Lee Semel

The Firefox commercial that my brother directed and that I helped with is going to air in Boston and San Francisco starting Monday. I’ll post a schedule once have that info. The commercial was produced for the Firefox Flicks contest, and you can watch it on their site.

Update: As a community sponsor and a supporter of the Firefox project, you can get your name included in a Firefox ad when it runs on TV.

It’s the holiday shopping season, a time when I reflect on the fact that I hate shopping. Whether online or in person, I find shopping to be a frustrating, time-consuming experience that ranks low on my list of favorite activities. Before you denounce me as somehow un-American, let me explain just a few of the many reasons, and some ideas about how shopping could be better:

• Shopping is all about gathering information. But there’s too much information, and once you’ve made your purchase, it all becomes worthless. Shopping is like a big research expedition, the goal of which is to discover the exact right product at the exact right place to buy it. Because of all the different product models and minute differences between them, there’s a lot of information to sift through. You can spend hour after hour researching a $250 purchase. It’s fine to spend the time if you’re buying an expensive item like a car, but a total waste for small things, like gadgets and cell phones. All that time you spend learning about the products is basically useless once you finally buy something. It would be better to use that time to learn something with some long-term value.
• Reviews and recommendations are of dubious value. Reading countless reviews is a big time sink. They often disagree and it’s hard to know what sites to trust. If you happen to be in a store, good luck finding anyone working there who knows anything about the product. Aside from Consumer Reports, there’s very little that’s trustworthy.
• Shopping = schlepping. I hate the physical chore of shopping, having to go from store to store, finding products on the shelves, and waiting on line to pay for them. What a waste of time and energy. I hate it when I schlep all the way to a store only to find out it’s out of stock for what I want. This is one aspect of shopping where the suburbs beat New York City hands down. It’s a lot easier to shop in a mall, and bring home your purchases in a car, than to take the subway all around town, from store to store, lugging your purchases with you.
• The need to keep track of little slips of paper. I hate having to worry about the return policy and customer service of a particular retailer. And reciepts are an archaic concept. It’s ridiculous that have to keep little slips of paper around to prove I bought the product in case I need to return it. The store has a computer system and knows my credit card number – why can’t they just look it up?
• What’s the real price? Who knows. Companies are always inventing complex schemes to try to test your price sensitivity in hopes of getting more out of you–coupons, affiliate points, rebates, special limited time sales, and price variations based on your cookies or purchase history. Whenever I buy computers or electronics, I now go and scour the Internet looking for coupon codes, not because I need a discount, but mainly to avoid the feeling of being screwed by paying full price. Even without coupons and discounts, companies aren’t even consistent internally. Every time I find a book I want in B&N, I hesitate to buy it because I know if I order it from their website, it’ll be cheaper. Why the difference?
• Comparison shopping sites are all but unusable. You get hundreds of listings of the same product, because the site’s not smart enough to know that ‘Manufacturer Cellphone Model ABC-123” and “ABC-123 Manufacturer Cellphone” are the same thing. This could be improved with some kind of visual matching that would be able to tell from the photos which products are identical. Moreover, I can’t search or filter on the attributes that matter most to me. For instance, if I’m searching for a gadget, it would be great to be able to pick and choose specific features, and have the site reliably find products that match them. Even better would be the ability to search on “soft” attributes, like color, aesthetics, hipness or style. For instance, I should be able to search for something like “mid-century modern coffee table”, and if I don’t immediately find the piece I’m looking for, adjust sliders different qualities like the shade of color, or how modern vs. traditional its style is. Otherwise, you need an expert advisor who’s familiar with everything available.
• EBay is in a class by itself. I especially hate eBay. EBay is only good for one thing: its tremendous product selection. Every other aspect of its user experience is absolutely terrible. Not only do you have to first choose the product you want to buy, you are on your own to judge countless offers for that product, all of which differ slightly by condition, terms, accessories, shipping charge, and other factors. You then have to judge hundreds of different sellers. You are one your own to decide who’s the best, and all of them seem to have 99% positive ratings. At that point, you’re ready to place your bids, so even after all that research, you have no guarnatee of even getting the item. An auction format might be find for collectibles or rare items, but buying standardized current products at auction is insane because of all the additoinal information you need to gather. Have a problem with a seller? EBay’s ready to offer no help whatsoever.

Those times I do enjoy shopping are at stores where collection is heavily edited by a group of experts, and comes at a predictable price point and quality, and when there aren’t hundreds of choices differing in minute ways. For example, shopping for furniture at Crate and Barrel is a great experience. All of their products basically match because it’s all in a certain style, it comes at a predictably high level of quality, and they are always good about returns. It’s a strong brand and I know what it stands for, and it lives up to its promise. Brand names continue to be important, even in the age of the Internet. Most of the reason people rely on brand names, of both products and stores, is to overcome the information-gathering chore and the explosion of choices. When used properly by their owners, brand names are great shortcut because they allow consumers to bypass the information gathering chore.

Any company that can make shopping even marginally more pleasant, and cut down on the amount of information gathering, will definitely be getting more of my shopping dollars!

Did you ever notice that some of the most useful, intuitive websites are basically just big lists of things?  Who would have thought that a ranked list of user-submitted links would be a good way to discover news?  Or that a chronological list of posts could be a more effective communication tool than an elaborately designed website?
Well, here’s another one.  UnSpun is a new review site by Amazon.  The site consists of community-contributed lists of the top, best, and greatest things in every conceivable category.

They don’t read. They scan. And they’ll ignore most of what you write.

They may scan the first sentence of your paragraphs.  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin venenatis sem. Nulla molestie. Quisque eu tortor vitae justo vestibulum fringilla. Fusce tristique nulla. Praesent bibendum tempor magna. Praesent at sapien.

• There’s too much information thrown at them every day. . Integer tristique erat ut leo. Curabitur ipsum pede, sollicitudin vitae, sagittis vitae, pellentesque eu, metus.
• Most of it’s not important or worthwhile. Aliquam adipiscing, tortor vel dapibus viverra, nunc leo gravida justo, non fringilla ligula nisl id justo. Vestibulum nulla dolor.
• So people scan first, and then decide whether to read in detail. ut quam consequat faucibus. Sed ornare. Proin vehicula. Mauris enim metus, euismod eget, blandit nonummy.
• People read while multitasking, and don’t pay much attention. Aliquam adipiscing, tortor vel dapibus viverra, nunc leo gravida justo, non fringilla ligula nisl id justo. Vestibulum nulla dolor.
• It’s hard to read on a computer screen. Aliquam adipiscing, tortor vel dapibus viverra, nunc leo gravida justo, non fringilla ligula nisl id justo. Vestibulum nulla dolor.

Making Your Text Easy to Scan

• It’s easiest to scan headlines, bold and bullets. Donec ante. Nunc enim. Praesent quis eros vel sem tempus aliquet. Aenean eget orci vitae ipsum porttitor ultricies. Donec ante. Nunc enim. Vestibulum nulla
• Don’t write long paragraphs like this. Quisque eu tortor vitae justo vestibulum fringilla. Fusce tristique nulla. Praesent bibendum tempor magna. Praesent at sapien. Dolor, malesuada id, malesuada ut, mollis in, sapien. Nullam vestibulum rutrum sapien. In auctor ultrices augue. In vestibulum, magna sed fermentum tempus, tellus eros malesuada tellus, eu commodo arcu risus in neque. Donec eget ligula.
• Make sure links stand out and remain underlined. Donec fringilla, ante eu auctor accumsan, libero elit cursus diam, non pharetra justo mi vitae augue. Sed ut libero ut quam Use highlighting for key points. Mauris enim metus, euismod

And finally, assume that most of your text will never be read — it may as well be Latin.

Over at the nextNY blog, there’s a recap of Fred Wilson’s discussion on whether NY is a good place for startups. One of the main problems he cites is the lack of good tech people in New York. I totally, absolutely agree.

I often feel that I’m the one of the few people here who does what I do.
It seems like nearly everyone else who works with technology in a substantial way works on Wall Street. This is a completely different environment and culture from the world of Internet, new media and startups. Another, comparatively smaller, group consists of front-end specialists, often involved in advertising, media or web design. There are a lot of talented graphic designers and user interface specialists in NY, and they bring a great design sense to some of New York’s startups.

The lack of talented tech people has got to hurt businesses that start here, especially those that are forced to outsource everything. A startup’s all about execution, and you’re just not going to get the dedication, attention to detail, creativity, and passion from some overseas outsourcing company. Plus, the turnaround time to get anything done is much longer, due to distance and communication barriers. This may be fine if you’re developing something standard, like a basic database app, another shopping cart, or the nth clone of MySpace, but I couldn’t imagine a team developing anything truly disruptive or innovative using outsourcing exclusively.I’d find it hard to believe that a totally nontechnical core team could have had the vision for, and the capability to implement, sites like Blogger, del.icio.us, Feedburner, Flickr, PayPal, YouTube or any of the hundreds of other new ideas that have been unleashed over the past few years.

And speaking of MySpace clones, lately I’ve been getting asked nearly every other week to develop one, or to join up with a startup doing one. Come on, enough with the MySpace clones already. You’re like three years too late!

Any startup that’s forced to outsource all of their technology truly has a difficult challenge. Nothing beats getting a talented product guy, marketing guy and technical guru in the same room together to work together.

If you’re a tech person in NYC, contact me — I want to know you exist! 

I haven’t been a big video gamer the last few years, mainly because today’s games seem to take too much time to learn, and I don’t have the patience to learn all the secrets of a complex imaginary world.  The real world is complex enough.  I like small, simple games geared more toward the casual player, not the gaming junkie. SimCity and Civilization are my personal exceptions to this rule, and many times I’ve started to play Civilization at 11PM, “for only for an hour” only to realize it’s suddenly 3 in the morning.

The new Nintendo Wii looks different, and some of the games seem oriented more toward players like me. So I decided to buy one yesterday, and did something that I thought was rather clever. I set up a script to scrape Amazon’s order page, and text message my cell phone the minute the product became available to order. The text message arrived on schedule at around 11 Sunday morning, and I raced to the computer to hit the 1-click order button. Amazingly, all 100,000 consoles Amazon supposedly had were sold in the 30 seconds between the moment I got my SMS and the second I tried to place the order. Apparently this idea wasn’t clever enough. At least I wasn’t sitting up all night hitting ‘reload’ or waiting outside outside all night.

I got my first ‘captcha spam’ yesterday! It consisted of a single graphic containing a paragraph of jittery, contorted text on a patterned background.

They must be trying bypass any spam filters that use OCR on images included in emails (I didn’t know there were spam filters that do this, but apparently there are!) There’s also been a report of the first ASCII Art spam. Spam techniques just keeps getting weirder and weirder!

Last night there was a NextNY discussion on the role of business development for Web 2.0 focusing on the opportunities for bringing in traffic and revenues through crawling, APIs, widgets, mashups, and the like. The conclusion was that, while you still need to schmooze and make deals, these new tools are a powerful way to get others to use your service.

Among the topics discussed were mashup sites, sites that combine these features in new and creative ways, and whether they could ever be standalone businesses. Right now, they’re mainly “FNAC — Feature Not a Company”. Things like the New York City Subway Smell Map. Cool, but not businesses.

But there’s something to be said for building a new product out of other people’s code. It’s done all the time: the applications you run on your Windows desktop are basically just ‘mashups’ of the Windows APIs. Why can’t we do the same thing on the Web? What would it take to allow you to put together parts of other companies’ businesses, to create something more than the sum of its parts? And what do you need to pay attention to now if you’re a startup using APIs as part of your business development strategy?

• Reliability. When you call the sprintf function, you can be pretty sure it’s going to be there, ready and able to sprintf for you. It won’t be down for maintenance, hacked, or gone out of business. All of which can happen if you’re making an API call to another website.
• Trust. Developers must have faith they won’t be kicked off or blocked from the API, as MySpace has done.
• A not-free option. If you’re going to rely on a web service to run your business, you’ll want some kind of contract or subscription. Free services are fine for experimenting, but not when you’re using a service in a serious way. You’ll need some kind of service level guarantee and a real person you can call up when something goes wrong.
• Predictable charges. Right now, you can buy an ActiveX control or PHP script and pretty much know how much it’ll cost. It’s usually a flat upfront chanrge. But charging for web services can be unpredictable. What happens once your site takes off, and the service provider figures out you’re making a lot of money? Up goes the subscription fee!
• Predictable upgrades. If you’re mashing up another site’s API and they decide to upgrade, it could break your site. This isn’t as much of a problem with desktop operating systems, because upgrades are fewer and announced far ahead of time, and vendors usually take great pains not to break old applications. Not so with Web APIs. It’s best if the old versions of the API remain available for a while for sites that can’t adjust immediately.
• Speed. HTTP is not fast. It takes a long time to make multiple HTTP API calls in the background.

If you’re creating a site with an API, you have control over some of these issues. Will you offer your users a Pro version of the API, predictable upgrades, a real person to talk to, and a guarantee that you won’t kick them off, or will you offer only a free API, make it impossible to talk to a real person, and kick off developers whenever you feel like it? , Companies like Microsoft need to treat developers well to get them to write for their platform. The same goes for companies create ecosystems around their Web APIs.

If you want to use APIs, mashups and widgets as part of your business development strategy, treat your developers well.

I haven’t watched a commercial in months, thanks to the fast forward feature on my DVR.  So what if someone sponsored the fast forward feature, and had their logo or ad show whenever fast forward is pressed?  Just a thought.

I use GMail and Google Calendar extensively to manage all my tasks. There’s one feature idea I had that would make this incredibly easier. Here’s how it would work.
When you’re viewing an email and click Archive, there’d be an optional dropdown labeled ‘Remind me in:” followed by a list of times (one day, one week, one month, etc.). When sending an email, the dropdown would also appear.

After the time period you choose passes, GMail would automatically return the conversation to your Inbox as unread. In other words, you’re setting a reminder to yourself to deal with this email again at some time in the future.

This would be useful in many situations:

• When delegating work, it would be an automatic reminder to follow up on its progress.
• When networking, you’d want a reminder to keep in touch with a person you met. You could set it to remind you in 3 or 6 months.
• When implementing Getting Things Done, this feature would eliminate the need to have those 43 folders (31 days + 12 months) that you’re supposed to use to remind yourself of future to-dos.
• When you just don’t want to deal with something now, but don’t want to forget about it either.

Currently, if you want to remind yourself to follow up on something, you either have to create a special label ‘Followup’, and remember to check it often, or go into the calendar and add an event, which is a cumbersome process that completely breaks your workflow and concentration.

So many tasks in life and work correspond directly with emails, and it’s a cumbersome process to have to create calendar entries for all of these. Setting a reminder for an email to pop back into your inbox is a much easier and elegant alternative.