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Manufactured Landscapes on The Hour
Whatever happened to Pac-Man?
The End of the Road for AOL?
Fast Company has a good article on what happened to AOL. This paragraph from the article seems to sum it up. In April 2005, he launched AOL Internet Phone, an entirely new product that he spent millions developing. To recoup costs, the monthly fee was set at almost double what competitor Vonage charged. "The rationale they told each other internally was that, 'Oh, well, we have all these extra features customers want,'" says a former executive. "In fact, people didn't want features. They wanted a phone, cheaper." And because of tangled billing systems, at first only AOL's ISP customers could subscribe to Internet Phone. This was no small glitch: Internet Phone ran on broadband only. So AOL's dial-up subscribers would need a separate high-speed connection to make it work. As if that weren't farcical enough, sources say that just before the launch the company's board refused to let the service compete in cities where Time Warner Cable was offering its own VOIP service. In the end, Internet Phone had a mere 2,000 subscribers when it was canceled in October 2006. I don't read the amount of business books that I used to but this was painful reading. How can a company this large be run so poorly? Well then again they aren't alone; GM, Ford, Air Canada, ABC, AOL, and at different times, Apple. via Labels: business, leadership, technology
Documentary Technology
A bunch of you have asked what technology I am using for the documentary that I am working on. I posted a link to the camera before but here are the rest of the setup. - Canon ZR-800 | Spencer Burke had an Sanyo Xacti that he used down in Soularize that I loved it. Recording to SD cards is a wonderful feature. When I got the idea for this project, one of the things that a Saskatoon police officer said, "Make sure you can walk away from your camera. I would hate for you to get hurt over it." The ZR-800 met that requirement. It also has an external mic jack which eliminates the need for the internal mic and the horrible motor noise it picks up (the main weakness of the camera). It also shoots in 16:9 format.
- Sima Video Bracket | This came from Amazon.com and was a little frustrating to buy. I tried to get one here but Don's Photo and several other stores told me that they didn't exist and had to be bought for a specific camera. Ummm, they don't. It screws into the bottom of the camera where the tripod mount goes. It also allows for some steadier camera shots.
- AUDIO TECHNICA ATR-35S Lavalier Microphone | Audio-Technica ATR25 Stereo Condenser Microphone The before mentioned external mics.
As for editing. I won't be doing that much of it is but Adobe Premier is pretty much the only option. I am still looking for a good bag but I haven't found anything I like yet. If you have any suggestions, leave them below. Labels: documentary, technology
My Essential Windows Software
 My laptop was slowly starting to die. Wendy dropped it off the couch and the motherboard was damaged where the a/c adapter plugs in. A friend was able to repair it was but it was needing some more work.
I looked around at a bunch of notebooks and the big question was to go with Vista or stay with XP. I thought briefly about getting a MacBook or an G4 iBook but decided against it. This article in the New York Times today affirmed my decision. After talking with some friends who had gone to Vista and looking at some reviews online, I decided to stay with XP and pick up a cheap Dell Latitude D600 which I got off lease buy back. Vista seems sluggish with under 2 gigs of RAM and even with a dual core, it seems slow. I'll wait until some quad cores start appearing in notebooks to upgrade or take the plunge and go to Ubuntu in a year. Today I spent a couple of hours downloading and getting my new laptop working again. I don't know what you use but here is what I use to get things done. Office Suite and Productivity Internet Web Design Utilities - CC Cleaner (free) I just started to use this but I like it better than EZ Cleaner.
- EZ Cleaner (free)
- PDF Creator (free) Since I use Open Office which does a good job of publishing to PDF, I don't use this a lot but every once in a while I need a PDF from a different program and this does a great job.
- Fox It Reader (free) So much faster than Adobe Acrobat that it is ridiculous and should make Adobe ashamed of themselves.
Media Players I do use a bunch of web apps like Gmail (although I use Thunderbird for work) and Google Reader. Labels: technology
Upcoming
A couple of months ago I was seriously thinking about moving out of Saskatoon. The real estate market is hot and until you have lived in Saskatoon for a winter, you have no idea how cold and miserable it can be from November to March. Now Saskatoon in the summer is a wonderful place. Festivals, parks, long hot summer nights, most restaurants have a patio to relax with friends on and literally thousands of lakes within driving distance. Winter it is different. Around 300,000 people just try to stay warm. Even Al Gore idles his car when he doesn't have to in Saskatchewan. Now I could drive to Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Regina but I only gain a degree or two in warmth at most in any of these places and only Calgarians have managed to enjoy the winter and only then because they get chinooks all of the time. I haven't seen a true chinook in many years and this winter is as cold as any others. Now to be fair, there is hockey but the Saskatoon Blades are brutal this year and are in yet another rebuilding season so driving to an arena to pay good money to watch bad hockey and then not have your car start, is not a fun way to spend the winter. Since I decided not to move to someplace warm, I decided to make the best of Saskatchewan this winter. To keep us from going crazy this year, Wendy and I have had to start looking high and low for things to do. There are a couple of sites that do list things in Saskatoon but none that I find do that great of job. After bookmarking a lot of different sites in trying to see what was up around town, Wendy and I started to enter the interesting items at Upcoming, which is a pretty great service by Yahoo! To sum it up, Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference. For Wendy and I, it is also our calendar of social events which gets used to schedule holidays and day offs around. For me it also gives me something to look forward to and our friends a site to plan around. I also use it with Resonate, our group features events that are interest to the emerging church in Canada (check out our group and add anything that you know of if you are so inclined). If you haven't signed up for Upcoming, you may want to check it out, check out your city, and see what you can find and add to the community. I should also point out that it now integrates with Flickr so when you post to Flickr, add the correct Flickr tag, your photos show up on Upcoming. Of course it comes with things like RSS, integration with Google Calendar (which surprised me), and other Web 2.0 bells and whistles. If you are wondering, here is my profile on Upcoming (it is also on the blogs footer). Wendy's profile can be found here. Remember if you know of anything interesting and worth going to... Labels: friends, technology, Wendy Cooper
How to download video off of YouTube
Some of you have asked how to download a video off of YouTube. I found a website called vixy.net which works when the server isn't that busy but they have created a beta downloader that works pretty good that you can download for free. It has some bugs but it downloads and converts video to mp4 format which works for your iPod or PSP just fine. Now it doesn't work for Google Video but many of the videos can be downloaded right from the site. Labels: technology, video
The next version of Blogger
I was home sick yesterday and thought to myself that since I was pretty much immobilized that this would be a good time to switch to Wordpress. I looked at AKMA's new blog and I really like his template and went looking around for some other templates I liked. That is when I realized why I don't like WordPress. It is the themes. I am finding that sites like Adam Cleaveland and AKMA's site are the exceptions and many, many WordPress themes compete with the content rather than let the content shine. The minimalistic themes that I like seem to have been used over at Wordpress.com so I would have a theme just like everyone elses. I installed MovableType 4.x the other day and while I liked it, it is a lot harder to use than it needs to be. I can't believe that blogroll support was not included and has to be added via a plugin. Also, Windows Live Writer does not work with Movable Type for some reason. I suppose I am looking for a Typepad type version which SA is smart enough not to do because everyone would host Typepad themselves which would cannibalize their revenues. I did try out a free trial of Typepad and I do like it but then I am paying to host my site at Typepad and then also some hosting for Resonate as well on a different site which makes little sense. Although importing 8000+ posts into WordPress is easy but rather difficult into Typepad or MT. If anyone has an easy solution for this, I think I would switch. In the end I am still using Blogger and here are a couple of features I would love to see for those of us who use FTP and host our blogs ourselves. - Integration with Google Sitemaps. I know it can use my RSS feed to update with but there has to be a better solution for our old content. The publication of a complete sitemap of our blog content would be wonderful, even if the file was stored on Google's servers.
- A separate archives and labels page. This way people could browse our labels and archives easier and we could even move our listing of archives off our main page if we so desire. Actually Blogger used to do this and it is a feature I would love back.
- Some new templates please. If Yahoo! 360 has more template options, something is wrong. In the Pyra days you had design competitions. Do one again and involve the Blogger and design community. You may be surprised.
- Integration with del.icio.us: I don't know who started this feud but it would be great if my contextless links could be posted daily via del.icio.us. While you are at it, could you get together with some of your old coworkers at Obvious and work out some cool inline Twitter integration as well.
- Can you please enable labels of longer then 100 posts. When Blogger publishes it republishes almost all of my categories anyways. Why not have it publish less unchanged pages and update a couple of current pages. Limit each label to 100 posts on a page but simple do the "previous" link to older labels.
Labels: blogging, design, technology
Review of the PlayStation Portable
A couple of you have e-mailed me and asked about the PlayStation Portable my brother gave me for Christmas. I have been e-mailing everyone back but I thought I would post a review of the device here. I have wanted a PSP since Lee got one a couple of years ago and have used his from time to time. The one that I was given is the PSP Slim and Lite and since I have been given it, I downloaded the latest firmware (3.80). The new PSP is 19% thinner and 30% lighter which is a noticeable difference. I also bought a two gig memory stick for my PSP. I actually got a package of two 2 gig memory sticks for for $30. Since it was with a gift card Lee gave me, I gave him a card as well. The other accessory I bought was a nice leather case that protects the PSP and when open works as a stand for my video. I bought a hard sided case as I tend to toss stuff like this in backpacks and I wanted something that could take some abuse. While the Sony cases are around $30 at the Sony Store, I bought my case for $5 at EB Games. While you need a memory stick, I would also say that the next most important accessory is a good case. The game quality is pretty similar to our PS2 which is pretty incredible considering the size. I am not a huge gamer but I have picked up a couple of sports games. EA NHL 07, MLB 07 The Show, and Madden 07. Since we are in the heart of winter I am playing a season on The Show but this may end when I can get a baseball fix when spring training opens. The game play is pretty similar to a PS2 console but not nearly as comfortable. My wrists bother me by the time the game is over so it isn't really designed for gaming marathons. Several of the games can be played against another PSP via an Ad-Hoc wireless network. Watching video is better than expected. You can the PSP Media Manager to easily place videos on your PSP System’s Memory Stick Duo. You can purchase the PSP Media Manager for about $30 or you can download it for free off of the Japanese Sony website. Once you get it installed, PSP Media Manager will search your PC for videos, and then convert them to PSP format and transfer them to you Memory Stick Duo. Of course you can buy a wide variety of UMDs and watch them from it. Again this is where a good case comes in. We haven't done any long road trips since we have gotten ours but some UMDs should keep Mark happy and eliminates the need for a portable DVD player. The web browser was what I was most interested in and I had quite low expectations. The first time I saw it was in an earlier firmware release and it made most sites look brutal. Since then the browser seems to have gotten better and renders most sites correctly. Entering information is similar to using a cell phone so you won't be writing really long essays with it or anything like that but once I got some sites in there and bookmarked a bunch of other sites, I found it a pretty good web browser. It's quick boot time means that I often grab it to check out the news and sports scores as well as checking out several blogs. It makes it easy to read Gmail and I have used it off an on with Twitter. The text entry limitations would make it impractical to write e-mail or blog. It comes with a RSS reader that don't seem to like Atom feeds but it handles other feeds okay. I still prefer iTunes for podcasts and Google Reader for other feeds but it isn't that bad. With the latest firmware update, it now comes with an Internet radio player that is powered by Shoutcast. Wendy seem to be fondest of that feature in her search for the cheesiest music playing online at the most inappropriate moment. Of course I have to admit I am looking forward to the next update which should include Skype and make your PSP into a pretty cool VOIP phone. As a music player it is okay. It won't replace your iPod, on a trip it works well enough to be the only device you need to take with you. So how does it compare to other devices? While the iPod Touch offers a lot of same features and the ability to enter text easily, it doesn't offer the game playing ability. The Nintendo DS does offer some excellent game play features, it doesn't offer the media playing capabilities. While some have compared it to Windows CE devices, it isn't a fair comparisons as at the end of the day, this is a gaming system with additional media capabilities. To compare it to other devices isn't really fair to it or them. That being said, if you are a media freak, the iPod Touch is your machine but at $100 more then the PSP. If you are a gaming person or competitive with your brother who lives in your basement, then the PSP is the choice. Around here it has been a hit with Lee and I but also I find Wendy and Mark enjoying it as well. With the cost coming down, it actually becomes a lot more affordable to us non-Sony fanboys out there. If you know someone that has one, make sure you check it out. Labels: Lee Cooper, technology
Netscape Navigator RIP
 It was a lot of fun while it lasted but on February 1st, it all ends as Netscape's browser is put to rest. Like almost everyone, I used and loved Netscape 2 and 3. Version 3 had a WYSIWYG editor built into the Gold edition which I used to make quite a few websites back in the day. I was an early adopter of Netscape Communicator (so incredibly slow) but quickly ditched it when the stand alone Navigator came out (4.08) and used Eudora as my e-mail client. The first time I ever saw it installed was years ago on a friends computer and it was so much cooler than Lynx which I was using via a shell account to get online back then. For years after that the only time I would use Internet Explorer was so I could download Netscape and then get some real work done. At work, I insisted that Netscape be installed on any computer I used and it wasn't until IE 6 came out that I truly gave up on Netscape not seeing a major update (Netscape 6 under AOL was horrible). Of course by that time Firefox was around to give me hope and I never had to endure the nightmare that was Internet Explorer.
It's hard to grasp that AOL paid $4.2 billion for Netscape back in the day. (Here was Wired's take on it back in 1999) I don't think they got their money worth. It was fun while it lasted and I am sad to see one of the greatest products of all time come to an end. Labels: history, technology
9 Days Left: One Laptop Per Child
There is a 2 for 1 deal at the One Laptop Per Child's website. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving). Labels: education, technology
Getting Things Done
I am into the second week as being the Residential Coordinator at work. Today is a quiet day which is letting me get some much needed tasks done. I am struggling with a couple of things that can be shared on this blog that have to do with more technology than anything. I spend a lot of time out of my office in meetings and away from a web connection. At work I have a nice fast desktop computer but it is a desktop computer and not a subnotebook and that poses some challenges since I am spending a lot of time running around in a lot of meetings. I do carry a Moleskine notebook for those meetings but I need some advice on how to store my notes and to do lists. Here are my requirements. - Outlook is not an option. I hate Outlook.
- It can't be a web based solution. I need to store the data locally.
- Back in my Windows 3.x days, there were some great freeware/shareware free form databases. Anyone use them anymore?
- Anyone know a freeware/cheap contact manager that is good. My address book is Outlook Express right now and that just feels wrong. That and many of the organizations that I connect with are telephone and fax based.
- Using my old Palm might be an option. Anyone use them anymore? Is Palm Desktop decent?
- Data has to be easy to move from computer to computer or storable on the network (preferably both).
Suggestions? (Update: I am giving the Palm Desktop a try which is a really, really nice freeware Personal Information Manager even if you don't have a Palm) Labels: technology, work
iPod Touch vs. iPod Nano
My goal was that after I got back from the Bahamas, I wanted to replace my iPod which I miss horribly. When the new iPod Nano's came out, I wasn't impressed but the new form factors have grown on me and I find myself more and more tempted by the 8 gig version. This week I was in Future Shop and they had a iPod Touch which I was able to play with and was blown away. I never tried to log into Gmail or Blogger so I am not sure if they will work with that and I was sad to see that Apple had eliminated calendar editing. After reading some reviews, I am tempted to get the iPod Nano and wait for the iPod Touch 2.x to be released. Labels: blogging, technology
Soularize Old School
Because absolutely no one has asked for it and I will be in front my laptop for part of Soularize, I thought I would set up an old school webcam that updates every 60 seconds or so while we are at the main sessions. Of course you can watch a live feed but you can now check in and see if anything is going on via cutting edge 1984 technology... the webcam. If by fluke it captures anything really great, I will post it to the blog as well. Labels: Soularize, technology
Five Overlooked Web Tools for Churches and Non-Profits
Despite all of the hype about Facebook (which I find invasive), there are some other web apps out there that are worth a look at to help a church or non-profit connect with people online. Below are five of my favorites and some ideas on how they could be (better) used. - Upcoming :: It used be Upcoming.org but it was acquired by Yahoo! and is now at upcoming.yahoo.com. What's so great about it? Well it's local. As you submit an event and a venue, it lists the event locally. When someone from your town or city logs into the site, whether they are logged in or not, they are shown what events are coming up in their area. It also allows you to great sub groups for a church, club, or network that you can subscribe to. Of course it also provides you with RSS feeds for yourself, your city, and any groups you are a part of. And since it is owned by Yahoo!, it also is "taggy" and also allows you to cross post to Google Calendar. How would I use it? I would set up a Upcoming group for my org and then post the big things that are coming down the pike. For a church I would post things that would be of interest to the entire community but I would be careful not to spam it (posting your weekly worship service or prayer meeting for example). Within my organization and on my website, I would give the occasional shout out to Upcoming. Why? The more people who use it locally, the better the site becomes for the entire community. Already Wendy and I have gone to a couple of events that we would never have heard about unless it was posted to Upcoming. Other people have said the same thing.
- Craigslist and Kijiji :: Both a different expressions of the same thing but they are local community bulletin boards where you can buy, sell, barter and list events. Saskatoon has both and of the two, saskatoon.kijiji.ca seems to get more traffic but saskatoon.craigslist.org has sent more traffic to the Church of the Exiles when we have used it. I would use both of them in a similar way that I would use Upcoming.
- Flickr :: Not a lot of communities and organizations are using Flickr and I am not sure why. Those that do, tend to ignore it after a while. I was cleaning out my RSS feeds the other night and there was a lot of local church Flickr feeds that hadn't been updated in a couple of years. On the other hand, I look at how much more I check out the John Edwards or Barack Obama photostreams. Probably the best examples of how to use Flickr would be Grace's photo pool (which features excellent photography from Jonny Baker and Steve Collins among others). The Church of the Exiles has a photo pool as well which features some shots from Nathan Pederson, Wendy, and myself. On a network level, Resonate has created Resonate Stories for showing what the emerging church looks like in Canada.
- Wiki's :: Now one of the coolest wiki's I have seen is Ikon's website which is entirely a wiki. There are a lot of wiki options... jordoncooper.com used Media Wiki at wiki.jordoncooper.com but perhaps the easiest solution comes from Wikia which will host your wiki for you and cost is free. While local church wiki's are cool, I keep thinking bigger like church planting wikis, the wiki of the emerging church, or denominational history wiki could be a tremendous contribution to a movement.
- Twitter :: A couple of youth pastors I know use Twitter to keep parents and kids up to date with what their youth group is doing. Twitter can send notifications via IM or SMA which makes it easier to keep people current. Now CNN, the NY Times, and other media organizations are using Twitter to share breaking news.
That's my list. Add some of yours below in the comments. Technorati tags: Upcoming, Craigslist, Kijiji, Flickr, Wiki, Twitter, Google Calendar, Saskatoon, Church of the Exiles, Grace, Jonny Baker, Steve Collins, Resonate, photography, wikia, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Facebook, Web 2.0Labels: church, communications, community, culture, emerging church, ideas, media, photography, Resonate, technology
Going Green
 I have been wondering lately what the impact that jordoncooper.com has on the environment. I went looking around my ISP's website and found that it is carbon neutral after all which made me feel a little better. Now I just need to find out what Google and Yahoo! are doing to keep my data green as well. Labels: environment, technology
Wahoo! I was wrong.
Good news, I was wrong about the iPod Touch. According to Mark Humphries in my comments Check out Apples pdf on the features. On page 44 it says you can use the keyboard at the same time as the web broswer to add information in text fields.
I watched several Apple movies and presentations and they didn't have any of that on the Apple site but here it is in the PDF, which gives me faith in the device as a blogging tool. Now I need to come up with the cash to get one. Hint, hint, hint :-) Labels: technology
iPod Touch
I don't splurge that much on technology but after my iPod Nano was stolen, I thought of getting a iPod Touch. People refer to it as the iPhone without the phone but it is missing a lot more than that. No camera, iChat, or e-mail and it looks like one won't be able to use it with Blogger, Gmail, Google Maps, or any of the other apps which make me want to get a iPhone. Of course getting a iPhone isn't much of an option as they aren't available in Canada and the unlocked ones are costing up to $700 a month with Rogers (until they are officially released here anyways) and even if pricing is comparable with AT&T, I am not sure if it is worth it for me since I just want a Wifi device. In the end, I am tempted to get one of these. The one thing that could change my mind with this is if you can blog, e-mail, type from Safari in the iPod Touch. If that was possible, I think I would be interested again. Labels: technology
Evolution of jordoncooper.com
I updated the site last night with a slightly new look. I want to thank everyone who wrote to say they hated the new look. Here are the highlights (lowlights) of the changes. - The store is now gone. It has been with the site since GeoCities but no one uses it anymore and it was a pain to update.
- Updated profile page
- I added a disclosure statement to help with accountability and transperancy with the site so it is clear where I come from, how I make my money, and identify any conflict of interests on the site. Read it and met me know what you think.
- The quotes section has it's own search engine now so you can search just that section of the site.
- There are new header images being created but they aren't done yet.
- I put some thought into the footers for the first time ever and I think they add a bit to the site as well. There are links there to the social networking sites I am a part of (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm...)
The site still isn't in CSS, although a CSS version of the site is almost completed. I am having problems with IE6 and IE7 and then I looked at it with Safari and it looked funny there as well. It will be uploaded in a couple of weeks if I get around to it. Labels: design, jordoncooper.com, technology
Zen
I was about to purchase a Creative Zen Stone to replace my stolen iPod Nano when I looked and saw it was for XP or Vista only. Since I run Windows 2000 on my main desktop where I keep most of my music files, that isn't going to work out that well. It's too bad that Creative doesn't support 2000 as iTunes works wonderfully on it. It may be a Shuffle after all. Of course if it was more affordable, the iPhone Touch (order via this link and I get rich) would be a lot of fun but would get me really excited about it would be if you could run Skype on it but alas, no such luck. Labels: technology
Decisions, decisions
Other than deciding if we want to move, I now need to replace my iPod Nano which was a gift from Wendy a couple years ago. The easy decision would be another Nano but at the same time there are a lot of 1 and 2 gig devices out there for $50 although I am not fond of their design or I don't want to use their software ( Sony Network Walkman). I am leaning a little bit towards a RCA Lyra or a Zen Stone. Both are cheap and I have owned Creative and RCA stuff in the past. Wendy does have a shuffle and I have borrowed it in the past but it so small and I tend to toss stuff like that in my pockets which means there is a good probability that it will end up in the washing machine. Wendy mocked me while agonizing over this decision but the other option is to save up and purchase a refurbished Sony PSP but the more I think about it, the cost of Memory Sticks to hold music on it does drive up the price a fair bit. Also, what is the disk format and how easy is it to burn content to those disks from a PC or do I have to use memory sticks. One last question, anyone out there use one of these? Labels: technology
Google Flight Simulator
Life just got a little better. Google Earth has a hidden flight simulator built into it. viaWhile the add on isn't as full featured as Microsoft Flight Simulator, it is a lot of fun. I was able to fly around Saskatoon, Calgary, Manhattan, and Boston with ease. I also managed to land the plane a couple of times as well as crash it in several locations. It is well worth the free download and you can get it at earth.google.com. Once you have done that, you will want to review the flight control keys, right from Google. Enjoy. Labels: technology
Capital
I finished Founders at Work today. It was worth the money I paid to get it and I enjoyed reading it. One thing that was a recurring theme in the book and in the stories of these companies that changed how we work and think is how hard it is to manage the relationship with investors who have a different vision than the founders. Paul Graham (who is featured in the book) has a Unified Theory of VC Suckage which probably explains a lot of why founders hate VCs. Phillip Greenspun has a good essay on how he got booted from ArsDigita
As I read the theory and reflected on the book, it explains why VCs are so evil but I was also thinking about the funding of church plants and how that can go so bad so often. In the case of VC funding, it is the need for a large and quick return on investment but funding for churches is similar but different. Similar in the need for success to justify the spending so they can get more funding. People and churches like to give to success. Successful churches, successful colleges, successful ministries. They spend money but also attract even more money. In that way it is like business and the temptation is to fund "what works". Of course in the church, "what works" is equated with being "right". You know, the whole blessing/success thing. It is different in another area and that is the preservation of a story dating back to the denominations or thought leaders founder. Methodists fund Methodist church plants. Purpose Driven churches want to see more Purpose Driven churches. WillowWorld (tm) churches want to see other WillowWorld (tm) churches started. Baptists plant Republican churches, etc, etc. It comes down to the idea that we know we are right and we want to see more of that in the world and all will be better. As I was reading this, it reminded me of something I wrote earlier this year about ecclessial mercenaries and the need for funding. The problem is that you could find yourself caught in the middle of those two worlds. Being hit with the need to be successful and to conform to validate a model. If you look back at the illustrious history of "church within a church", those two things nailed more coffins closed then anything else. The need for success to justify existence and funding and also the conflict that happens if the values are unaligned, kind of like when a teenager starts to exert his or her independence. Paul Graham wrote this in the forward to Founders... Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.
The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like. If you looked in people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing "business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.
Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast. I like the last part. What if we started giving new ideas in the church, the permission to be the church instead of expecting them to look like the church before we believe in them. Labels: business, church, church planting, energy, organization, technology
Founders at Work
 The book Founders at Work arrived in the mail yesterday and I dived right into it. The book is a series of interviews of founders like Blogger, SixApart, Adobe, Apple (Woz!), Hotmail, and a bunch of other startups that changed the way we live and interact. The underlying narative is: entrepreneurship is all about tactics, guts, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. In other words there are a lot of lessons for church planters in this book as well. Some thoughts from the book. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.” Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.” Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’” -
Paul Graham (Viaweb): On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…” Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”
Labels: books, business, church, technology
How Twitter Will Change How Business Communicates (again)
Robert Scoble on how Twitter is changing how we communicate with each other. Twitter's basic idea has proven so popular that others have copied its premise and added features. Jaiku lets me include blog posts, my link blog, and more along with my mini posts. Pownce users can send files to one another, as well as calendar events. At Facebook, I can add such information as my favorite music and the syndicated Web feeds I've shared in Google Reader. All this adds up to a new way to share information about yourself. Although the content of the messages can vary wildly from voyeuristically interesting to terribly
dull, a frequent stream of updates can strengthen your brand. My 4,000-plus Twitter "followers" can get my blast
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