It’s great to be back on a bike. After the last couple of years, with a myriad of issues and two children getting added to the mix, I really haven’t been able to train the way I want for my races. Last season’s Ironman Buffalo Springs was a complete let down in terms of my finishing time. At least I finished.

So now that we are done with our little vacation, and apparently relocating to the Pacific Northwest, I can start thinking about my race schedule for this year. I plan to post my training regimen, as a way to share with other folks looking for ways to supplement their training, without all the preachiness you will find on certain web forums for triathlon. It’s just what I do and what works for me.

The one thing that I am not used to here, which we certainly did not have in Texas, are the hills. Holy banana hands, there are some crazy hills around here, and I am so not prepared for riding them. It will be great for training, but man does it suck. At least the weather is cooler here (if not more damp).

I had a great conversation today with Kevin Merritt of blist.  He was nice enough to get together with me as I get reintroduced to the Seattle scene.  It’s a weird thing returning to a city which you left almost a decade ago, but made much easier when people welcome you with open arms.

During the course of our conversation, we were talking about the shifting needs of getting product to market, and the skill set required of your marketing team.  This of course could take many, many pages of text to work through, but I think he summed it up best when he broke down the shift by stating simply: “people need to think about the difference between product marketing and product management.”

When most people think about marketing, especially engineers, they think about marketing communications.  They think about advertisements.  They think about press releases.  They think about Gartner’s magic quadrant.  That used to be the right way to think about marketing, because the means by which you could reach your customer were quite constrained, and marketers relied on the gatekeepers to the customers.  Namely the press corp and the analysts.

Times they are a changing, and marketers now have unprecedented access to their customers.  Think about it: 10 years ago, it was almost a ridiculous thought to think that a CEO would have a public forum discussion with customers about product features, limitations or directions.  The idea that for several cents per click, you could have your ad in front of customers looking for information pertaining to your product, in a specific city, at a specific time period during the day was the stuff of advertising fairy tale, and yet now it’s a simple matter with Google AdWords.

Product management is about reaching the customer.  Delivering to them the product that solves a need for them in an exceptional way.  This requires close quarters conversations with your customers to really understand their pain points.  Assisting users in the product discovery continuum is a critical part of product management.  In a world with an increasing volume of products and features, how can you be heard?  Product management is about delivering the right message at the right time to the right person.  If you can’t assess those items, you’re in the wrong business.

I can speak personally about this because I was part of the team that built AskMe.  I was the very first employee and responsible for the consumer portal and our syndication business.  We grew the site to MediaMetrix top 150, and had a guy who isn’t credited (though should be) with inventing the sponsored link for search traffic.  My team was doing widgets with our content back in 2000.  The problem?  We had the right product with the right message at the wrong point in time.  We were Yahoo! Answers about six years too early.  Other examples include the Foleo (wrong product), Newton (wrong time) and the early days of the UFC (wrong message - no holds barred fighting vs. mixed martial arts).

Being a stellar product manager means adapting to the world around you, and using the new tools and communications channels to reach your customers, assess their needs and pain points, and construct the messaging for your product.  Yesteryear’s banner ad was yesterday’s AdWord is today’s social media portfolio will be tommorrow’s who knows what.  The key is to stay educated and stay close to your customer.

One of the common traps of any startup is hiring too many people too quickly.  When code is being cranked out and everyone is running around like they have had their heads cut off, there is a tendency to believe that every task needs to have a separate person assigned to it.  This is much more the case when you have engineers running the company.  They often make the mistake of thinking you need “lots of business guys.”  Trust me, as few of us as possible is all you need in a company.

This lends nicely to bringing up a conversation I was having the other day with a local entrepreneur who is trying to do a good old fashioned bootstrap.  Not only is he not going to raise any money (he has so far completely self funded), he didn’t hire out any of the development (he did it all himself over the past 12 months), and will be doing the cold calling once the product is ready.  When I asked him if he needed help, he said “yes,” but only so long as whomever comes on board works for equity and no cash.  That’s pretty hard core boot strapping.

His whole outlook on his approach is summed up in one statement.  “Watson, you are either selling or building.  Nothing else matters.”  His take on organizational development is that there is little need for anyone doing anything other than building the product or selling it.  He’s so hardcore that he would rather his demo be his slide deck - meaning no slides at all.  Product strategy means little to him unless it’s being dictated by people who are writing checks for revenue.  Search engine marketing is a wasted task unless the links are organic.  Like I said, he’s hardcore and going for the boot strap.

While I think his position is a little extreme, it does point to a very important success factor for startups - knowing that you should make do with less people, and the only thing that matters for your survival is either building the product or selling it.  In fact, when you ask anyone in a startup, from the receptionist to the CEO, what their job is, they should all say “selling.”  The selling culture is very rarely ingrained in startups, and this is a large contributor to the current mentality of thinking that business models either don’t matter, or can have an ad-supported model slapped on in the future.

I had a chance to get together with an old friend today.  It’s great to spend time with someone whom you haven’t seen in some time, but all the better when it’s someone with whom you went to war during the Internet bubble go go days.  We built a company together and watched our fortunes rise, and fall, together.  Good memories.

In any event, he said something interesting today with which I am not sure I completely agree, mostly because of his stringent application of the dictum, but I wanted to share.  In essence, he said:

Product feature ideas don’t matter.  The only place you should get product feature ideas is from someone who is giving you revenue.

That’s a very strong stance to take.  One that I think leaves little room for flexibility.  He’s in the process of building a nifty SaaS application, and showed it to me over coffee today.  Being the “product guy” that I am, I immediately started asking questions about the possibility of this or that.  He was quite quick to dismiss them by telling me the only product input he wanted was from people who were already paying him.

That leads to a tough development cycle.  How does one develop the initial product?  He’s had an iterative process of meeting with potential customers.  He shows them what he has in a demo, and then sits back and listens to what they have to say.  He processes the commentary and iterates through his development cycle.

While on some level this is the right way to go, there is the issue of  taking direction from the vocal minority.  Those most willing to share information, in some cases, may be in the minority, and therefore leading you down a path of development which doesn’t represent the mass market.  In this case, you may well find yourself with a great product for the first 15 people to whom you spoke. 

I was sent an email by a family member about how to impact gas prices.  It started off with quite a come on:

THIS IS NOT THE ‘DON’T BUY’ GAS FOR ONE DAY, BUT IT WILL SHOW YOU HOW WE CAN GET GAS BACK DOWN TO $1.30 PER GALLON.

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this PLEASE.

I should have known we were in trouble when I saw that engineers were involved with this economics shenanigan.  I say that in jest since one of my undergraduate degrees was in engineering.  I was curious about this one since most of the ideas revolved around not buying gas for a day.  Bill O’Reilly certainly had this plan a while back, and it seems to come up every now and again.  Of course, it has proven completely ineffective as no one signed up for the plan.  People need gas in their cars.  However, this plan promised to have a new twist on the problem, so I read on:

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action.
The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.
How?

How indeed?  The premise here is that the consumers are in control of the market, and that we can act in some manner to effect maybe one player, and not all, in an effort to impact the price of gas.  Hmmm, I’m not sold, but I want to hear more.

Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one),EXXON and MOBIL.  If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $2.00 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK. 

So, this is where the plan completely falls apart.  On the surface, this plan feels like it should work, right?  Unfortunately, a study in basic economics will prove that not only will this plan not work, but due to unintended consequences, the exact opposite could occur.

The first problem is that this plan doesn’t actually have a net impact on demand in the marketplace.  By not buying from Exxon/Mobil, they will certainly see demand for their product go down, but the demand will go elsewhere.  Logic would dictate that Exxon/Mobil would have to lower their prices, right?  Wrong.  The issue now becomes that gas, which is a limited resource, will now have it’s net market supply impacted by having Exxon/Mobil removed from the marketplace.  As such, the increased demand to the other stations, for their now more scarce supply, would cause their prices to go up.  Assuming that there are rational buyers in the market, the pricing at Exxon/Mobil, without any changes, would now appear to be cheap, and the demand would flow back to them.

Now, assuming the demand could permanently be removed from Exxon/Mobil, their supply is completely out of the market and the price of gas would have to go up.  You see, Exxon/Mobil can’t simply lower their prices to what the “market” defines as fair.  The current price is what the “market” defines as fair.  If we are to assume that a lower price, say $2.00, is OK to allow people to return to buying from Exxon/Mobil, they will see a run on their stations, which will cause their supply to disappear, again causing the supply demand imbalance with the other stations.  Exxon/Mobil will have to raise their prices.

Rationality in the marketplace is all fine and good, but there is another dynamic which further complicates this issue.  Exxon/Mobil, as refiners and marketers of gasoline, sell their gas from their terminals to the highest bidder.  Sure, they sell gas to stations which they have branded (some owned by them, many are not), but they are happy to sell that gas to a distributor or jobber at a higher price if the market will allow.  The station owners really only make a penny or two on gas, so the people getting hurt by this plan are the station owners, who are not Exxon/Mobil employees.  This narrow margin on gas is why the pumps at the stations are so slow.  Those mini-marts make far more in terms of profit for the station owner than the gas.

To sum up, supply/demand is really simple.  For a given supply, there is demand, and that determines price.  Without removing demand, but actually removing supply, the price will go up for the resource, not down. 

Short post in the run-up to Daytona, the US motorcycle racing season opener.  AMA Superbike action will be back in full swing, and I am sad to say I almost don’t care.  Sure, it’s going to be nice to have Yamaha back in the superbike fold, but with the Yoshimura Suzuki boys running rampant, it’s hard to know how anyone will compete.  Yates put on quite a show with the Jordan Suzuki last year, but it’s the Mladin/Speis show.  It’s possible that Ben will take his eye off the ball, with his move to MotoGP next year all but a done deal, and Mladin, with nothing to race for but soul crushing championship domination, will win out.  It should be fun to watch.

Side note - I raced against Spies once.  Spies started last on the grid (a split start grid no less) at Road Atlanta, in the rain, and carved his way to third in several laps, ultimately crashing out of that position.  I fared slightly better, crashing out of 10th place, ultimately remounting and finishing in the top 20.  He was crazy fast then, and it’s nice to see he didn’t rush off to the world level like Hopkins.  He’s a good kid, with a bright future. 

The support classes are slightly less exciting, and I am sad to say that I can barely tell you who won what class last year.  I don’t know what it is, but I care a lot less about domestic racing.  I shouldn’t, but I do.  I’d really like to see 600 supersport be a class for non-factory riders, with formula extreme being the training ground for future superbike riders.  I just don’t get the superstock class at all.  In stock form, these bikes are barely slower than the factory superbikes, which begs the questions: what is all the money being spent on, and why is there so little difference.  Rider to watch this year for me?  Two - Josh Herrin and Roger Lee Hayden. 

Surprising to perhaps only a blind man living in a hole, Troy Bayliss has opened the World Superbike season on board the new 1098 Ducati, and is showing how it’s done.  Last season was fun to watch for the close racing, but the super sized Ducati engine puts them in the drivers seat once again.  New engines mean teething problems, but somehow I think this is going to be a nice, easy season for Baylistic.

MotoGP, on the other hand, is a bit of an unknown.  I think that there is little doubt that Stoner is the man to beat this year.  If he manages to keep his “win it or bin it” mentality in check, and keeps the rubber side down, I don’t know how anyone beats him.  What’s so amazing about Stoner is that he’s the only fast Ducati in the field.  Others have tried and failed, and he seems to be the only one to get the Bologna bullet round the race track.

With the new rookies in MotoGP, there are ten former world champions in the field.  Who says that it’s not the best field in racing?  Spec tire rules be damned!  If Rossi can’t win on the Bridestones, he owes a *huge* apology to Stoner and the rest of the world for even insinuating the Ducati had an unfair advantage last year.

I’ve missed racing in the off season and am looking forward to it getting back in full swing. 

From the Buffett special on CNBC tonight, in reference to whether or not hedge funds can justify their fees:

But in Wall Street you have this progression from the innovators to the imitators to the swarming incompetents. And what happens is that the results achieved by the innovators enable the product to be sold by a lot of people simply because the record of a few people was good. So the idea that billions–well, trillions of dollars can be managed to get above average results while charging fees that are way higher than normal just defies the–just defies the logic. So, in aggregate, people are going to be disappointed with the results you get from hedge funds.”

Innovators –> Imitators –> Swarming Incompetents.  I love that.  The same could be said about the Web2.0 trend, but I’m not here to talk about that.  Not now anyway.

I’ve been spending time time thinking about all the flap regarding the surprising decline in Google paid clicks.  (full disclosure - I am long GOOG in the mid 300s)  What struck me about the discussion around GOOG has been how the sagging economy is going to impact the company and it’s fortunes in a meaningful and negative way.  We’re off close to 250 points (35%) in a matter of weeks.

In order for this kind of analysis to make any sense, I would first want to understand how, in a broad sense, the categories of words that are the highest earners, in an absolute dollar sense, are impacted by this coming recession.  The discussion of whether or not we are in a recession (we are not) and whether or not we are headed into one (could be a self fulfilling prophecy) will be left for another time.  For now, what I want to talk about are mortgages.

Yes, mortgages.  I started by playing around with a simple idea - what is going on with the cost of the “mortgage” keyword, and what is going on with the traffic?  I haven’t figured out how to find the trend line for the cost of a keyword, but I can tell you that the average CPC for positions 1-3 is $5.73 - $8.60, for a max of 28,625 projected clicks.  You can get positions 4-6 for considerably cheaper: $0.55 - $0.83 worth a max of 1,894 projected clicks.  To be clear, that’s a difference of daily ad spend of $244,890 and $1,580.  I wish I knew what it cost to get in positions 1-3 in late December.

Now, things get a little bit more interesting when you use the Google Trends tool, which allows you to see how search terms have performed over a given period of time.  I started with the “mortgage” keyword because I knew it to be one of the more expensive, and one of the more clicked on from a paid ad perspective.  Take a look at that chart on the right.  Looks like searches have actually gone up over the last few months.  Now, one could argue that these are all desperate people looking to get out of a bad loan.  Possible.  One could further argue that there is no one willing to lend to these people.  Also possible.  Regardless of that truth, someone still paying for those clicks.  

If you look at the chart at the left, you can see that the cities that have well documented troubles with subprime are well represented here.  So the question remains, is GOOG’s business in trouble, or will there be some subset of words that actually drive more income for the company?  We all know that when financial troubles set in, people go looking for the get rich quick schemes and other magic pills.  Think of all the Ebay Power Seller guides that will get sold to people following the Dave Ramsey model of getting out of debt (note: I listen to Dave every day, and his advice is pretty solid, but he does like people to sell their stuff).

I wish I had access to a little more data to further explore this concept.  I throw this post out there in the hopes that someone smarter than myself, or with access to more information, takes a deeper look at this idea.  Bottom line, I am actually holding out on buying more GOOG because I don’t think we have bottomed.  If it touches 400, I am in, and backing up the truck.

It’s not often that I see a demo (a video of a demo no less) of something and get excited about it.  I can think of very, very few in recent memory: Spore, the CompuTrainer with HD Video, and now the WorldWide Telescope.

As some may recall, this was the same product which brought a tear to Robert Scoble’s eye when he did the interview with  Curtis Wong.  Scoble finally has his exclusive video up, and all I can say is “wow.”  I can’t really explain it in a way that does it justice.  Watch the video.  The camera work is awful, and Robert needs to learn how to do interviews of this format a little better.  To his credit, he does get really smart people on camera, and that’s what makes his videos so interesting (specifically this one).

Having two young children has given me the opportunity to start dreaming again.  Dreaming about possibilities, about how my kids will view the world, and the types of tools and technology they will have available to them to do some exploring.  My wife was amazed the other day when my daughter used her trackpad on the computer to move some things around the screen.  My wife said “I’m 35 and still can’t get this right.”  The beauty of being a kid is that they don’t know any better, and so they don’t have any mental barriers keeping them from doing amazing things.  A tool like this will surely spur incredible amounts of interest in what is possible, not just in astronomy, but with inter-spacial relational photography (**I made that phrase up).

I believe that I am a closet astronomy nerd wanting to break out of some artificial confines I have erected over the years.  Whenever I get near a telescope, or somewhere where I can see the night sky, I really wish I knew more.  Sometimes I even hear the drunk/stoned freshman saying “like, the universe is expanding, but what’s it look like at the edge???”  <insert Keanu Reeves “whoa.”>  I have actually started to let that nerd out a little bit in the last couple of weeks, and plan on doing more.  Having this desktop app will really make it easy.

As I said, it’s hard to communicate the awesomeness that is what these guys at Microsoft have built.  The sheer amount of data is mind boggling.  Being able to weave it all together into a seamless tapestry of near infinite resolution is simply incredible.  I am not sure how much of the land based photography will be in this product as well, but the Yosemite footage made me say “wow” yet another time, and with an increased level of incredulity.

I’m not sure this was enough to make me cry, but my money is on the notion that this app could zero in on Scoble from space and find that tear.  I really, really want access to this app…now.  Good on Microsoft, and good on Scoble for sharing.

I have long been a fan of the iPod line of products from Apple.  I owed one of the very first iPods, and several in between.  When the Video iPod (now called iPod Classic) was released, I purchased it with the belief that it would be everything I could want in a portable media player.

Unfortunate a teacher as gravity may be, I learned a valuable lesson two weeks back when my iPod fell five feet to the ground, flush on it’s glass display.  I have long wondered how Apple got it’s hands on glass that was so hard to scratch.  Alas, I broke it plenty good with that fumble.Though I was not looking to pay my twice annual Apple tax so early in the year, I knew that I had to replace my iPod. Sad, I know. I mostly used it for listening to podcasts. Several I recommend below. In any event, I rarely watched video on the device, in large part to the small screen. I started watching a few shows that I was downloading from the Apple Store, but the small screen really limited my viewing - which bothered me a little, because I really wanted this to be my travel buddy.

The first time I handled the iPod Touch, I wasn’t that impressed. It seemed a bit clunky, and not as pretty or slim as her sister, the iPhone. Too much time was spent hoping that I could get one of those for Verizon, that I completely missed the boat on this one. In fact, when I read Fred’s dismal review of his experience, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want one.

It’s funny how the loss of a loved one can force us to make decisions that we may not otherwise have made. Sure, one could argue that my iPod Touch purchase is a rebound purchase, but sometimes the rebound is exactly what you need. In this case, I have to say is that I don’t know how I will not have this thing with me all the time. My wife is already annoyed at how often I have it in front of me. The screen is plenty big to enjoy TV shows on. The ability to synch with my iCal, my photos, and do email and web on the one device is fantastic. Would I like it to have wimax or in effect be an iPhone? Sure…for the data only. Now that I have this thing in my pocket, I long for a much smaller phone than my complete-pain-in-the-ass Motorola Q. The hate that I have for this phone is second only to it’s predecessor in my pocket, the dreaded Samsumg i730. The Moto Q is kind of like the hot cheerleader in high school: you really want to date her, and you finally get the chance, only to find out that she is bulimic, completely self-involved (meaning you don’t get what you want), and a borderline short bus passenger.

Anyway, back to the Touch. It hasn’t left my side in the week that I have had it, which is to say that I love it. Though, I have some complaints about the controls. It’s almost impossible to advance a song, movie, show, whatever, with any fine level of granularity. On the Classic, you had the scroll wheel, so advancing was easy. With the Touch, they had to make some compromises on how the controls work. The slider is too small, meaning you move forward in :45 second chunks, and the fast forward is not up to the task, as you have to hold it for something like 10 years in order to move forward one minute. It would be nice if the slider timeline were zoomed in around the location, so you could move forward with slow movements in small chunks, but faster movements would move you along further. Perhaps this is how it is implemented, but it doesn’t work as such.

The battery life also impresses, though I find myself watching so much video on this thing now, that I am a little miffed that I have to dongle the Touch to my computer to charge it. There are times when I want to use my computer and just leave the Touch to charge. They make wall chargers in the aftermarket, but I shouldn’t have to pay for it. I guess the box wouldn’t have been so slim if Apple had included a wall charger.

The flash memory is also a welcome change. No longer do I feel or hear the hum of the hard drive as I listen or watch. The big drag, of course, is the pricing with the flash memory. I ponied up for the 32GB version for no other reason than it came in a scant $1 below the threshold for a spousal deliberation. I have seriously trimmed down my music library on my main computer, but that’s because my nearly two year old Macbook has the svelte 80GB drive in it, on which I am always in danger of running out of space. I know at some point I am going to upgrade my main computer, and it will thankfully have more space for music, videos, etc, so for the extra $100, I doubled the memory to 32GB.Every day I marvel at the technology I can now fit in my pocket with this iPod Touch. It’s amazing, and I hate sounding like a fan boy. I am sure that as I travel with it more, I will come to want the constant network access, which means I will end up buying the iPhone, but I hope not. I actually miss having a small phone in my pocket/bag.

Some Recommended Podcasts

• Keith and the Girl - Crass? Yes. Good fun? You bet.
• Dave Ramsey Show - I find it very interesting to hear how people are dealing with financial issues. This is something that people (friends, family) don’t talk about enough, and yet money woes are the cause of so many problems. Financial education really needs to be higher priority.
• The McLaughlin Group - Yes, they are self-billed as having the “hardest talk,” which I find a strange way to market yourself, but I do find that I learn something with every listen.
• This Week in Tech - The obligatory nerd talk show.
• The Tri Talk Triathlon Podcast - Nerdy content of a different type. A great host, with great content, though it always reinforces in my mind how much time type-A tri guys (and gals) spend on trying to find that little extra “go fast” tech, when dropping a pound or two would probably do you just as well. For the middle and back of packers anyway.