Category: Business

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Business

The Money Will Follow

In the latest issue of Minnesota Business Magazine they have a profile on My Wonderful Life, a website for helping people plan funerals. It’s a quick look at the founders and focuses on their recent appearance on Shark Tank.

There is a quote that just bugs me to no end. Sue Kruskopf, one of the founders, is talking about the increase in traffic to their site after the airing of the Shark Tank episode.

Which proves we have an idea that people are looking for. Now the money will follow.

REALLY!?

NOW the money will follow? That way of thinking terrifies me. They have traffic, they have a site, yet they are not making money right now and it doesn’t sound like they have any idea what they are going to do to try and make money either. It is the same “get eyeballs first” mentality that plagues many of the Silicon Valley startups.

I was very disappointed after reading the whole thing.

Categories
Business Technology

Don’t Stop Consumerization

Over at f5 DevCentral, Lori MacVittie has written about how IT departments might stop the consumerization of technology in the enterprise space.

I really don’t think that overly-restrictive MDMs are going to really stem the tide, but I would rather have IT departments view the changes coming as an opportunity to really look at the processes in place and change the ones that are now outdated.

What does the consumerization of IT free IT departments up to do better? What new challenges are brought in? How can we mitigate the security and reliability issues by changing how we provide services?

I think THAT is how we should be looking at the changes and not trying to grab onto the old way of thinking.

Categories
Business Life Technology

An Hour A Day

Michael Lopp posted over at Rands in Repose about a new goal for himself:

Starting at the beginning of February, I made a change. Each day I blocked off a precious hour to build something.

Every day. One hour. No matter what.

Every day? Yup. Including weekends.

A hour? Yup, 60 full minutes. More if I can afford it.

I like it. I like it a lot. Knowing full well that I am going to fail at this consistently (having a 7 month-old will do that for you), I’m going to try and start setting aside an hour a day to actually build something.

Not just think about it, but actually build something. I can do the “thinking” part, but I need to get better at the “building” part.

An hour a day.

Categories
Business Technology

Thoughts on Trello

I’ve been using Things for Mac to handle my “project management” for a while now, but it felt like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole … or a square peg in a round hole (whichever is harder).

So a friend of mine (hey Dan) invited me to a board over at Trello. I didn’t quite “get it” at first, but after spending the better part of an afternoon really playing around with the service and moving some stuff over there it really started to click.

So I’ve moved all of my project management “stuff” over there.

Granted, it isn’t a lot, but I have a few boards floating around in various stages of “usefulness”. I’ll just briefly outline how I manage a project currently:

  • Setup an organization for a number of projects (right now I have one for Deck78 and one for Martin Luther College)
  • Create one board per project (MLC Website, any products I’m working on, etc.)
  • Edit the labels to fit what the board needs
    • Usually I have Emergency as red, Bug as orange, and Feature as green … the others are fluid
  • Create cards as needed
  • Move cards between the To Do, Doing, and Done lists
  • Profit?

That’s about it. I I have a board for our home projects and also one for This One Podcast, I’m hoping it will help keep things in order a little bit more.

Categories
Business

Apple and Money

Martin Hutchinson has posted a mind-boggingly ridiculous piece over at Money Morning about what he would do if he were Apple.

I’m glad he’s not Apple.

This is the real killer for me:

However, the temptation of the $97.5 billion cash hoard would remain and management would still dream of the $100 billion acquisition that could revolutionize Apple’s prospects.

What in all of Apple’s history has ever even given the hint of that sort of thinking coming out of the company? I’d be far more worried of Google getting another $20 billion to spend on a company that isn’t making money than Apple doing anything of the sort.

That quote really shows that he doesn’t know the company he is trying to talk about. Everything else is exactly something an investment banker or money manager would recommend a company do and listening to those people has worked so well for the world in the past, right?

Just dumb.