Category Archives: Favorites

Those posts that I like (unique perspective, interesting writing), get referred to others often, or have been popular in the community.

Financial Discovery

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked to compile a couple of presentations here in Portland. I thought I would share those with you.

As those who know me know, I have extensive background in creating and preparing financials for both investor readiness and day-to-day corporate use. I learned a lot in college (I have an undergraduate degree in accounting and a master’s in management), have done it for Infinity Softworks since 1997 and helped numerous other companies do the same.

The first presentation, delivered to the Oregon Entrepreneur’s Network, focuses on the fundamentals of financial statements and how to prepare financial projections. Please feel free to review that presentation here:

The second was delivered to OTBC Technology Incubator, which Infinity Softworks resides at and I am an advisor. This presentation delved into an investor’s perspective of those financials, what an investor is looking for, and what it says about the preparer. Please feel free to review that presentation here:

Please feel free to contact me via About Me if you have questions or need help.

Doing The Right Thing

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If you didn’t catch this amazing story about the softball player who injured her knee after hitting her first career home run, check it out. She was so excited when she reached first that she missed the bag and ripped her ACL when she tried to stop. She couldn’t walk let alone run the bases and, as rules go, her own team couldn’t help. So two players from the opposing team, a team that was fighting for their playoff lives, picked her up and carried her around the bases. Home run!

Too often, it is easy to do what is expedient and not what’s right. Too often, it’s easy to do what benefits me no matter the impact on them.

Business, like sports, is a lot like this. It can be us win and them lose. It would have been easy for the opposing team to leave her there with a single. Hey, that’s the breaks after all. That’s how the game is played. No one said anything when the ump missed the call at second. What goes around comes around.

Except what goes around comes around in both directions. I can only guess how much good mojo these two opposing players picked up with that one. And I can only hope that my two young girls grow up to be the kinds of people who would pick an opposing player up and carry her around the bases.

Mobile Destiny: The Crossroads Approach

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I had a couple of great conversations recently with my friend Michael Mace who succinctly summed it up: In the world of mobile, we are at an inflection point. For the first time, mobile technology has become good enough to serve the business purposes of its users. Soon, the laws of diminishing returns will affect the market. In other words, does increase power and capability actually make the devices better? Or are these incremental improvements, same as what has happened in the PC world? There is no doubt that we are fast approaching this crossroads and soon, incremental technological improvements will be the norm.

There are still a few big hills in front of us that will make mobile technology significantly better, namely faster data connections, synchronization via the web (rather than sync cable), and truer browsing experiences (read here). But the top of this hill is fast approaching us, I believe, and we are within a year or two of reaching the top.

There is a dynamic in the market that has affected all of us. In order to make money, carriers and hardware vendors feel they have to make devices and services that broadly appeal to everyone. So the capabilities of the devices are generic and the plans provided are pretty close to “one size fits all.”

The problem is these are highly personalized devices. They are very oriented around niches, or vertical, markets. The needs of a Realtor are vastly different from the needs of a contractor or lawyer or business manager. So there is a disconnect between the way these devices are presented and sold and the way they are used. And that leaves all of us hunting for third-party solutions to fill the gap.

There are significant challenges for third-party developers, though; it is getting harder and harder for us to develop native applications (those that go on the device) and then get the word out about them. We can no longer partner with hardware manufacturers because all device and in-box promotion decisions are controlled by carriers. Carriers don’t care about niche markets, for one, and prefer no software be installed at all, raising huge certification and device lock-down barriers to keep software out. Finally, software resellers, the remaining sales channel, are either charging exorbitant fees or have disappeared altogether. Why not go after niches, you ask? Because there isn’t enough device penetration around a platform or two to make it worth the development effort (read here).

This is why the crossroads fast approaching, this intersection of business utility and technological prowess, is so important. The rise of the Internet as a medium for software and the ability of these mobile devices to run them effectively will open up a new world for you, as a business person trying to make the device useful for your needs, and for us, as a developer trying to help you get there.

Fear and the US Economy

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the next twelve months, as most of us are prone to do each December. During this time, I have been thinking a lot about the big picture. What will make or break my business and, due to my heavy reliance on a paycheck, my personal life? The answer, I believe, is the abundance or lack of fear.

See, I believe more than any other factor that the US Economy is driven by fear. For instance, let’s look at the years surrounding 2000, when the stock market crashed and the “irrational exuberance” era ended. From 1993 to 2000 we had one of the largest and longest economic expansions in US history. It was built of a strong dollar and an expanding knowledge base of educated employees. From 2000 until 2007, we have had a vacillating economy. The good times were driven by a housing boom in most of the country.

But that picture is incomplete. What else happened from 1993 to 2000? Nothing. And nothing is a good thing for the US economy. There were no wars, no dire predictions of impending doom, no terrorist attacks, no perceived risk of biological or nuclear attack. Couple this with the rise of China and India, the solidification of EU, and the country’s pre-occupation with our president’s sex life, and there was very little to distract us from building businesses and making money.

From 2000 to 2007, the opposite has been true. First, irrational exuberance finally hit its peak and sent the markets down. Then, 9/11 happened and ever since we have been met with endless predictions of biological, nuclear and terrorist attacks. Every time we start to get comfortable in our skin, there’s Osama bin Laden on the screen again or dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan or a led-filled Thomas the Tank in my two year old’s mouth.

So how will 2008 turn out? That depends. Will the fear of not being able to flip our houses and pay for our collective credit card bills overwhelm us? Or will some blissful peace overcome us, leading to another year of economic expansion and happy bank accounts?

I know which one I prefer. I also know which one I fear.

UGH! 3 Million Platforms with 100 Users Each

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Okay, I exaggerate a little. Okay, I exaggerate a lot. But the point should be well taken.

In essence, the PC was created in the late ’70s and by the early ’90s had two dominate operating systems. You either developed for Windows or Macintosh or both.

By all accounts the mobile world was created in the early ’90s and in 2007, about the same length of time as the PC world’s OS slimming, the number of operating systems is expanding, not shrinking.

Even as late as 2001 and 2002 it seemed the trend of less operating systems was taking hold. In that year, the Palm OS was on 85% of devices sold in the U.S. The other 15% was Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile Classic and Professional) and Symbian OS, a leader in Europe. Sometime in 2008 there will be no less than ten operating systems, and it doesn’t look like the splintering will end (in no particular order):

  1. Palm OS I
  2. Palm OS II (if Palm doesn’t cancel it)
  3. Windows Mobile Class and Professional (both based on Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system)
  4. Windows Mobile Standard (based on Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system)
  5. Windows Vista and XP for very very small laptops and tablets
  6. Apple OS X version for portables (iPhone, iPod Touch)
  7. Symbian OS
  8. RIM’s BlackBerry operating system
  9. Google’s rumored operating system (if it is more than a rumor)
  10. Sun’s rumored Java OS (if it’s more than a rumor)

UGH! What’s a software developer to do? See Infinity Softworks has highly technical applications that are very difficult to port from one platform to another, all of which, in essence, uses different development tools and languages. And even if we could easily port the math engine for our applications, we would still have to re-develop the user interface, not a trivial task in and of itself.

So this is the problem that confronts me as I ponder the future for Infinity Softworks and how we move ahead. This is also why I am convinced that the company’s developing mobile applications specifically are almost all very small — the market is too fractured for big companies to dive in and make a profit. For years every penny we have made has been dumped into developing the next platform product instead of improving the products on the platforms we have.

And this is why Apple’s decision to release software tools for developers last week so we can write native applications for it is concerning me. Yes, I know, I blasted Apple earlier for this and now I am doing an about face. But over the past few months I have come to think of Apple as an innovator for software developers, someone who can finally force a mental change in developers and a mental change in consumers.

See, all of these devices have browsers and all of these devices connect to the web, whether cellular or wifi or both. Apple’s decision to force developers to write web-based applications that ran in the browser meant that consumers could only get applications this way. And for us developers we were finally freed of the multi-platform approach to writing applications and could focus on writing great products that ran in the browser instead.

Instead, Apple announced its software development kit for iPhone and iPod Touch and alas I am left to ponder the conundrum further.

I am longing for simpler days, when there were two or three platforms that I needed to care about. Maybe this will come some day again, maybe not. I thought Apple was going to help get us there sooner. I guess not.