bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

I’m streaming launch festival today, and Kanishk Parashar of Coin was speaking – talking about why what they’re working on hasn’t already been done.

One thing he noted was “writing code that is low energy as well” – efficient code with low power hardware i.e. bluetooth.

That reminded me of an article my good friend Dan Heier sent me, focused on Sustainable Web Design, that is it looks at the real cost of serving up a web page.  I.e. A 2008 paper from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests it takes 13kWh to transmit 1GB!

Apple is focused on this as well building an energy score on apps in Maverick – meaning you can see what impact an application has on your battery life.

Worth thinking about, how does our code impact the power consumption at the other end and what’s the real cost of that?

There’s a balance, how much is too much?

Really as far as the conceivable future is enough.

When you start trying to build for all eventualities it’s too tough.

Work to what you’re 80% confident of.  Anymore beyond that’s probably getting a bit too expensive.

The power of the Wiki is in the fact that we can all contribute.  If it’s not right we can fix it.  Or if it’s controversial we can debate it.

Also the end result is clear, better sharper knowledge for all to access.

So you have a community of people motivated around achieving that goal, in a way they can all positively contribute.

It’s a great metaphor for how businesses should be fun, a clear goal for all and a clear way for everyone to contribute in a constructive way against that.  Most businesses are geared that way but don’t embrace the participation part, everyone should know how they add to the overall goal and how their peers also contribute.

What he does is draws up a calendar of boxes, each box represents a day he has to write, once he writes a joke that day, he can put a cross through it, after a while his job becomes trying to extend that daisy chain of boxes because you don’t want to break it.

He’s gamified his own writing!  By focusing on extending the chain, not the writing, he’s sidestepped the all too common writers block.  Nice hack.

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Reminded of this whilst reading Steal Like an Artist.  More on Seinfelds hack here.

This book Steal Like an Artist has long been on my list to buy, I started it last night, it’s excellent.

A quick short but motivating read.

Just a good reminder of constructive habits to fuel your creativity.

What that creativity is to you will vary but it’s applicable to anyone.

I’m happy to shout the first copy, the first person to email me [email protected] will get a copy from Amazon.

But the deal is, once you read it you have to pass it on to someone else, books like this shouldn’t sit on the shelf they’re best spread from person to person.

In a complex market with a elongated value chain you may have 12 companies that value chain who don’t have that visibility of one another. They don’t have personal relationships up and down, or a whole visibility. And each component they’ve got to compete with others trying to take that component.

I.e. I found was someone was Promoting Tweets, another company wrote them and another set the strategy. In my mind too micro within an emerging field.

So that’s where buzzwords come in, they act as a guiding force of change in a complex market. They get the value chain in align and get everyone thinking about the changes they need to make happen. It’s that a certain kind of change has been branded.

Buzzwords are a big complex markets way of ensuring change comes about consistently. And that’s a good thing, buzzword or not.

What if  you could share anonymously to Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn?

That’s a big what if.

I want to push this content to my friends but maybe not have them know it’s from me.  Or like WikiLeaks people may post on LinkedIn when it’s not attributable to them.

I dunno but I think it would change the dynamics quite a bit.

It’s your social group, just not attributed to you.

I was chatting with a fellow entrepreneur last night, around the at least one competitor rule.

A companies founder that he’d invested in was worrying that there was a competitor in the space.  You want at least one, as they help educate the market, they help bring a point of difference, they help sell.  You don’t want to the lone soldier growing the market.

Especially when your product is iterative, it’s worrying if others aren’t reaching a similar conclusion.

Every now and again I’ll get back into my Economics books, podcasts and relook at things from an Economics lens.

The lens is always good for looking at incentives, how are parties incentivised, what will they gradually move towards when incentivised that way.

We’ve been looking at our new product Nudge, at how our competitors bill and what their incentives were, it helped explain a lot.

We don’t onsell your data, if our product creates insightful data you maintain ownership.  Our competitors don’t, they want to onsell it, they have to as they have priced free and gone broad.  We’ve gone high value and charge upfront.

Data is accessible & actionable, we’re pushing the data we create to Ad Servers, so that our clients can then use this data for targeting as they need.  Our competitors have to get you to buy through them, this is their margin on top.

Our objectives are sustainable growth, the others in our space are looking for overnight scale to exit rapidly.  We want to hold our clients for a long period of time, the cost of change is too big for us and them.

In any market place, look at the incentives, what is it that’s going to dictate how a company acts.  Always insightful.

Improvement is about turning change into habits.

Self discipline is what gets you started turning it into a habit is what sustains the improvement.

And self control is an exhaustible behaviour, so you want to turn things into habit to make sure they keep happening.

Same with businesses and systems & processes – once there’s consistency you get that consistent output.

I’m reading Daily Rituals of Artists at the moment – very good, worth a read.

I’m finding at the moment the web is becoming a lot more homogenized. It’s in a zag, all the ways that content bubbles to the top is becoming rapidly connected.

Top of Medium? Top of Digg? On the main media outlets in hours.

What used to be niche is no longer niche.

What this has meant is it;s allowing less content for discovery those little moments of finding gems but even more value in that discovery.

Creep to the edges of the web – what’s happening there?

My wife Esther and blogger friend Marian always tell me off for the double spacing after a full stop.

It was a paradigm meant for typewriters!  Not digital communications.  I did learn to type on typewriters as our school couldn’t afford enough computers (fortunately that changed after a couple of years) which is where it started.

I still do it – I will probably change in time but it’s a great example of legacy learning, to help shift change you need to teach people en masse the new way of doing something.  At some point that will change and we need to change what we do.  Where we don’t it’s the next generation that will.

In the classic book vs kindle argument, people think they could never do without books.  That’s because they grew up with books, there’s a whole generation of kids growing up reading on a screen more than they ever will paper.  It’s a scale that’s only tipped in the last few years.

We’ve got to be conscious of what is legacy, what will change and what won’t till the next generation.  It’s these shifts which can creep up on, real fast.

We’re nearing the end of the year – still a wee way to go but it is coming.

It’s weird but at this time I always see a few friends, or personally projects look to wrap up, or people looking to quit.  Usually it’s just part of the ups and downs of working on something meaningful.

But it’s always good to get someone elses thoughts, a great book I’ve found as a prompt is The Dip by Seth Godin. It’s a book I often recommend, loan and gift to other entrepreneurs.  Give it a read when you just feel like that projects not moving along.

When you feel like quitting that’s the exact moment you need to double down.

In the shift up to NY, it’s like starting from scratch again – but with a bank of support behind you (thanks to the team back home!)

But in that shift we’re based out of a shared office in New York (Grind Spaces) which is excellent, I was able to pop in and get started day after arriving.  It’s a healthy mix of startups, freelancers and events being run – I quite like it.

But one observation I’ve noticed, is that as it’s got colder, on a cold day there is noticeably less people in the office.  That is more people are deciding to come in later or work from home.  I understand but if you want to get the business grinding you’ve really got to get more disciplined.

To really crack freelancing and grow it you’ve got to into a routine, consistently, as with consistent inputs you’ll get better results.  Charles Duhigg wrote this great book about habits, what they are, how they form and really how you can adjust your own habits for your benefit.  After reading that I redesigned my morning to develop new habits, things as simple as leaving the keys by the front door, getting my gym gear out and ready – packing my bag before I go to bed.  Simple things but they meant that when I got up my day got off to a great (frictionless) start – which of course a great start sets me up for success each day.

Freelancing is tough – don’t let something easily fixed hold you back.

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If you are freelancing, a wrote a blog series on it a while back, growing from that to a business, read it here

And even if you’re not The Power of Habit is a great book to make you look at your own habits.

It’s real easy to be busy.

And it’s easy to justify why you haven’t done something because you’ve been busy.

The reality is, we are all busy, it’s about being busy on something meaningful.

Start with 1% or 2% of your time, each day, on something meaningful.  Something that you work on today to improve tomorrow.  And keep at it.  Till you achieve what you wanted.  Then start on the next.

Don’t let ‘being busy’ stop you from what you want to be doing.