Posts from — January 2008

Here is a video I put together quickly to explain cold weather altimetry. Please leave your comments below.

I’ve been working on a proposal recently.  Today, I used the term “opportunity cost.”  My point was that given some of the decisions made in the past using an accounting cost analysis, the long-term total, economic costs ended up being higher.

Opportunity cost is what you miss by making a choice between several options.  If, after high school, you chose to go to college rather than go straight into the work force, your opportunity cost was the money you could have earned during the time you were in college.  That is fairly easy to figure out.  In reverse, if you went straight into the workforce rather than to college, your opportunity cost would be the education that could have led to a non-linear growth in your pay over time.  That non-linear aspect of what an education can provide makes the accounting cost very hard to figure out.

In the business world, capital expenditures are always difficult decisions.  Where do you put limited resources?  Given my previous post about geometric growth and change and my belief that technology has a propensity for this geometric growth and change, I strongly feel:

“NOT investing in technology will yield “surprise” opportunity costs over time. “

Faced with the choice of capital expenditures between something with a history of linear “returns” and technology with the possibility of geometric “returns,”  I’ll vote for the technology.  If you choose against the technology, there is the risk the total, economic cost of the decision will be a huge opportunity cost over time.

We just had a wintry mix of rain, sleet, and snow here in the south. Although I didn’t want to be on the roads, I had to drive to work. I caught myself testing the road conditions regularly – a habit learned from my father. On a straight section of road with a low risk of hitting anything or anyone, I would hit the brakes aggressively to see if I could slide the tires. If they slid, I knew I needed to drive carefully. If I didn’t slide, I knew conditions were better. Either way, I knew the conditions. I didn’t have to guess. I didn’t have to listen to the weather on the radio. I didn’t have to infer conditions from the temperature displayed on the car display. I knew I could stop safely, or if I needed to slow even more. I got the information I needed during low risk times, so I knew what I could expect at critical times.

The more I thought about it, I thought this is a real metaphor for life. You can live your life based on opinions and judgments of so called “experts.” Or, you can gain the knowledge through direct experience. In the low risk times, do you test the conditions to see if your judgment of the conditions is correct? Leave you life metaphors in the comments.

Jason Van Orden , podcasting consultant, has asked his audience for their #1 podcasting tip learned in 2007.  I answered him and added it here for you.

TIP:  Clean up every aspect of the process.  Simplify, simplify, simplify.  Think speed and efficiency.  90% is good enough.  Get it out the door.  If you get bogged down in too many steps in your process, you will find it harder and harder to bring yourself to record another show.   Re-evaluate ALL the steps to see which ones can be dropped or combined to simplify the overall process.

The biggest combination of steps for me was to move the compression and EQ process to the front end, before everything goes into the recorder.  Purists will say that I’m losing the ability to selectively clean things up in post-production.  That’s the whole point. I don’t want to spend the time “doing it in post-production.”  My ideal show would require no post-production.  I want it out the door.

On TheDivaCast, I record five women.  We spend some time in the show planning process with the goal of recording it all in one take requiring no post-production.  Over time, we have cleaned up our process and moved some tasks around for the better.  Just so you know, we have recorded one show so far, where we did no post-production.  It’s still a goal…

Leave your best tips in the comments.

This article in Advertising Age really demonstrates one of my favorite terms – corporate inertia. Nothing new in the concept of corporate inertia – just lots of people with a slow rate of change. Organizations that can adapt quickly to change, win.

This article shows the corporate inertia in the advertising industry. As a podcaster, I “know” there is an incredible relationship that is fostered between the podcaster and the consumer. The strength of this relationship is real, but hasn’t be measured, yet. Advertisers are using the metrics they know. Exposure, Eyeballs,… Advertisers are buying “exposure to” consumers not the “relationship with” the consumer. I do think this will change as the strength of the new media – podcasting relationship will be measured and fed back to the advertisers. The ADM – Association of Downloadable Media is working on this. I’m also sure PodShow, Podango, and Wizzard Media are all gathering their facts and figures to change the opinions of the advertising world.

If a conventional advertising conversion rate of 2% could be upped to 5% through the relationship strength of a podcast, I see huge advertising money moving into the new media arena. That’s why I’m playing in this sandbox.

More and more of my computing is moving into the “cloud.”  I have Outlook on my laptop, but I can’t figure out how to get my wife’s laptop to look at the same calendar.  Step in Google calendar.  I can set it up so we can layer lots of different calendars together for family calendar.  Where is the calendar, really?  Google.  Google where?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  I can get it just about anywhere as the internet “cloud” gets more pervasive.

So, what’s next.  iTunes.  I have an iPod Nano.  I like to listen to podcasts.  I like to update my podcasts.  However, using iTunes, I have to synch my iPod to my laptop which may be 2000 miles away when I want to get the latest shows on my iPod.  I really thought the iPhone would solve this.  All the bandwidth you can eat and a direct link to the music store.  No.  You can’t download podcasts thru the ATT network.   I can understand that perfectly.  If I were ATT, I wouldn’t want to supply the pipe for someone to download free content (read podcasts) without getting something in return.   I’ll bet that was part of the agreement between ATT and Apple.  Apple would not allow podcasts to be downloaded thru iTunes to the iPhone.   You have to synch it thru a computer with an iTunes account.  I didn’t buy the iPhone.

Then there was the iPod Touch with wifi.  I thought this would be great.  Find a wifi access point and update my podcasts on the fly.  Wrong.  Can’t do that either.   You have to synch it thru a computer with an iTunes account.   I didn’t buy the iPod Touch.

Right now, my iTunes podcast subscription list lives in my laptop.  This needs to move into the device or into the “cloud.”  It could be at Apple.  I don’t care.  I should be able to plug my device into the network, USB, Bluetooth, wifi, cellular network and get my latest episodes on my device.   This will be a big change for the iTunes architecture, but it has to change and I predict it will.

I know Podcast Ready has a system that will do this.  Do you know of another way to do this?  Add it in the comments.

I flew with him on three continents. I chased him down black diamond slopes. I helped introduce him to his wife. I was his best man at his wedding. We talked about flying from every angle. More than once. Floatplanes, gliders, antiques, airliners, biz-jets, military jets. We talked about it all. We even talked about Cockpit Resource Management – CRM. That’s airline speak for “How do you work with the other pilot in the cockpit to safely operate the airplane?”

Andy was killed in a biz-jet crash this month two years ago. He was the co-pilot in a Cessna Citation. What bugs me is the links in the chain of events leading to his death began well before the early morning crash. His death has more to do with the softer side of aviation than the harder side. What do I mean by that? I think it is more about the personalities and the emotions involved than the technical skills involved. I think the relationship between pilots in the cockpit was huge factor in the accident. The cockpit recorder doesn’t tell the whole story – just the minutes leading up to the end. [Read more →]

I don’t know where I read it or heard it, but someone was talking about how we, as humans, think linearly. We look at past trends and forecast along a straight line. This isn’t in all cases, obviously, but in a lot of things, I think we do. But, change doesn’t happen that way. Populations, demand, growth, acceptance, … can all change exponentially or geometrically. Think viral videos.

The take away from this… plan and think how things in your business can change geometrically. If you only use linear forecasts, you will be surprised. If you plan that your forecasts will “turn the corner” and go viral, you will be prepared and not playing catch-up, slack jawed, with watery, wide eyes.

The hard part is “when.” Exponential growth does follow a pretty linear path until it does “turn the corner.”

If anyone knows where I might have heard or read this, please put it in the comments.