I love that the Hobbits of Tolkien’s world give presents on their birthdays. The idea that the birthday boy should give out presents to his friends seems fitting, a way of saying, “hey, thanks for putting up with me.”

Sadly for my friends I haven’t adopted this tradition, mostly because i am not a Hobbit. Hobbits do not exist, despite the efforts of the NZ tourism board to suggest otherwise. And perhaps, just quietly, I don’t have nearly enough money to buy nearly enough gifts to make up for *you* having to put up with *me*.

So this year, I thought to myself: “I’m going to write a reverse birthday card where i tell everyone how awesome they are and how much I love them.” So here we go. My inaugural reverse birthday card.

Dear friends, family, and random internet people.

Apparently, if my parents are to believed (fat chance), I am turning 30 years old. Shock, horror. But no, actually i don’t care. Or if anything, I’m sorta looking forward to getting carded at bars so I can knowingly smirk at the bouncer as I hand him my ID card. Then, as a surprised look dawns upon his face, I can kind of huff at him as he waves me through. Anyway.

I am truly lucky to have a group of wonderful people around me. You are all absolutely fucking wonderful. I don’t know how you manage to help me float somewhere between bat-shit insanity and boredom, but the balance appears to work. For example, it’s been quite a while since I believed I was a Teletubby. I think we can all agree that it’s an improvement.

But in my ever-diminishing wisdom, I’ve also figured out that most of us really don’t have any idea what we’re doing. The magic of it all is, even though we probably shouldn’t operate heavy machinery (let alone run businesses), we tend to figure it out when we work together.

I shouldn’t have driven,
You shouldn’t have driven,
But we got there.

It is to my infinite fortune that the people who have chosen to embark on my various life endeavors with me – and those who have helped me along the way – have unanimously been smarter, or wiser, or more experienced (or all three) than I. Thank you.

I’m also amazed that I’ve somehow convinced a very special group of incredibly fun, talented and crazy-in-a-good-way people to hang out with me from time to time. Who are you people, and how is it that you can be so awesome? Can we eat Vegemite at 4am again sometime? That hippie camp up in Mendocino, let’s do that again, and no, i don’t want to convince the old lady to put her clothes on when she’s swimming in the pool; she looks way too happy. I think she might just know the secret to the universe. Speaking of which, didn’t we find the meaning of life somewhere in the clouds above Coachella? And do any of you *actually* remember what it was?

Can we be crazy for a few more years? Have I got them in me?

They say that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Well, whoever chose my family for me did such a good job, I’m kind of glad i wasn’t able to get in the way and screw things up. My family is a clan of inspiring ninja warriors with hearts of gold. I am talking from my grandparents down. My uncles and aunts and adopted aunts, my cousins and adopted cousins, they’re all doing awesome things with their lives and I’m proud to be a part of the fam. But most of all, Mum, Dad and Tara. I couldn’t even describe how important you are to me, or what your love and support means for me, but i hope it’s pretty damn clear that I love you all very much.

So, here we go. 30. I’m pretty excited. Mostly because I look around me and all I see are awesome people.

If this isn’t love, it’s very close.
Can you hear the world is waking up?

Thank you.

p.s Random internet people, I haven’t forgotten you. Thank you for making lolcats. I see you 9gag and imgur and Larz Shinola, president of the internet people. You give me teh lulz on the sad days with the sad feels. Thanks.

p.p.s This is the song that has been running through my head as I was writing. It’s also the source of all the quotes.

I backed App.net on Tuesday when they barely had $200k committed to their goal of $500k. After a whole bunch of press and even a few beta-ish apps being released, they’ve scooted past their goal.

I backed App.net because i think it’s a marvelous experiment. Can a pay-for-entry social network actually work when it isn’t a dating site? Will it reach some kind of scale? Could it even be a massive business?

My personal belief is that the quality of the people on a network like App.net is very very likely to be high and of great interest to me. The fact that payment is required to get in is a good reason to believe it will remain high.

We’ll see, but the experiment itself (and being a part of it!) is totally worth the $50 I paid. I’m glad they made their goal.

There’s still 13-ish hours left – here’s where you can back the project: https://join.app.net/

I’m super excited that we’re covering the Austin City Limits Music Festival down in Texas. The lineup is killer – Coldplay, Kanye, Stevie Wonder(!!!!),  Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket. And Skrillex. Who could miss Skrillex. Pretty Lights. I wish I was going to be there.

One of the really cool things they’re doing is live webcasting many of the performances on YouTube. You can tune in during the event here.

Sometimes I’ll be chatting to people about Veokami, and they’ll ask me – “so, you think you’ll be able to replace an official camera crew?” For now, the answer is: no way. In the future it may become more feasible, but let’s face it – no one is tall enough to get those epic crowd shots, or the artist-eye-level shots where you can see the sweat on their nose.

But what *is* really exciting is the ability to augment the clean, above-the-melee footage with some raw, authentic, I-WAS-FRKN-THERE-MAN shots. That dude dancing up a storm at Big Audio Dynamite. Deadmau5 opening in epic rain.  The crazy mud dancing to the arctic monkeys.

Kinda feels more like being there. And makes me wish I was there. Andddd… in that spirit we’ll be seeing ACL’s official videos mixed in with your fan videos after the fest! Huzzah!

Anyways. Check out ACL on Veokami. Right now, you can only vote (cause it hasn’t happened yet, duh). So go vote for which acts you’d like to see unlocked. Afterwards, come back and add some videos. I’ve voted for a couple:

• Pretty Lights, apparently they put on a great show.
• Arcade Fire, cause I haven’t seen them yet!
• Skrillex. He just keeps kicking arse.
• Stevie Wonder. Because it’s goddamn Mr Wonder!
• Kanye West. He was great at Coachella. And he’s the VOICE OF A GENERATION! I hear he also likes Fishsticks (NSFW). In his mouth.

Ok, so you’re thinking, “What’s the point of Veokami? Why the hell should I vote for you in this Lollapalooza competition?“

Good question. Social niceties aside (i.e I’ll support you because I’m your friend), there are some very good reasons you should vote for us in this competition, especially if you:

• Love live music
• Have trouble finding relevant videos from events
• Take videos at events
• Want me to buy you a beer. Ever. Again.

First up, Veokami is still in beta. We haven’t finished the product. What will it be within the next two months? Two key things.

• A place to find video from events like conferences, concerts etc. Any event. We’re organising videos that were taken together in the same place by grouping them together so we can reconstruct parts of the event for you to re-experience.
• A place where you can share your favourite moments from events you’ve attended and discuss those moments with likeminded people.

Why do you care? I’m going to number these for maximum impact. Yeah. This time, there’s more than two things.

1. Finding and sorting through more than a handful of videos from a concert is hard… you can easily find the most popular videos. But what if you want to see what happens next? 9 times out of 10, Veokami will find you a video that will show you what happens next. 
2. The next time I search for “Green Day Lollapalooza” and see some dude in his bedroom singing “Good Riddance” whilst strumming a cruddy guitar he bought at Walmart I’m going to commit seppuku. You know what I’m talking about. I hate that guy. Veokami uses math and smart stuff to make sure that douche doesn’t muddy your results.
3. More of us are taking videos when we’re at events. Whether it’s iPhones, Android phones, Sony Bloggies, Flip cams whatever, the amount of video that’s being uploaded every minute would blow your mind: 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, every minute. We need to be smarter about how we deal with these videos so we can find them later. Veokami takes an innovative approach that uses audio processing so we can group videos together.

We want to launch Veokami at an event like Lollapalooza, with the blessing of Lollapalooza, so that we can show the potential of what we’ve developed. Also, by the time August rolls around, we’ll have more features in place that will make our product vision clearer.

Please take the time to vote. Please note that the voting requires you to connect with Facebook in order to prevent fraud… not to spam you or your friends.

[NOTE: You can't just "like" the submission. You have to click "Vote"... see the screenshot below]

Thank you! If we do win, beers are on me.

I’ve been reading resumes, interviewing and hiring people for various positions for 5 years or so. Support technicians, Designers, Engineers, Marketers, Office Admins, you name it.

While I am often depressed at how bad some of them are, I’m more depressed when I see great candidates who let themselves down by making silly mistakes. I’m not talking about spell-checking. I’m saying you should be mindful of the position you’re applying for and make sure your resume positively reflects your skills that are relevant to that position.

The layout of the document, the font you use, the colours you use (if any), your choice of words, all of these matter. They are subtle yet powerful signals to the reader. They’re also the kinds of things that many a well-meaning proof reader will miss.

Here are some examples. Imagine you’re a UX/UI/Interaction designer applying for a job.

• You have URLs in your document that are underlined and look like links, but they’re not clickable. I click on them and nothing happens. Not very user friendly.
• Your resume is grey text on black. Looks different, stands out from the crowd. But many people print resumes to read them, and that’d be a huge waste of ink.
• Or maybe you’ve used grey text on white for that subtle, stylish look. But my LCD screen isn’t as good as your Apple Cinema Display and my colour settings are whacky. So I can’t read it.
• You used a non standard structure for your resume so my desire to skim read it is stymied. Did you think about your audience here?
• You made it so pretty and artful that I can’t quickly and easily consume the information therein. Ditto above.

These mistakes aren’t necessarily because the applicant is bad at what they do, although that’s possible. They probably didn’t consider that the document itself, beyond the words on the page, speak to how thoughtful/detail oriented/user-centric the creator actually is.

Consider these positions and some desired attributes of a person holding that position:

• Visual Designer. Creative. Maker of beautiful things.
• Engineer. Structured thinker. Problem Solver.
• Support technician. Customer focused. Problem solver.
• Marketer. Analytical. Creative.
• Sales. Persuasive. Friendly.

Expanding my line of thinking above:

• If you’re a visual designer, your resume should be attractive (without getting in the way of its function).
• If you’re an engineer, your resume should be logical and cleanly structured.
• If you’re in sales, your resume should make a good case as to why I should hire you.

Ideally, all resumes should be attractive, cleanly structured and make a good case as to why I should hire you. But some mistakes, such as the aforementioned not-links that trick me into clicking them, are cardinal sins for a UX Designer. Not so much for a marketer. An ugly resume is a big fat fail for a Visual Designer, but not for an engineer.

The next time you write a Resume, consider the signals you’re sending through your presentation and content choices. Think about the attributes your potential employer is looking for. Then pay attention to the details that will subtly convince her that you’re the right choice for the job… or at least avoid your resume languishing at the bottom of the pile.

v3o

I often take videos at events I attend. Birthday parties or weddings, nights out with friends, concerts, music festivals. They’re usually short, 3 minutes maybe. Some of them are worth sharing. Some of them aren’t. But the fact is, I have a HD video camera in my pocket pretty much all the time – my iPhone – so I might as well use it.

I’m not the only one. At some events I’ll start recording, only to notice that half the people in the room have spontaneously had the same idea. Now I’m just part of a growing sea of small screens echoing the action in front of me. Some of them started recording before me. Some of them continue recording after me.

So I’m wondering – why can’t I see those videos? If they’re friends on facebook I might see them, or I might miss them as they flow through my news feed. If I’m super keen and the video-taker labels them correctly, I can do 156 Youtube searches and find some of them. I have to watch them one at a time; I won’t see them in order; I won’t get any of the surrounding context. I can’t say “what happens next?” and then actually *find* videos that were recorded just after this one.

Why the hell can’t I find them? Why can’t I see these videos as a group? We were all recording something mutually interesting to us, in the same room at the same time. Surely these videos should be bound together, presented as a group, in context.

I couldn’t find an experience that did was I was looking for, so Chris and I are gonna make it. We’ve called it Veokami, like origami for videos (although the name has no real meaning, my Japanese friends reassure me). We’re taking a bunch of videos, folding them together and turning them into something more interesting.

We’re building the product at the moment, and we’re gonna take the time to get the experience right. In the meantime, check out veokami.com and sign up for an invite. Tell your friends. Spread the word. Hide your kids. Hide your wife. Let’s get this show on the road.

I’m excited, can you tell? :)

p.s The little robot, his name is v3o. Say hello.

Good post over on Venture Hacks today about the 4 Types of Scale. It transported back to the lengthy and often passionate discussions we had at GoodBarry/Business Catalyst about how to deal with some of the problems of scaling – whether they be technical, customer related, support related and so on. They were all scaling problems, dilemmas and trade offs. Spend money here, or spend time there? To hire or not to hire?

You can get yourself into a real trap when your business is growing and you need to scale up. You can focus on automation, you can engage your community more; you can outsource; you can buy a product and integrate it with your offering; you can hire someone to help deal with the load.

Doing any of those things has overhead that comes with it – money and time. Your money and time. Taking care of that overhead takes you away from developing and improving your core business. Whenever that happens, you get this horrible niggling feeling that you’re not doing the right thing, that you’re wasting time. That feeling drives you to make decisions based on expediency, which are usually crappy decisions. This is the trap. You feel like you’re doing the right thing and moving forward, but you’re not.

And bad decisions tend to keep begatting bad decisions, if you catch my somewhat biblical drift.

For example, as Nivi at Venture Hacks points out, hiring should be your last resort. Unfortunately, though, it’s often your first.

The reason for this is that it allows you to maintain the illusion that you can still focus on developing and improving the core business. That niggling feeling goes away, and you think: “great, now someone else can worry about that problem.” This is commonly known as “lying to yourself”.

The reason hiring should be your last resort is two fold.

Your opinions are infectious

They will likely inherit your disdain for the task you hired them to undertake. They’ll get the same niggling feeling. As the founder you’re setting the culture of the place, consciously or no, based on your own attitudes. Fail.

Hiring is not a shortcut

Hiring seems like a shortcut. It’s not. It’s a longcut. You need to find someone good. Then you need to teach them the ways of the force your product. Then they can fix the issue. By this time, it’s taken you much more effort and you’ve actually diverted more attention away from your core product than you intended. And now the problem is twice the size and even more insurmountable. Now you need to hire two more people to deal with it.

Let the bad-decision-begatting begin.

Hiring is great thing and it is a necessary part of growth. But the right time to do it is when you are growing the product outward, tackling new problems. Not when you’re groaning under the weight of your existing success.

There’s a balance between doing too much preparation for scaling – i.e automation – and doing too little. If you do too little, problems become very big, very quickly. If you do too much, you deliver way too slowly.

I think the trick is to push forward as hard as you can, but always consider the destination. What happens when you get there? What next? Will everything fall apart?

There’s no point running to the top of a mountain before nightfall if you don’t have a tent. But there’s also no point carrying a tent if you’re never going to get to the top of the mountain. That’s the dilemma of scaling.

I was chatting with a friend about business ideas and the different “types” of businesses we embark on. I think it’s generally accepted that entrepreneurs are a certain type of people – short term pain, long term gain. Take the leap. Have vision, will code, etc.

But just as some artists are driven to create certain types of art, entrepreneurs are drawn to certain types of businesses. I split it in two types (although there are, i’m sure, more): businesses that primarily require solid execution, and businesses that primarily require creative vision.

Every business requires solid execution, and every business needs a vision. But some of them, when you consider what you’d need to do to be successful, are often weighted in a direction.

Execution

Perfect example – Groupon clones. Take, for example, Living Social. Or one of my mothercountry’s Groupon clones, like Scoopon or (the recently acquired) Spreets. These businesses didn’t require a strong creative vision. They’re all about execution. Do what Groupon is doing better. Or do it more local.

The entrepreneur needs to be to be a strong executor, a chess master playing 6, 8, 16 moves ahead. Someone else has chosen the battlefield; now you go forth and beat them.

Many very successful businesses have been execution heavy businesses. It’s been said that being first to market isn’t as important as we once thought. I think Facebook is an execution business. Same idea as Friendster and Myspace, different execution. That’s not to say Zuckerberg didn’t have a vision, but he didn’t break the mold with something revolutionary; it was a social network for colleges. But therein, he found the winning formula.

Google, same thing. Better tech, better execution. But it’s a search engine in 1998; not a new concept. They built a better monkey wrench, and won.

Creativity

Perfect examples are Dodgeball/Foursquare and Twitter. These businesses did something rather new, created something people didn’t know they wanted but then discovered they loved. They’re driven by a person’s vision or an idea. They had to build something to see if people liked it.

It’s been pretty well publicized that twitter has made some missteps (as do many young companies), but they can afford to make more missteps than a Groupon clone can. Twitter not a commodity product; they got to market first and defined a new “thing”. They’ve messed up a couple of times but they’re still winning.

Which type to pursue?

So, I’m sitting with an entrepreneur and they’re considering tackling a new business. They’ve got a few ideas, but guess what – the top two fall into opposing categories – execution vs creative vision.

I think it comes down to two things.

• Which are you more suited to?
• What’s your ultimate aim?

My gut feeling is that businesses in the execution category are probably more likely to succeed. By the definition I laid out above, we’re talking about concepts and markets that are already somewhat proven – you know there’s a market there already. You’re improving on it in some way, sure, but the idea has been shown to work to some extent. Go on, build a better mousetrap. We know the world needs mousetraps, you win if you can execute.

Creative businesses are a hit-based affair; like a musician, authors or artists, you’re trying to put out a hit. Millions of users, “the people will love you”, all that jazz. Twitter could have flopped. In fact, people predicted it would – who cares if your cat rolled over? What thoughts of value could you possibly say in 140 characters? But it worked.

Same with Foursquare. So, you want me to play a game where I have to ignore my friends for a minute when i’m at a bar while i check into some stupid app to earn points that don’t even get me anything? Sure thing. But there was something there. 6 million users of “something there”. Boom, it’s a hit.

So, coming back to my two things, it’s time for some broad-brush-maybe-half-false generalisations:

• If you’re a chess player, a strategist, a get things done guy – you’re probably an executor.
• If you fancy yourself an artist, a visionary, you’re probably a creative business type of person.
• If you’re in it for the money, you’re a execution business type of guy.
• If you’re in it for the fame, you’re a creative business type of gal.

The real killers are the strategic artists. Mathematician musician chess masters. Watch out for them. They’ll get the cake, win the championship and steal your spouse. Hide your kids, hide your wife kind of stuff. They’re the Steve Jobs of tomorrow: rare, powerful, and about to own half of your city.

The exciting thing is, the (multiple) friends that I’ve had this conversation with – are “strategic artist” type of people. And hotdiggitydamn(!) it’s going to be exciting to see what they’re going to come out with this year.

When I was about 13 years old my father took me on a holiday to Singapore. I had a blast; it was a new country with new sights, sounds and experiences. I also learned an important lesson.

If you haven’t been to Singapore, one of the (many) cool things about the place is the food. And so, when in Singapore, you eat. A lot. And at one restaurant we were presented with a rather interesting dish. It was brown, goopy and spongey, and my thirteen year old brain was like: “that’s gross!” I then verbalised this sentiment.

My dad’s response: “I don’t care if you don’t like it as long as you try it first.”

Me: “I don’t like it.”

Dad: “You haven’t tried it yet. Try it, then tell me you don’t like it.”

I ate it. I didn’t like it. But the lesson stuck.

Fast forward about 15 years. Personalised content and custom recommendations are commonplace. Whether it’s Netflix making recommendations or Pandora allowing you to tailor your listening preferences, you’re watching, reading and listening to the things that you know you’re likely to enjoy before you try them. Sounds great. But what about trying different things?

I’m worried about a future where everything is tailored to your taste. Tastes and preferences can and should change. For example, the music I listened to at age 16 is different to the music I listen to now. And no – it’s not just that my taste is maturing due to age. It has a lot to do with a desire for exploration, receiving recommendations by friends, and by generally taking joy in exploring things outside my comfort zone.

Not all of us venture out of our comfort zone, and the motivations for doing so are pretty interesting in themselves. But for me – I love discovering new things. There is a thrill in tasting something new, seeing something different. Many of my friends and family feel the same joy in discovery.

So what happens when we’re systematically pushed towards a new choice based on past choices? Ah, yes… you liked Blah so you’ll like Bleh, right? Rather than growing and changing as people, we become static. Your tastes solidify and you become just like everyone else in a particular category. We become our own little echo chambers, with every choice informing the next choice, waltzing down a path of algorithmic satisfaction and zero adventure.

I’m not trying to make a scientific argument about recommendation engines, or say that personalisation is bad, or that we shouldn’t enjoy the recommendations we receive from algorithms. I just want to make two points.

First, I want an anti-recommendation engine. Something that shows me something I probably WOULDN’T have tried. An algorithm that says, “Based on your past choices, here’s something you haven’t tried and might not like but goddammit you should try it anyway.”

Second: Don’t knock it till you try it.