Learn New Skills, Then Leave Them Behind

Thanks to a post from Krista Neher, I recently stumbled upon this picture from the excellent Cincinnati photographer Jim Talkington.

That brought back fond memories from bygone days. I could almost smell the D-76 soaking Tri-X in a mysterious bath, while I enjoyed the darkness and the isolation, giving birth to my creative vision.

The truth is, I never had much interest in photography before college. My dad was a professional photographer, but it wasn’t until I saw the job posting for the Publicity Office at Adrian College that I ever asked him to show me how it was done.

We went through two rolls, from shooting to processing to printing in his basement darkroom. I sent in a few prints and got the job. So I headed off to freshman year armed with minimal experience and my dad’s aging Mamiya.

Soon I graduated from PR’s tiny closet in the history building to the full size darkroom of the college newspaper, where I’d push 400 speed film to 1600, bringing out that week’s basketball games and swim meets in glorious grainy detail. The halftone machine was probably bigger than my dorm room, with a loud vacuum pump to hold the wax-resist paper where my shots would be reproduced in thousands of tiny dots.

Several years later, I aim a point and shoot camera at my kids without a thought about aperture or shutter speed. Not only is there no film to process, but my pictures automatically appear on my hard drive through the magic of an Eye-Fi card. It’s a very different world.

This nostalgic reverie actually has a point to it.

That was the beginning for me of some guiding principles I’ve carried with me through my whole career. Something like this:

1. Identify opportunities where not a lot of people have the requisite skill.
2. Learn new skills quickly, and don’t worry about perfecting them before you get started.
3. Keep moving forward, learn from your failures but don’t be afraid of them.
4. When better methods and techniques come along, don’t cling to your old skill set just because you put time into developing it. Embrace the new.

When desktop publishing replaced light tables and X-Acto kinves, I was ready to go along for the ride. When the web started gaining popularity in 1995, I got a Macintosh Performa and a “Teach Yourself HTML in a Week” book.

It took me until Dreamweaver 3.0 to make the leap into WYSIWYG editors, but then i didn’t look back and jumped with both feet into Flash development.

Now, I’ll still hand-code some html once in a while. I’ll put together a swf when it’s the best way to accomplish something. But I’m not married to those techniques. If there’s a faster, easier way to do something, I’m ready to learn.

This is why I feel at home in internet marketing, online development, and social media. The landscape is always shifting. This is an industry that rewards flexibility, adaptability, and a passion for learning. The most successful people in this sphere are those who move quickly, learn quickly, and waste no tears on the skills and techniques they leave behind.

Tags: Career Development, Internet Marketing, Photography, Social Media

How Can $1,000 Make A Difference?

Over on LinkedIn, Thom Monahan poses an interesting question about how one person can stimulate the economy with $1,000.

I would like to have a personal impact on the economy. We’ll call it Thom’s Economic Stimulus Impulse. I’m setting aside $1,000 to be used on something or things that I had not planned. Any ideas?

This got me thinking about what kind of impact you can get from four figures. Of course, the first challenge as I saw it was to leverage social media to get a multiplier effect from the money so the benefits extend beyond the people who actually touch the check.

So here’s the idea I submitted to Thom:

Great thanks to Thom for trying to make an impact on our community.

If you have ideas for Thom, submit them through the LinkedCincinnati Group on LinkedIn.

Tags: Charity, Cincinnati, Doing Good, Donation, Recession, Stimulus

The Strategy Behind Amazon’s Kindle iPhone App

This week, Amazon released a free iPhone app for reading eBooks made for its Kindle reader. It has so far received mostly favorable reviews for its execution and for the idea itself.

It would be easy to say that offering eBooks to be read on the iPhone would cannibalize Kindle sales. You could also object that the iPhone’s screen is far too small for reading an entire book. Yet in my view, this is a brilliant move by Amazon.

Amazon’s core mission is to sell content. While the Kindle is a real physical product for which they make a very real profit, the ongoing revenue model for Amazon is to sell eBooks. Kindle’s primary role is as a vehicle for those sales. The iPhone app allows Amazon to open another channel for eBook sales which costs them virtually nothing and removes a $300 barrier to entry for new customers.

Releasing any high-profile application for the iPhone is a publicity triumph. Kindle has received its fair share of media coverage, but no device in recent memory can match the iPhone when it comes to media affection. Any significant move made by a large company which credibly includes the iPhone as a major character in the drama is sure to generate plenty of press.

One of the iPhone app’s most telling features is the ability to synchronize bookmarks across devices. This presents a clear statement that the iPhone app can live harmoniously with the user’s Kindle, meaning enjoyment of your eBook is not an either-or proposition.

That’s where it becomes clear what a victory this is for Amazon. For any iPhone user who has already bought a Kindle, this rewards their purchase with a free option to continue enjoying their eBook in situations where they don’t have their Kindle handy. Even more importantly, it makes an excellent pitch to iPhone users who haven’t bought a Kindle.

There couldn’t be a better target market for the Kindle than a class of consumers who have demonstrated their willingness to buy an electronic device for three figures. By letting iPhone users try Amazon’s eBooks for only the cost of the book itself, Amazon lets the user sell himself on the idea of reading electronic books. As he becomes addicted to the convenience of reading nearly any title anywhere and concurrently grows frustrated with the iPhone’s tiny screen, the Kindle looks more and more attractive.

Any iPhone user who downloads the app and doesn’t buy a Kindle probably wouldn’t have bought one anyway. This gives those users the opportunity to become eBook buyers that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. For those iPhone users who have considered the Kindle, but for one reason or another have not bought one, this app gives a significant nudge.

I applaud Amazon’s iPhone release, and wish them great success. Well done.

Tags: Amazon, Cannibalization, iPhone, Kindle, Marketing Strategy

Flash Countdown

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any Flash development. But we’re launching a really important new product so it’s all hands on deck, and I got to put on my ActionScript hat again for a bit.

Fortunately, I still had a computer running Flash8. Macromedia (now Adobe) really wants their developers to keep up with the times, and I never really made the move to AS2.0, let alone 3.0.

The challenge here was to create a sense of urgency to get signed up for the new product introduction. We reached out to people to get on an advance list, and planned to close it in two days’ time. The product itself is called “Double Your Money,” so the design aesthetic has a U.S. currency theme.

I’d done a countdown swf before, but the technical challenge was a lot more sticky than I remembered. First, you want to get the time from the server so you’re not dependent on the user to set his computer’s clock correctly.

loadVariables("gettime.php","");

I skipped that part in the piece you see here so it will continue to work after Saturday.

Next, I set the date of the event to which I’m counting down. My server’s calendar returns 0 as January, so I subtracted one from the month of my event when I entered the date.

eventDate = new Date(2009, 01, 14, 23, 59, 59);
eventMillisecs = eventDate.getTime();
eventNumber = eventMillisecs / 1000;

Here’s the part I forgot about. Even though I’m getting the time from the server, which is in the time zone I want to use, Flash makes an adjustment anyway, according to the time zone of the user. So I need to find out what time zone the user is in, and back that out.

d = new Date();
offset = d.getTimezoneOffset();

This function gives the offset in minutes and I need seconds
offset_secs = offset * 60

My countdown is on central time, which is 6 hours (2160 seconds) offset from GMT
offset_cst = 2160;
offset_secs = offset_secs - offset_cst;

Here’s where I get the difference between the server time and my event date, and add back in the timezone offset.
secs = (eventNumber - time)+offset_secs;

Once that’s done, I’m ready to calculate how many hours, minutes and seconds are left.
mins = Math.floor(secs/60);
hours = Math.floor(mins/60);

Now my minutes and seconds are the entire time expressed in those units. To make a countdown clock that makes sense, I’ll take out all the minutes that are accounted for in the hours, and all the seconds that are accounted for in the minutes.
minsLeft = mins - (hours*60);
secsLeft = secs - (mins*60);


With three dynamic text boxes on the stage to show hours, minsLeft and secsLeft, I was free to design the rest of the clock around that.

Incidently, time is running out if you’re interested in our “Double Your Money” product. You can get more information here: Double Your Money from Zacks.

Tags: Actionscript, Countdown, Flash, Time Zone, Tutorial

Lovely Charts is Now Open

I’ve been a fan of LovelyCharts.com for some time now. I got in on the private beta and found it to be really useful and even a little fun.

If you ever use flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, or similar diagrams to communicate your ideas, LovelyCharts makes it much less tedious to put those documents together. If, like me, you’ve ever used Illustrator, Fireworks, or (God help me) Quark to draw a diagram or flowchart, this is for you.

Of course there are powerful and perhaps even more flexible charting applications out there. But if you don’t use them often enough to justify their cost or learning curve, then this web-based tool is the answer.

A free account should do almost everything you need to create an occasional flowchart or diagram. You can save the result as an image file to use however you like. Premium accounts add extra features like version history and collaborative tools.

Tags: diagrams, flowcharts, lovelycharts, omnigraffle, Productivity, project management, Tips, Tools, webbased charts