SharedBook: On Demand

Resolutions, anyone?

It’s tough to be cheerful this morning, as this is written on the 27th just as the news of the Bhutto assassination is hitting the US.  What an awful, senseless tragedy.

Up ‘til now, we had been in quite a good holiday season spirit here in the New York office, coming off a very successful sales period.  I’m certain that we’ve made a lot of folks very happy during this time of year.  There have been some wonderful books made, most all of them clearly having a special meaning and carrying special memories for the creators and their recipients.

Getting all the orders out the door was not so easy, but such is the price of success, and our Customer Service team did an amazing job.  I’m very proud of them.

So, how do we top this in 2008?  Sustaining growth is never easy, but the one thing any manager, and any organization can do is to learn from mistakes.  As a young company, taking risks every day, we have no shortage of learning opportunities, therefore; it’s an integral part of this game.

I resolve to take advantage of these opportunities.  I promise!  Right after the Bowl Games…

Happy New Year, everyone!

Time Management & Me.

Time has always been a precious resource for me.

Raising three kids (with a fourth on the way) along with a manager's job in an intensive start-up company can sometimes be very challenging.  The ability to juggle between numerous tasks both at home and at the office seems impossible sometimes.  At some point in my life I've realized that, whatever I do, I'll never have more than 24 hours each day; the key is to make sure I use those 24 priceless hours wisely in order to achieve all my goals and finish all my tasks.

Lately I came across an article which suggested some time management tips (http://www.sdtimes.com/article/TQA-20071201-02.html).  Due to my obvious interest in this subject I went on and searched the web for similar tips and suggestions and I have found many articles containing dozens of tips on how to make better use of my time.  Not all of them were relevant to me and not all usable, but I was able to learn a lot and even started using some of them, hoping they will assist me with my daily challenge.

Here are a few of the key tips I found to be helpful for me; I hope they will also assist others:

1. Know thyself - Rivers can't be forced to flow uphill; nor should you try to work against your inner nature. Schedule the toughest work for your circadian period of peak productivity.

2. Use a To-Do list – Keep it short and focused and try to update it every day.

3. Know and respect your priorities - Aim to do the important things first. Remember the 80-20 rule: 80 percent of reward comes from 20 percent of effort. One of the aims of time management tips is to help you refocus your mind to give more attention and time to those most important 20 percent.

4. Don’t leave email sitting in your inbox - Organize email in file folders. If the message needs more thought, move it to your to-do list. If it’s for reference, print it out. If it’s a meeting, move it to your calendar.

5. Save Time for Murphy - When you over-schedule your day, you create stress for yourself by not allowing time for Murphy’s Law—the inevitable and unforeseeable things that go wrong.  Leave at least two hours of your workday unscheduled.

6. Make it easy to get started – Sometimes it is more difficult to start a project than to finish it. Break large tasks into chunks and do only the first one, the rest will be easier. Dedicate only 15 minutes to start an annoying task.

7. Avoid being a perfectionist – "Good is better than Perfect.”  Yes, some things need to be closer to perfect than others, but perfectionism, paying unnecessary attention to detail, can be a form of procrastination.

8. Learn to delegate and/or outsource – Check if you can delegate or eliminate any of your To Do list, work on those tasks which you alone can do.

9. Emulate others - Don't try to reinvent the wheel. If someone else always seems to be ahead of the game, watch and learn. If someone else has a speedier way of doing something, copy it. If you're having trouble getting specific jobs done, ask others how they organize and execute the task; perhaps you've overlooked some short cuts.

10. Reboot Your Brain - To function at its best and keep all the data in the right places, the brain needs time to sleep. When you’re rested, you give your brain the white space it needs to do its best work. Nothing is a bigger time waster than when you’re not in top form, and you have to keep doing the same things over and over again.

To Be Continued ...

Back in August I wrote about the similarity between road signs and web site design (Roads to Usability).  In that post I compared an exit sign on a major highway to a button on a web page (the specific example was for Phoenix).

Over the holiday weekend I did a considerable amount of driving and it occurred to me that the exit sign analogy is only half the story.  The other half being - What if I don't want to go to Phoenix?

The term "exit" tells the driver (user) that they have a choice to leave their current route and take a new one.  What it doesn't tell you is what will happen if you don't exit.  The important question being - Where does this road go if I stay on it?

Thus in many cases road signs reconfirm to users the destination of the current road (in this example, Tucson or Flagstaff) next to the exit sign.

But this can be difficult.  Certainly there are thousands of destinations a driver can get to by proceeding on a major highway.  Should the signs list all of them?  Most of them?  Some of them?  Usually the sign-makers choose the most recognizable destination or something relatively close.  They usually limit the sign to 2 or 3 key destinations.

The same situation occurs in web site design.   There are "exit" buttons for things like "Search Again" or "Learn More".  But there is also the need to tell the user what they get if they don't use the exit.

Thus one of the keystones to web design - the big "Continue" button.  How many web sites make use of this classic?  It is supposed to convey to the user that by clicking it they will proceed on the course that they have already established.   But the same difficulty exists here as for the road signs - there are too many destinations along this road and you can't list all of them.

So the following basic rule has been adopted.  You can give a user the "Continue" button so long as they are clearly in-progress on a task with a defined outcome.  In other words, the user should always know the answer to the question - Continue to where?   

If the user can't answer this question, there is a design problem and the "Continue" button may as well be a brick wall. Sure many will click it because it denotes progress, but if they don't know where they are going how can they be successful?  Generally, it is a best practice in web design to try to be a bit more specific - like "Continue to Checkout" or "Continue Shopping".

So, next time you are using a web site keep an eye out for one of the almighty "Continue" buttons.  If you see one, ask yourself - do I know where I'm continuing to?  If the answer is Yes, then perhaps it was the right design.  If the answer is No, then perhaps you'll get a clearer understanding for why you feel like you are going 60 mph down an unknown road and all you want to do is Exit.

Santa's Sleigh has left the building .......

It's official, the last of our Holiday orders are out of manufacturing and on the way to their rightful destinations just in time for Christmas !

This is no small feat. Managing the logistics, manufacturing, consumer inquiries and special requests for many thousands of custom printed one-of-a-kind books is truly complex task. It requires subject matter experts from various disciplines all marching in lock step, along with great patience and stamina.

That said, we at SharedBook wish you a Happy and Healthy Holiday Season !

It's Not Too Late to Find a Thoughtful and Unique Gift!

I have a shameless plug to share today that I hope will also be helfpul to last minute holiday shoppers, which must number in the tens of millions this year! I came across a recent study from the National Retail Federation yesterday that showed the average person still has about 50% percent of their holiday shopping to do, while 16.5% (35 million shoppers) haven't even started yet. This figure includes one in five men.

While it may be too late to create a personalized book and have it arrive in time for Christmas, gift certificates for Create-A-Cookbook, Georgia FanBooks and personalized versions of The Poky Little Puppy can still be ordered through 3:00 p.m. EST tomorrow (Friday, Dec. 21), as well as numerous additional options from our store.

According to a very reliable source, our elves will be working throughout the day tomorrow to ensure that each and every package is out the door and on its way. 

Happy shopping!

Role Reversal - Hello from New York

Having a team geographically spread across continents is always a difficult challenge. One that has many advantages, but still a challenge. In order to conquer this challenge there is no replacement for good old human interaction, which means frequent visits among the teams.

This week I am visiting our New York office again. Both Rick and I have written in the past about our experiences with these visits and the importance of face to face meetings.

I was thinking about it this morning during my daily run and how the roles have reversed for me this week. Normally, my interactions with my team in Israel are so easy. Just walk up to the person you want to talk with, and talk. Problems are solved before they even arise.

But this week, I had a simple question for one of my developers, and I had to e-mail it (it was already late in Israel, so she wasn’t around). The next morning I got a very detailed e-mail that obviously required a lot more than the 10 seconds it would have taken to respond in a face to face conversation. I got the answer I needed, but at what price and effort?

On the other hand, questions that have been lingering for a few weeks have suddenly been resolved in minutes here. Casual corridor talks and being able to physically sit in a meeting (and not on the other side of the phone, barely hearing what everyone is saying), have kept some issues from even showing up in the first place.

This all reminds me of when we first started SharedBook, and how we paid close attention to working well together with a team that was separated not only geographically but also culturally. We held cross cultural workshops both in Israel and in New York right from the beginning. The person who lead the workshops, also wrote an interesting book about this: Border Crossings: American Interactions With Israelis which I recommend wholeheartedly.

I feel lucky that most of the issues that we deal with on a daily basis have to do with the physical separation of our offices, and not necessarily the cultural differences. We must be doing something right! J

Keeping Up with Web Application Security

Web development is a complex realm since you need to know different technologies and how they interact. You have server components that run in the back-end such as the database and the business logic and on the other hand client code running in the browser. These components are sometimes developed using different programming languages and tools. On top of that you have to know how to deploy the server architecture that drives the database and business logic and on the browser side you sometimes need to know a number of different technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript (AJAX) and Flash.

Because of this complexity the whole issue of Web related security and privacy is very challenging. As part of trying to keep up with this challenge a couple of our developers attended the OWASP Israel 2007 Conference.

OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project) is a worldwide free and open community focused on improving the security of application software. The OWASP community includes educational organizations, commercial companies, and individuals from all over the world. Together, OWASP forms an application security community that works together to create methodologies, documents and tools that are freely available for the entire world to use.

Some of OWASPs interesting and useful projects include :

• OWASP Top Ten - a document that lists the 10 most serious Web application vulnerabilities, discusses how to protect against them, and provides links to more information
• OWASP Guide -  a massive document covering all aspects of Web application and Web service security
• OWASP WebScarab -  a tool for performing all types of security testing on Web applications and Web services

The conference (which BTW was free) turned out to be a very good one and our developers returned with new and relevant information about issues such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and much more. Even though we have taken both security and privacy into consideration when developing our application since day one, we still have to constantly stay alert for new threats and techniques.

Books and Bytes .....

I've been watching the eBook space since the late nineties with much disappointment. Plagued by inadequate battery power, display technology that causes eye fatigue, and tethering requirements to get content on and off, take up in the consumer market has been slow to non-existent.

Two companies have recently introduced new eBook readers that have made significant strides in overcoming the challenges of past generations.

Sony's 2^nd generation Reader and Amazon's all-new Kindle are the two bright spots in this market space. While they're both based on MIT's E-Ink, there are definitely some significant design differences.

So what's the low down?

• The Sony Reader is physically smaller and is three ounces lighter than the Kindle but they both have the same screen size. Why is the Kindle bigger you ask? Because it has a full keyboard at the bottom of the device.

• The Sony Reader does partial page refreshes where as the Kindle always refreshes the full page when any content changes.

• Being based on the same E-Ink technology both eBook readers have no back light, are not color displays and create no noticeable eye fatigue.

• Both units are mountable on your PC as a USB storage device so you can transfer files and the like.

• The Kindle offers six font sizes to the Sony Reader's three. Changing them on the fly is a snap and is a great convenience.

• Some other little goodies are the Sony Reader's music player and jpeg viewer, along with the Kindle's embedded speaker for listening to audio books.

• Sony's eBook Library software is a must for downloading titles from Sony's Store and implies tethering and the use of a PC.

• Amazon's Kindle on the other hand comes with a built-in Sprint EVDO modem allowing you to purchase and download book titles directly from Amazon no matter where you are (presuming you have coverage). This is where the full keyboard comes into play. By the way, there's no charge for the EVDO service. I would venture to guess that Amazon is subsidizing this via royalty payments to Sprint for every sale of an eBook title.

Ready for prime time? Almost!

The EVDO modem in the Kindle makes it “the killer device." There are a few short comings that will likely be addressed either through a software update (that's right the Kindle is a Linux device) or a 2^nd generation Kindle (new hardware). The key stroke lag when typing on the keyboard is painfully slow. There are also some file conversion issues that need to be worked out to facilitate getting content on and off the device. And the Web browser needs some work.

What content works best on an eBook reader ?

I'm not sure I'll be reading large novels on them but certainly content with a shelf life (what I like to call disposable content), and/or reference material would be my first choices. This includes my morning New York Times, manuals, and other stuff I'm generally interesting in booking up on!

Will the consumer consumption model change ? Over time, yes. In the near future, likely not. Device limitations like the lack of a color display, combined with the fact that human beings are change adverse will help to stall this transition.

Fan of a Fan

Recently, I've become a huge Georgia Bulldog fan.  Not really because of their football team, but because of the fans of their football team.

To explain, we recently launched our Fanbook (a joint venture working with JumpTV Sports)  And as part of the launch, Georgia fans can now build their own personalized "Bulldogs FanBook".

I've had the pleasure of seeing some of the amazing books that have been put together by our users.  They have been quite busy making use of everything we've built into our system.  They upload their own images and make the most beautiful full-bleed laminated hard cover books.  They blend their personal photos with the professional photos taken at the same games.   They add text pages with quotes from the players, coaches or their own friends.  They make some of the most amazing books!

I can't help but feel a part of it.  And I can't help but become a big fan.  Georgia! Georgia! Hear the Bulldog Growl!

Create-A-Cookbook in the News

This is an experiment of sorts ... I don't think we've ever included audio or video on this blog before. Caroline recently spoke to Catherine Cioffi of CBS Newsradio 880 here in New York regarding Create-A-Cookbook from Allrecipes.com. The segment aired on Saturday. You can listen to it here:

Carolyn Jung of The Mercury News also included Create-A-Cookbook in her Holiday Gift Roundup for foodies today. You can see the column here, registration is required.