I didn’t get a chance to write anything on my actual birthday because I was too busy goofing off with my mom, who was in town visiting. We went on a tour of Stanford, admired the view from the top of Hoover Tower, went up to Skyline Drive for an even better view, tried a new Korean restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, and celebrated with a little gelato.

The great northern California weather has allowed me to stay active and fit. I picked up tennis again after not really playing since high school. I’ve been running the last 7 weeks following the Couch to 5k app. I learned how to play badminton with a group of friends from work, and most recently have been honing my billiards skills at work thanks to our new pool table, which I helped pick out.

I could go on and on about the other great people, places, and things I’ve experienced over the past year, but I’ll save that for the five weddings I’m attending this summer. I’ve really progressed as a programmer, but I’ll save that for another post as well.

Writing this is a renewed personal commitment to publish more meaningful content. Next year or in ten years, the only thing I’ll really care about remembering about my 25th birthday is spending time with my mom, staying active, and helping bring a dozen people clean water.

Wired knows I own an iPad because I went through the disjointed, error-prone process of linking my print subscription to my iPad. They should know if I have downloaded the latest issue and whether I’ve started reading it. That’s no different than email marketers tracking open rates and click-throughs. Newsstand should let me opt-in to tell publishers my progress. Why not let me share my progress with others and do some free advertising? Twitter is baked into iOS after all.

Max Beatty just finished reading this month’s Wired magazine featuring <lead story>. Check it out for yourself <affiliate link>

I wish Wired would take a step further and send me an email saying, “Hey, we see you haven’t opened an issue in 3 months. Is there anything we can do to make it a better experience on you iPad?”

Let me know you know.

In a world of big data and constant consumer profiling, why aren’t companies like Condé Nast using the vast information about me that’s at their finger tips to deliver a more personal experience? Isn’t that the promise behind all of the advertising and data mining on the Internet?

I first moved away from home when I was 16 to enroll in a residential high school situated on a college campus. The classes were harder, the independence was greater, and the likelihood of a college scholarship was higher. It was like going to college. No one could believe I was leaving my incredible home high school and all the friends I had grown up with. I enjoyed my quasi-college lifestyle and knew everyone else would, too.

When I moved away to college, it was no big deal. I was used to the distance from home but not the distance between friends at different universities. As much as everyone loved college (as I expected), they knew there would be a next step or phase. After my senior year, I took a job with a big company in a big city like I told myself I wouldn’t. I had outgrown campus and the small town that bound it.

I wasn’t alone. Nearly everyone moved to Chicago. Anyone who didn’t came up on weekends. Though the distance wasn’t great, going home became harder. Winter was hard. Work was dissatisfying at best. While I still loved the city, I knew I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t go.

I packed up my high school dorm in under an hour. I moved myself out of my college dorm down 8 flights of stairs. I had myself packed and moving to Chicago when my transmission dropped on the northwest side of I-465. I took one car-full to Menlo Park with my Mom. Like ripping off a band-aid, moving quickly hurts less.

So here I am in my third apartment in 12 months. I haven’t lived in the same residence for more than 2 years in the last 10 years. My friends are starting to have weddings, buy homes and have babies. I haven’t perfected my pitch to convince them to move here with me, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I really like California after 10 months. I haven’t figured everything out which keeps me moving.

I started looking into laundry services and buying a washer and dryer. Services charge based on pounds of laundry, never giving any meaningful estimates. Compact washer and dryer sets I could hook up to my faucet would need to be used for 3 years before I broke even for the amount of laundry I do. Financially speaking, pay-per-load laundry machines make sense. The pain point is how you have to pay to use them.

The only place you can get $7 in quarters without a dirty look is a bank branch. While banks have invested more and more into their ATMs and websites so you don’t need a branch, laundry machines still expect quarters. The only innovation I’ve seen with laundry machines are cheap credit card imitations that allow you to “deposit” money via an ATM-like terminal. This just provides another middle man in the process of paying for laundry.

Why isn’t anyone removing the friction of paying for laundry?

Answer: there’s no ubiquitous solution that can compete with quarters. NFC payments would be ideal. You could even wire it up so an app would tell you when your load is done. NFC depends on hardware. For even a small apartment complex, you would have to bank on every tenant, now and in the future, having this ability.

What about solving this on the app layer?

Everyone has an app phone these days. Well, anyone paying over a certain rent threshold should have an app phone. Make an app that says, “I am here. Deliver this payment. Make this machine do its thing. Let me know when it’s done.” Perhaps as a fallback you have some sort of terminal in case the customer doesn’t have an app phone. Resorting to the app layer for mechanical tasks such as laundry hinges on “six nines”.

Assumed Cost

Doing laundry has a cost based on the water used, electricity used, and the wear and tear of the machines. I am blindly assuming that’s what increases the price to wash a load. One way to remove the friction of paying for laundry in an apartment building setting is to bundle it in with rent. My current apartment already bundles water, electricity, and heat into the rent. What’s stopping them from calculating the assumed cost of laundry, adding it on top, and making this an even more attractive place to live?

Going back to the spreadsheet calculations, raising the cost of a wash load by a quarter translates to $1 more a month for a modest amount of laundry. That’s $12 per year. If new tenants signed leases for $25 more than the last tenant, the building owner would make more profit than outsourcing it to whomever operates the coin-payment laundry machines. No one sweats $13 when it comes to the price of rent. Weighing the price of an apartment happens on the scale of hundreds of dollars. By including the cost of “in-house” laundry in the rent price, a landlord stands to make more money.

Here’s an explicit example from Southwest Airlines today:

For #VetsDay2011, we are giving @iava $1 per drink sold onboard our planes today (up to $50k)!  Details here:  http://t.co/iuVw8Pwu

November 11, 2011 9:00 AM via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@SouthwestAir

Southwest Airlines

Donating $50,000 to the IAVA is very commendable. Just do it. Basing this act of charity on drink sales and capping it is a cheap act after doing some quick math.

Southwest’s inflight menu sells energy drinks for $3 and booze for $5. One could easily assume there’s at least a $1 margin of profit per drink. They have more than 3,400 daily departures. Their fleet consists of only Boeing 737 jets which seat about 180 people. (If you’ve flown with them, you’ll remember they have boarding groups A, B, and C numbered 1 through 60.) If they have 3,400 flights with 180 passengers trying to sell 50,000 drinks, less than 13 drinks per flight need to be purchased to meet the cap.

That’s less than 7% of passengers per flight that need to buy something for them to meet their cap. It’s not a goal of how much they’d like to raise, it’s a cap on how much they are willing to donate. Either donate all of your profits from drink sales for one day, or cut a check for $50k. Give whatever amount you are comfortable giving. It sounds cheap to put a cap on what you’ll give. Make meaningful donations.

If you’re going to make donations based on passive social media actions, make sure they are meaningful. This summer Wendy’s offered to donate 50₵ for each retweet.

RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd

June 15, 2011 3:13 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Wendys

Wendy’s

Again, the math fails the sentiment, and they’re implicitly capping their donation. Twitter published the most retweeted tweets of 2010 but didn’t give any metrics for what each little dude represented. There are 90 of them for the #1 retweeted tweet. If they represent 1,000 people, that’s 90,000 RTs. If Wendy’s took this into account when “pricing” their RT donation, they set their cap at $45,000. Even if they were retweeted 900,000 times that’s less than half a million dollars that’s not going to bankrupt a company with a market cap of $2 billion.

Being a cynic, Wendy’s also may have noticed that Twitter doesn’t give an exact number of retweets. After it reaches 100 RTs, it just says “100+” so no one has any way of keeping them honest. (Even the API returns “100+” as the retweet_count)

Fifty cents a RT isn’t meaningful. Write a check for $45,000 and tweet about how others can contribute what they are comfortable giving. I guarantee that approach will raise more money than passively hoping your tweet goes viral.

Corporations don’t have to put explicit and implicit caps on their donations when relying on others to meet their “goal”. Take notice of how Charity Water and Movember are empowering individuals to raise more for a cause than a single corporation’s campaign could. Corporations should use their social media following to make meaningful donations, not cap their charity.

Update

Twitter announced today that the most retweeted Tweet of 2011 was from Wendy’s. It was not the one mentioned above (it came in 2nd), but one exactly like it sent a week before. The announcement states they raised $50,000 which means the two Tweets combined for 100,000 retweets. (That makes my math above pretty accurate.)

Wendy’s Tweet is also notable because it was a Promoted Tweet, part of a Twitter advertising campaign that Wendy’s ran in June to celebrate Father’s Day.

What wasn’t apparent until now is that Wendy’s paid to make their tweet go viral. According to this Quora post by an ex-PMM at Twitter, that costs between 20c and $5. If you assume they were on the lowest end of this and only had 50,000 retweets from their campaign, they spent $10,000 (50,000 x .2) to donate $50,000 instead of just donating $60,000 in the beginning. Sounds like a successful campaign to me.

If you need to delete a photo for whatever reason, you have to reset your stream.

First, reset your Photo Stream on iCloud.com.

Second, turn off Photo Stream on your iOS devices by going to the Settings app, then iCloud, then into Photo Stream where you can turn it off.

You should now be able to delete any and all photos from your device.

I arrived at the office before 10am energized in part from 1000mg of vitamin C and some DayQuil wearing an IU t-shirt and jeans having not shaved for days if not more than a week. As if scripted in a sitcom, both pots of coffee were empty so I made another while joking with a member of the product team. A “(hopefully) last” revision of a design waited for me in my inbox. The designer happened to be walking by giving me the chance to ask him if everyone understood the difference between character count and word count, a minor oversight in the user interface (UI). A stand-up status meeting was forming behind me to discuss the progress of the next features for our newest product. I had been pitching in where I could, so I spun around to sip my coffee and listen.

At 11am on Mondays and Wednesdays, major feature releases must be demoed to our quality assurance (QA) team. I had stayed late the night before so that my refactoring of a few thousand lines of code could be admired in one curl request. Everyone was happy for me that it worked so well locally, but insisted it needed testing in a broader environment. I adjusted the test scripts and tunneled into log servers praying it would work flawlessly, and as programming goes, it didn’t. Considerations and compromises were made to continue with the release before I headed to my noon interview.

For the past couple months, I’ve been interviewing candidates to join me in the ever broadening world of front end development. My in-house specialty is CSS so for about 45 minutes I questioned and quizzed and made myself available to answer any and all questions. Towards the end, someone thought to bring both of us lunch, which was much appreciated.

Refueled, it was time to start juggling projects three and four for the day. Another designer wanted my input on the flow of a new multi-step feature that requires as much backend magic as it does design clarity. We’ve been meeting in brief stints for the past few days to rework details and cut out non-essentials. Bugs have popped up in other parts of the code-base from my refactoring but are easily fixed. I got distracted and nailed down a re-opened display issue with Internet Explorer 8. I got distracted again and wrote an email suggesting a schema for storing some new data when the release ops manager came over to clarify the details of a new repository that was being created for the project whose design I first reviewed today.

After helping another engineer resolve some SVN conflicts, we discussed a new API she had designed and developed that I would be using for a reworked portion of our product. We came up with a few solutions weighing the efficiency of the code vs the most awesome user experience I could imagine during which I was pulled over to review another revision of the multi-step feature. As I was walking back to my desk confident in our decision on how to implement the API, another engineer was having trouble setting up apache on his new MacBook Pro. I sat with him comparing configs until we realized he was restarting OS X’s built-in apache server and not the one part of our development environment.

A few more bugs came up surrounding my imminent release and were easy to fix. I started to write a script that utilized some PHP classes that abstract our database calls and asked a chatroom of other developers if the classes supported MySQL LIMIT. Someone was able to help me right away, and I continued to hack together queries until dinner came.

That’s what I juggled today. I started six months ago fixing CSS and JavaScript issues while learning the custom PHP MVC, and now I’m involved with just about every step of the product life cycle. It can seem like controlled chaos at times, but it’s exciting and rewarding once it all ships.

(If you think you’d like to juggle some of this, Reputation.com is hiring, and I’d love to have you join our team. No, no one from the company asked me to write this.)

To give a little background on how I understand the state of the School of Informatics, IU Bloomington, and the State of Indiana, there is a significant brain drain. The State of Indiana can’t keep the talent it produces from their state universities that found first-of-their-kind schools. Hello from California by way of Illinois.

Funding Ideas

A competition that funds business plans is ultimately funding ideas. The timeline of the competition is purely academic and verges on the pace of corporate. Submit in November, select by February, and present in April.

It’s open to seniors and graduate students meaning if you didn’t already secure a job offer by mid-November, which you should in such a hot tech market, feel free to throw an idea out there that appeals to Indiana based investors (hint: faster assembly line). If you still don’t have a real job offer or couldn’t build a prototype to get funding, you could still make a presentation by February. After six weeks of deliberating over PowerPoint slides, you, you and your partner, or you and your team will win at least $100,000.

“As an Indiana University graduate and local software entrepreneur, I am thrilled to have been involved in the formation of BEST. I am optimistic that pairing talented student entrepreneurs with seed capital and business mentorship will lead to entrepreneurial success”

- ExactTarget CEO and BEST investor, Scott Dorsey

You’ve proven you’re a talented student entrepreneur after a few rounds of presentations spread over six months. Now, CEOs from all over Indiana will drop what they are doing to mentor you to bring your idea to life. Your seed capital should give you at least a year (maybe two if you’re lean) to build it.

Build It

Now imagine it’s the beginning of your second semester of your junior year, and you’re scheduling classes for next Fall. (That’s how it felt for me.) An upperclassman didn’t tip you off that your internship from the summer before junior year could be used as your capstone (thanks Tyler) so you’re blocking out half of your schedule for one course where YOU BUILD SOMETHING.

For the next 6–8 months between homework, Little 500, and a summer internship, you can formulate and iterate over half a dozen serious ideas before showing up for your first capstone session where you form a team to build something. You and your team then have two semesters of student loans (plus endless credit card offers) to build a business. Student loans (and credit card interest) are way cheaper than venture capital funding, especially if you’re a “talented student entrepreneur.”

Better Yet

In all seriousness if you think you’ve got a good to great chance at this BEST competition, drop out and come to Silicon Valley. There’s a valuation bubble. Port your PowerPoint slides to HTML/CSS/JS and talk loudly at University Ave. coffee shops, and odds are you’ll have $100k before everyone else has finished submitting their business plans on Nov. 15.

Shamelessly, the company I build products for needs more help. If you just need someone to talk with about building ideas, I’m open to that, too.

Weaknesses

What concerns me most about this business plan competition is the lack of involvement by two key players in the Indiana technology scene as I see it. Gazelle TechVentures and Scott Jones used to play a substantial role in driving technology innovation and hi-tech job growth in Indiana with the support of Mitch Daniels. Jones and President McRobbie have a long history. I was present for their first press release over four years ago. If this was a sound plan for job growth and technology innovation, Scott Jones would be involved.

SproutBox has been investing in solid, vetted business plans for years in Bloomington. Why aren’t they involved? They even host a technology conference that boasts the benefits of starting a technology company in Indiana!

It frustrates and saddens me that this is what is announced the day before the SOIC Career Fair. I’m still proud to tell people I have a degree in Informatics from Indiana University even though it matters less every day. Throwing money at problems like this rarely works, especially in technology.

Students, don’t plan it– build it.

When I first joined, I needed my precious @indiana.edu email address. I was friending and being friended by anyone related to the 8th floor of Briscoe Shoemaker in the Northwest neighborhood of Indiana University for 2005–2006 and any combination of those keywords. No one knew what they were doing. Friending attractive strangers was encouraged and the norm.

Now, I’m still friends with some attractive strangers and have grown my social network to include distant family members who are reportedly related. The dynamic of friending someone on Facebook has changed. The consequences of using Facebook have evolved as well. I should know well being employed by a company that provides products and services to regain online privacy and build an online reputation.

After hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets, it is clear I’m not afraid of sharing online. In fact, I really enjoy it which is why I try so many new social apps and services. If I’ve noticed anything in the past few years, it’s that every new social play experiments with maximizing reach while trying to control privacy. Many services have turned to asynchronous relationships, where you can follow or friend someone without them reciprocating, and now Facebook allows you to use their service in this way. Plenty of people will make this out to be a move against Twitter, but I think it more importantly removes the confusion between having a ‘Page’ as an individual and using your individual account as a ‘Page.’

You can now subscribe to me on Facebook. I’ve been posting updates to ‘the public’ for a while assuming they were easily discoverable. Now, they’ll be conveniently delivered to your News Feed.

This allows me to treat Facebook somewhat like Twitter (I’m not ready to connect the two). I can choose to maintain friendships with people I actually consider to be friends without cutting off access to what someone might have found interesting by being my friend.

Allowing others to subscribe to the content you share on Facebook, allows you to evaluate the friendships you truly value. It increases engagement with the site (and ads from a business perspective). It also should be a wakeup call to people who have or are approaching maxing out the 5,000 friend limit to rethink what a friend really is. Relationships on Facebook should become more meaningful because of this.

I will be actively de-friending people on Facebook so that I can take in more of the updates and news from people I care about instead of relying on Facebook to filter, silo, and group it for me. Please don’t take it personally. I’m not hard to contact. I approach Twitter the same way and keep up with about 600 businesses and individuals (a little less than twice the number of Facebook friends I kept before this announcement).

To simplify how I’ll use social networks, as they are today, going forward:

• Facebook: You don’t need to ask to crash on my couch.
• LinkedIn: We’ve worked together, or I would like to work with you.
• Twitter: I’m following you because you are interesting, not because someone told me you were interesting.
• foursquare: I’m not going to be creeped out if you find me here.
• Phone: You are more important than a Facebook friend or you don’t know me.

So you post how to cheat the restaurant you bought a groupon with? And apparently your proud of this and it looks like you might even be soliciting businesses to hire you for web work? Your a crook and a thief and a liar. Why not post how to short a bartender(when he is real busy) by showing him a $20 then handing him a $10?? Your just a dishonest a-hole. No wonder you need the internet to find friends. You look like a douchbag anyway…

It looks like Jiffison is a made up name, but I replied to the email address provided — cliffjiffison@yahoo.com. If he or anyone else would like to have a constructive conversation about any of the material I post, please feel free to contact me.