn it was hilarious.

Humor is in the delivery as opposed to the subject.

Best of all, using humor is not an inborn skill; anybody can learn how to do it.

Maybe not well enough to appear on Saturday Night Live, but well enough to motivate your team or close a sale.

Flickr image credits: Duck: Tambako The Jaguar; Sign: Angela Schmeidel Randall

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