Lee Semel

TechCrunch covers another online question & answer startup, Tinbag, which follows in the footsteps of many others that have failed to tackle this market, including Google.

In my experience, the best community for getting anything answered online is Ask Metafilter. Since it started around 1999, it has grown organically but not explosively, and now has several hundred new questions a day. It’s loaded with interesting questions and intelligent, thoughtful responses. The membership skews toward, smart, hip, tech-savvy people. This is the place where Adam Savage of Mythbusters asks fans for show ideas. But the questions cover all areas. Unlike recent Q&A startups, AskMeFi doesn’t charge you per post, and you can’t make any money by answering questions. Membership is $5, and like buying a gun, requires a one-week waiting period. The fee alone prevents a lot of spam and abuse, but it’s also due to the high degree of trust as well as community input through the MetaTalk forum.

AskMeFi is a great example of the value of governance that Fred Wilson talks about as being next on the value stack for technology businesses. Any startup could take this site and clone it, but it wouldn’t be the same. It’s the community and the governance, not the technology, that account for its success.

Should you outsource your development offshore? This is a question I get asked often both by entrepreneurs and consulting clients. Serial entrepreneur Darren Herman has an excellent post today on when to use internal and offshore development teams, and I’d like to add my own perspective. I’ve had great success outsourcing for projects large and small, but the success really depends on the specifics of the project, your ability to oversee it, and the quality of the offshore outsourcing firm. Ask yourself these questions before outsourcing a project:

Can this project be completely specified in a detailed design document? You need to prepare detailed use cases, wireframes, designs, and software specifications that the offshore firm can follow. Don’t outsource projects unless you know precisely what you want, upfront, down to the last detail. If your project is not the type that can be completely specified in writing, it’s not a good candidate for offshore outsourcing.

Do you have the knowledge to oversee software development? I’ve seen too many non-technical people try to outsource a project on their own, only to get useless, buggy garbage back because they don’t know how to evaluate the work provided. Make sure you have the expertise to review and test the work, or have a local CTO or technically-savvy project manager who can oversee the project on your behalf. If you’re a business guy and you can’t tell which offshore programmers are good, find a technical person to help you.

Is technology the key value driver of this project? Or just an enabler? If the technology or user experience is part of the core value that your project delivers, develop it locally. If the technology is just an enabler for some other business opportunity, it’s a good candidate for outsourcing.

If you’re in the software business itself, including all types of web-based software, technology is absolutely key to your product. You won’t see a 37signals or Fog Creek throwing a spec over to an offshore firm. Great software requires more than just implementation, it requires passion and craftsmanship. These can only come from a star programmer who’s fired up about your project.

You won’t get that when you outsource, because you’re basically hiring a body shop. You never really know who’ll be put on your project. Joel Spolsky makes many good points in his article Hitting the High Notes. Basically, he explains that the added quality a great programmer adds to your product greatly outweighs the added costs, because software (including web based software) can be distributed at next to zero marginal cost. It’s the same as hiring a star for a movie. Brad Pitt may cost millions of dollars, but he increases the movie’s appeal, and his cost is distributed over the millions of people who see the movie.

How often will the project change? If you’ll need to provide constant updates, whether to keep up with the competition in a startup environment, or to handle customer requests, develop locally. If your project doesn’t require constant iteration, and you can deal with longer development cycles, outsource it.

Are you innovating or merely implementing? To innovate quickly you need to iterate, experiment, and learn from your mistakes. Ideally you want the most talented software engineers, sitting in the same room with you, using an agile, iterative development process. You’ll also want them in touch with users, to get direct feedback that can influence product development. In these situations, local developers are a must.

What is the size and capabilities of the offshore firm? You can outsource to individual freelancers, small firms, or large consultancies. Will they provide comprehensive project management, or will you have to micromanage them? Do they have proven capabilities in the technologies and platforms you’re using, or are they just saying ‘yes’ to win your business? Does their pricing seem realistic, or is it unrealistically low?

Are there conflicting interests? Compared with passionate developers, a third party offshore consulting company will never be as committed or motivated to see your project succeed. They may have many other clients to satisfy, and billable hour quotas to fill. Any consulting firm makes money one of three ways: 1) by billing hourly, 2) by setting a fixed project price and executing the project for less than that price or 3) on change orders. If you’re on fixed price, there’s an incentive for them to do as little as possible to make the greatest profit, or to underbid and issue change order after change order once they have your business.

Make sure your interests are aligned by choosing the proper payment model. If your project is more open-ended, choose to pay hourly. If your project is extremely well defined, with a clear functional spec, user flows, wireframes and designs, choose fixed price. Don’t choose the lowest price. You won’t be doing yourself any favors by getting an unrealistically low bid. Go over your project with them to make sure they understand its true scope.

Once you answer these questions for yourself, the best way to find an offshore firm is to look on eLance, RentACoder.com, GetAFreelancer.com, or similar sites. Offer a small test project, such as coding a basic script, to a number of companies, and compare the quality of the results you get back, as well as the experience working with them. And if you decide not to go the offshore route, there are a number of niche job boards, such as 37signals, TechCrunch, or NextNY to help find the star that will help make your project rock.

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was banned from advertising on Google. His egregious infraction consisted of accidentally linking his ad to a redirect, because he’d moved his site from one domain to another. In the meantime, Google’s been supporting websites that sell pirated movies, going so far as to assign them an account representative to suggest better keywords. These fraudsters spent more than $800,000 on Google ads. That’s a real double standard: banning the small guy for an honest mistake while actively supporting the big spender in their illicit activity. I expect better from Google.

Will it Blend? is a funny site that advertises a powerful blender with videos of their spokespan blending all sorts of objects, from iPods to golf clubs. Its popularity is an example of how people will willingly seek out ads of they’re funny and entertaining. David Pogue writes:

I’m not alone when I say that I’ll happily watch your ad if it’s entertaining and worth my while. The number of hilarious ad videos circulating on YouTube—millions of people VOLUNTARILY watching corporate ads—is testimony to that.

A while back I wrote a game called Wolf5K, which was a re-creation of the original first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D in only 5K of Javascript. There’s an online tutorial about how this was accomplished. It used an archaic 1-bit image type called XBM, originally designed for the X Window System, to dynamically generate bitmap images via Javascript.

I’ve just discovered that XBM images no longer work in Windows XP. There apparently was a recent security update that removed support for this image type, and it won’t be included in IE7. This means that the game will no longer work, unless there’s a way around this restriction. I’d like to keep the game up, so if you have any ideas, please contact me.

Today I walked in on a bank robbery. Well, actually, I missed it by about 15 minutes. I was headed to Commerce Bank on Park Ave and 21st street to exchange all of my accumulated change. The bank was full of cops, and the officer at the door said it had just been robbed.

I’m not naive but I always find it amazing how certain people have such little respect for the law or their fellow humans, combined with a high tolerance for trouble, that they’ll do things like rob banks, steal credit card numbers, break into brokerage accounts, or other dishonest activity. Even if these people score a big zero in the morals department, this kind of life has got to be incredibly risky and stressful.

Anyway, I finally lugged my 20 pounds or so of change to the 15th and 5th branch, and ended up with enough cash to buy a nice iPod Nano.

There’s a lot of buzz about how the way we interact and socialize is changing thanks to innovations in social websites – virtual worlds, avatars, social networking. But it only seems like these ideas are new. Having been involved with computers since I was a kid, I’ve realized that there’s very little that’s actually new. Even some of the coolest trends of 2006, virtual worlds and avatars, are rehashes of things that have come before. The only difference now is that computers have more power and better connectivity, but more importantly, that the general public is much more receptive and open to the Internet as part of their social lives.

In 2006 there was a lot of buzz about Second Life. But in the 1980’s, Lucasfilm launched one of the first online multi-user games, called Habitat, which was part of QuantumLink (now known as AOL). It was a 2D world with blocky graphics, but had most of the elements of today’s virtual worlds. You got to create your own avatar, walk around the virtual landscape, and interact with the other members. I vaguely remember playing this as a kid on my Commodore 64, but my use was severely limited because it took about 5 minutes of loading time to even start the program, and at $6 an hour, my parents weren’t about to let me run up the bill.

Yesterday, I found out about a cool new site called Webkinz, where you can adopt a virtual stuffed animal, an on-screen representation of physical stuffed animals you buy in the store, and set up online via entering a code printed on its tag. Like Neopets and The Sims before it, this is the latest recreation of the Activision game Little Computer People. You’d adopt a virtual person, who would take up residence in a house on your computer screen. You’d be responsible for feeding him, and keeping him healthy and happy. Sound familiar?

This also shows how long it takes, and how difficult it can be, to get any kind of software really right. How many unsuccessful virtual worlds have been developed through the years before Second Life came along?

So if you’re looking for a new idea, try flipping through the pages of old computer magazines and see what’s been tried already. Maybe you can execute better. What was once confined to a small slice of computer-savvy kids is now commonplace and cool.

It’s New Year’s Day, a time for fresh starts. Each year, millions of people make resolutions for improving their lives: losing weight, becoming happier, starting a business, making more money. And every year, millions of people follow their plans for a month or two, but ultimately forget about them.

If there are important changes you want to make in your life, thinking about them once a year isn’t enough. Instead, do a three-month plan. Three months is long enough to see changes and improvements in your life, but not so long that you can put things off easily or lose sight of your goals. Just as public companies issue quarterly results to Wall Street, you should issue quarterly reports to yourself.

Here’s the process I use for the quarterly plan. This needs to be done in writing because it will become something you refer to often, as well as a document of where you started and what you’ve achieved:

• Identify the major areas of your life. My list includes Business & Career, Financial, Family, Relationships, Social Life, Learning & Knowledge, Fun & Recreation, and Health & Fitness. You may have others.
• Make an assessment of each area, and plan your goals. Write down an honest assessment of where you are in each of these areas. If some areas are suffering, it’s important to acknowledge this, because unless you admit there’s a problem, there’s no way to improve. For each area, determine what you want to change and write down your goals. Look ahead in the long term to see where you want to be in a few years, and choose appropriate short term goals for the next 90 days to help you get there. This can take several hours, but it’s worth it to see where you are and keep you on track toward accomplishing your goals.
• Turn the goals into concrete actions. To accomplish a goal, you need to identify a list of concrete actions you can take toward achieving it. Write down a list of the things you can actually do, right now, to get the ball rolling. Be as specific as possible. For instance, “lose weight” isn’t specific, but “go to the gym from 8-9 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays” or “buy diet soda instead of regular soda” are. If any seem daunting, break them down into smaller tasks.
• Take action. Immediately, start implementing the actions steps on the list. After completing them, highlight them or cross them off (using the strikeout feature of your word processor). Don’t delete them, because you’ll want to keep a record of what you accomplished. Surprisingly, the act of writing down and crossing off completed actions helps increase your motivation and sense of accomplishment. It’s very satisfying to open up the document and see a list of 30 days you’ve been to the gym, each marked as accomplished.
• Review the list weekly to stay on track. It’s important that you use the document as an essential planning tool, reviewing it regularly. This ensures you never lose sight of your goals. Otherwise it’s easy to get caught up in day to day work, and focus on what’s urgent and immediate while forgetting about your long-term goals. The first thing Monday morning, go through your actions list to check your progress, and to plan time for them in your week’s schedule. No matter how ambitious, all of life’s goals have to take place on ordinary days between the time you get up and the time you go to sleep. If you’re writing down goals and actions but don’t plan actual time to execute them, nothing will happen. If you have free time during the week, you can check the document to find an action you can take toward one of your goals.
• Every three months, re-assess your plan. At the end of every quarter, go back to the assessment, take a look at what you planned to do, and note what you actually done. When you haven’t followed your plan, this will be easy to see, and you can make a course correction in your behavior and time management. Then, go through each major area of life. Write a summary of your accomplishments for the quarter, and note any areas you haven’t made progress in. Revise your goals, and come up with new actions to take during the next quarter.

Writing a quarterly plan will help keep your goals and resolutions constantly in mind, and will give you a sense of control, because you’ve systematically thought out and planned all the major areas of your life. The critical step is reviewing the plan regularly, as part of your regular work process. This will ensure you continue to work toward your long term goals, and never get sidetracked by day-to-day concerns.

I’ve been looking for a device like this for a long time, and finally found one. This miniature amp lets you ditch your tinny, underpowered computer speakers, and directly hook up high-quality stereo speakers directly to your computer. Despite being inexpensive, it has a great sound. If you get the original, be sure to get an AC adapter for it as well, otherwise it runs on batteries. In my opinion, the maker of this product doesn’t know what it’s got on its hands — it seems to be targeted toward audiophiles, but at this combination of low price and high quality, anyone who uses their computer as their music source should get one.

Saatchi Gallery makes the NY Times with a niche social networking website dedicated to artists to view and share their work. A lot of entrepreneurs are trying to create riffs on MySpace, so I wonder if this is part of the next wave of social networking… sites for narrow audiences, associated with established brand names for cachet, and used as sort of a recruiting or A&R mechanism to find the best people in a given community. For instance Pixar could create a community for aspiring 3D animators, or Google a social network for programmers.