Business Bricks

HOT or NOT (my favorite site, if I was single) doesn’t have any instructions. You know what to do.

Meanwhile, Ecademy (not my favorite site) has lots of instructions. They’ve even started workshops to explain what to do and how to use it at £25/ seat. The email I received this week implies they’ve sold 800 seats so far. That’s some going, but wouldn’t it be better to make a site that’s easier to use? Isn’t the goal of design to make something that needs less instructions, not more?

But is a non-paying customer a customer?
Jeff Jarvis | Stupid, stupid Yahoo

Eric Pratt takes apart consumer electronics devices. He took apart the new 2 Gig iPod Nano and this is what he found: (a) It retails for $199, but is actually worth $103 in parts and labour. Over here? £139/ £58. (b) The flash memory from Samsung costs $54/ £30 but the flex circuit that controls the click wheel costs just 1.8c/ 1p. And that, remember, is what makes the iPod great. He doesn’t say how much the, ahem, screen costs.

More photos of Nano parts on this Japanese site.
Story via Boing Boing.

A short update on Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage. He’s now sold 453,600 pixels at $1 a pop, up 200,700 on my original post 18 days ago. Meanwhile it’s all getting a bit bandwagonesque. I delete at least two spam comments a day on my original post, from characters such as Christian N. Abad, Kelvin Foo, and Mike Blakely. And people have even started to sublet pixels. (Note: the only copycat site I’ll link to is One Million Internet Faces and only because long-time reader Nick Butcher set it up.)

At last, intelligent argument AGAINST open plan working:
Joel Spolsky | Multitasking in the Workplace

Sorry for the delay posting this. You can grab our RSS feed (and keep up with every post I make automatically) by clicking here or on the little FeedBurner icon below and following the instructions.

The first in a semi-occasional series on how to hire:
MICROSOFT INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS THEY ASK:
Why are manhole covers round?
How do they make M&Ms?
How many piano tuners are there in the world?
How would you move Mount Fuji?

QUESTIONS THEY DON’T:
How many times a day does Windows crash?
What is your greatest weakness?*

*As Malcolm Gladwell puts it:
“[By asking the weakness question] all I’d really asked him was whether he could describe a personal strength as if it were a weakness, and, in answering as he did, he had merely demonstrated his knowledge of the unwritten rules of the interview.”

Jo (my other half) was in Edinburgh on Saturday night to see the three years late, 10 times over-budget Scottish Parliament building walk away with the RIBA Stirling prize for architecture. Me? I just spent three days working through a project I seriously thought would take half a day. So this link seems especially apposite -
Why are people such bad estimators? | 37signals

I meant to post this earlier:

Finkbuilt | KETCHUP LABEL DESIGN CONTEST.

Still two weeks to enter for anyone who can use Photoshop. The Malcolm Gladwell article that inspired the contest is worth reading too (best line: “the mind knows not what the tongue wants”).

I’m all for this: A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom.

Since 1972, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan (about the same size as Switzerland) has measured Gross National Happiness (GNH) in place of Gross National Product (GNP). And, according to King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, self-reliance is one of the four key functions of happiness. So we (small business owners) probably contribute even more to a measure of happiness than we do to a measure of product or consumption. So maybe our contribution to society should be measured in happiness made, not profits made. Ian, can I change my annual return?

Less is a competitive advantage | 37signals
Less choice makes us happier | Barry Schwartz
Do less planning | Brad Pitt
Less More blades | The Onion
If you can’t explain your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position | Seth Godin
Use less letters | John Forde
Do less bad things | 43 Things
Do less | Seth Godin (again)
Sleep less. Eat more | Slashdot

The best received post on the site so far has been one I didn’t even write: Name Charlie’s business.

UPDATE 1: The editors at Pick Me Up tell me that Ilya’s baby weighed in at 8lb 7oz pounds, and she named her Honey.

UPDATE 2: Charlie will decide shortly on his name change. If you’ve got any more suggestions, post them by tomorrow please.

A FEW THOUGHTS: In Charlie’s case, picking a new name probably matters a lot. Standard Office Cleaning ended up a bad name for an obviously non-standard business. But mostly naming names is overhyped. Al Ries and Jack Trout devote two chapters of Positioning to the “single most important marketing decision you can make . . . what to name the product”, but they’re wrong (in my book).

Isn’t it like saying picking a baby name is the most important decision you make on his/ her upbringing? Aren’t the rules, in fact, the same? (1) Pick something that any kid/ business with any kind of character can make his/ her own. Great kids/ businesses make their names sound great, not the other way round. (2) Make it a name that teachers/ employees know how to spell without asking and other kids/ customers can pronounce.

This new site rolled off Mint Digital’s servers on the same day as our site last week.

Most olive oil makers just sell WYSIWYG - you buy a bottle of olive oil. But Nudo Italia let you adopt an olive tree. All they’ve changed is a verb and a noun, but it will multiply their profits. People nowadays like to know what happens to their money after they spend it. The word “buy” is temporary, as is “oil”. But “adopt” and “tree” imply something more, something continuous, something your money can help cultivate. E’ magnifico!

In two months, Alex Tew, 21, has made $252,900 by auctioning off pixels on The Million Dollar Homepage. It costs advertisers $1 a pixel. So that clipping on the left alone is worth $27,300 to Alex. (By the way, for all the dollar signs in this post, it’s worth noting that Alex is a student from Wiltshire.)

My 2p/ 2 cents below. Comments are open if you want to add your own.

(1) The Million Dollar Homepage doesn’t change the rules about how to make web sites. It’s just the exception that we all wish we’d thought of first.

(2) Alex might think his site is making internet history, but it isn’t. Homepage pixel auctions happen all the time.

In fact, they’re why most homepages don’t work. Ask any web designer working for a large corporate. Making the homepage is like managing a pixel auction. Most homepages end up a messy compromise, as departments, projects and clients all vie for space. The problem we face as small business owners is only slightly different - it’s our darling ideas and projects that vie.

Everybody/ every idea wants a shot at the auction for space on the homepage. What they don’t realise is that by doing that, they’re stopping the site working. It’s the web equivalent of blocking your shop door with stock. As Seth Godin put it ages ago, a webpage should only do one, maybe two things - not twenty.

Late notice, sorry. Tomorrow - Tuesday 4 October - we’re
holding an impromptu (no agenda. just talk and meet) and
informal (no dress code whatsoever. wear what you
normally wear) meet-up in Angel, North London.

WHERE? - The Living Room, 18-26 Essex Rd, N1 8LN
Map, directions etc - we’ll probably be around the right-hand side of the bar as you go in (or ask at the bar).
WHEN? From 6pm. COST? Nothing. Except the drinks you buy.