A post over on TechCrunch today proved to catalyze some recent thoughts I’ve had about Angie’s List, a local service provider review site.

Michael Arrington announced that Intuit has an entry into the local business review “space,” Zipingo (joining the likes of Judy’s Book, Yelp, and Insider Pages).

He missed my favorite of the bunch, though, Angie’s List There’s a lot that I like about Angie’s List:

• Unbiased. Think of them as the Consumer Reports of local business review. Businesses can’t advertise, influence or comment on rankings, and consumers pay subscription fees to either rate businesses (via an extensive survey) or to view business ratings.

• Intelligent Rollout Strategy. They’re not trying to rollout nationwide all at once, but metro area by metro area—an approach that allows them to build and demonstrate utility.

• Innovative Product: Unlike many of the other sites mentioned above, they’re not trying to replace the yellow pages, so they’ve been able to rethink the requirements a bit. They’ve limited their scope to service providers so the starting dataset is manageable and a relatively small number of contributors can create a resource that’s useful to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

I’ve been watching them grow and waiting for them to get to DC. And I’m looking forward to being able to recommend all my clients nationwide have their customers rate them in Angie’s List.

In the baby gear search, this automatic crib (“cot”) rocker looks promising:

The “Lullabub” consists of four décor designed modules, which are simply placed under each leg of a cot.

The “Lullabub” is an innovative product that will gently rock a cot automatically & unassisted, in a harmonic rhythm to naturally soothe & settle babies to sleep. Helping the parent attend to other duties or catch up on some much needed and well deserved REST.

Lullabub

This is fun…

Carping on ticketmaster
About usablity
With animated frogs (?)

Seth Godin says that he recognizes one of the voices.

What prominent usability/UI folks are affiliated with MIT? Jared Spool?

Unwired Buyer

extends the e-commerce experience beyond the PC to any mobile phone via the voice channel.

The “voice channel?”

How about “We enable bidding on eBay through cell phones?”

Paul Graham recently wrote that Google & Yahoo are now buying startups wholesale, pre-first round:

...the acquirers have begun to realize they can buy wholesale. Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups they want more expensive? Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don’t want anyway. The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR departments. What they really want is the software and the developers, and that’s what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated software and developers.

Google, typically, seems to have been the first to figure this out. “Bring us your startups early,” said Google’s speaker at the Startup School. They’re quite explicit about it: they like to acquire startups at just the point where they would do a Series A round.

On the heels of that article comes news that Riya, a photo search startup using facial recognition technology, is being acquired by Google for around $40 million—PRE-LAUNCH

It really highlights (and heightens) the difference between, on the one hand, startups as planting and growing a viable business, and on the other, startups as product development roll of the dice.

These obviously aren’t mutually exclusive—Riya could very well have built a beautiful business.

But building a single cool thing with acquisition as the only exit is like sitting on a time bomb that’s ticking very loudly. Product development efforts and the chance of an acquirer “getting it” are both racing against your bank account.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the chances of a product succeeding—being adopted and changing a small part of the world—are infintesimally small with this approach.

First, the products developed have to be blue-sky, way ahead of an adoption curve that will pay for them. By nature, they’re high-risk.

Second, once acquired, the fate of the product is out of the hands of the inventor and in the hands of “senior corporate executives.”

I want to see my invention take flight—not be subsumed by a corporate behemoth that prioritizes its success according to an agenda that I can’t control.

Some may say I’m risk averse. That’s ok with me. Peter Drucker wrote that entrepreneurs were by nature risk-averse.

Count me as a fan of Slow-Tech: building companies that create real value that people are willing to pay for, that actually generate wealth over time.

Todd S. over at 800CEORead has pointed out a new book called Big Winners and Losers

What Marcus found was that companies need to balance agility, discipline, and focus.

Ho, hum, right?

But put in the context of a raft of best-selling business books, this is framework-busting stuff.

In an excerpt from the Appendix, there’s a list of classic business bestsellers, classified by whether they’re primarily about discipline or primarily about agility.

Tom Peters “innovate everywhere” vs. Jim Collins “focus focus focus”:

Starting with Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, there has been a spate of books that purport to provide managers with the secrets to sustained competitive advantage (SCA). Jim Collins’ and Jerry Porras’ best-selling Built to Last is another work in this genre.


The problem with these books is that the prescriptions they make often are contradictory and one sided. On the one hand, they urge you to take bold steps and explore entirely new markets, technologies, and business models, or risk becoming extinct (Peters and Waterman). On the other hand, you are admonished not to divert your attention to things you know nothing about,and to take small,gradual steps to get better at what you currently do (Collins).

Their list of disciplined-focused books:

• Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
• James Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Other’s Don’t
• Robert Kaplan and David Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
• Donald Mitchell, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model
• Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, and Bruce Roberson, What Really Works: The 4+2 Formula for Sustained Business Success
• C.K.Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswany, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers
• Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersman, The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market
• Michael Treacy, Double Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It No Matter What
• Chris Zook, Profit from the Core: Growth Strategy in an Era of Turbulence
• Chris Zook, Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots

And agility-focused:

• Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor,The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
• Sydney Finkelstein, Why Smart Executives Fail: What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes
• Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market and How to Successfully Transform Them
• Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
• Mary Kwak and David Yoffie, Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitor’s Strength to Your Advantage
• Adrian Slywotzky, Value Migration
• Adrian Slywotzky, Richard Wise, and Karl Weber, How to Grow Markets When Markets Don’t
• Donald Sull, Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them

The excerpt includes links to the books and summaries of each book’s main arguments.

Seth describes the fear of leaving one success on a course for another as a scary place.

Most people get stuck at the Local Max because changing strategy in any direction … leads to poorer results.

But I live for the thrill of the bottom dropping out and the slog through the shit.

There were 10,000 single-location hamburger restaurants in the world when Ray Kroc decided to build a giant chain of franchised McDonald’s. Anyone could have done it. No one did. Because everyone who tried had to go through point C to get there. It took Colonel Sanders more than a decade of pain to get through point C.

Local max is no comparison to the Big Max.

And it gets even better than that:

...changing markets are always surfacing new Big Max points, and the only way to get to them is to go through the pain…

I guess it’s more accurate to say that I live for the Big Max…

Crafting customer experience, the EX Group says, is comprised of details, small touches and holisitic integration of them across customer touch points.

Decker Marketing has published a list from EXG about creating a capital-E Experience for your customer.

1. Experiences don’t just happen; they need to be planned.

2. Think about the customer experience first—and then about the functional features and benefits of your brand.

3. Be obsessive about the details of the experience.

4. Create a small touch that sums up and stylizes your experience. (The Conrad Hotel in Hong Kong places yellow rubber ducks in its bathrooms—a quirky, memorable touch.)

5. Think situation, not product: “Grooming in the bathroom,” instead of “razor”; “casual meal” instead of “hot dog”; “travel” instead of “transportation.”

6. Strive for holistic experiences—experiences that are sensory, emotional, thought-provoking and relevant.

7. Track experiences across media: logos, ads, packaging, advertising and websites.

8. Use multiple metrics—from quantitative to verbal to visual. Be explorative and creative and worry about reliability, validity and methodological sophistication later.

9. Consider how the experience changes as the brand expands onto the Web or across international borders.

10. Add dynamism and “Dionysianism” to your company and brand. Most brands are too timid and too bureaucratic. Be ecstatic, passionate and creative.

Authenticity moves me, but does it work for the mainstream?

I really enjoy individual, quixotic, unique takes on the world.

So it’s no surprise that the Cluetrain or the Hughtrain resonate with me—and many others. Markets Are Conversations! Yeah!

But Seth has a post that resonates with another part of my experience.

He points out that the Mass Market doesn’t want authenticity. My company, Market Hardware, does quite a bit of traditional direct mail, and, boy, we’ve definitely see what Seth’s alluding to.

I’m not sure why the mass market insists we dumb down stuff that’s already dumb, but it seems to be true.

“Now we don’t have to go to Spain,” indeed.