turntable / as the table turns

Hong Kong 3D pixel-art interactive map. Be sure to spend time exploring it and using the tools!

My 20th high school reunion just happened this past weekend in Philadelphia. I wasn’t about to fly to the other side of the globe to attend. Instead, using Ning, I managed to quickly and easily put together a site for my classmates to post their pictures, bios, videos and messages. Most people were on Classmates.com, but that site is such a miserable rip-off, only an idiot would pay for it, so it’s worse than useless.

It’s been really fun catching up with people, learning what’s happened to people I knew so well in a former life. Things I’ve observed so far:

• Somewhat surprisingly, most people have not moved more than 30 miles away from our high school
• The ladies were really working the desperate housewives look at the reunion
• The guys were all taking the night off from their bingo game at the old folks home
• When I tell people the Sopranos is the closest thing to a reality show on TV they need to believe me
• Seeing the photos of kids of people who I can only remember as kids themselves is very trippy and wonderful
• Fuck, I’m old

On the tech side, I had my doubts about Ning when it launched. It looked interesting and promising, but completely confusing: what was it exactly and who was it targeting? I’m really glad they sorted it out. They’ve done a great job and I’m really grateful for it.

I recently sold my domain Turntable.com and switched over to TurntableMedia.com. The final selling price was $45,000 USD. That’s a respectable amount of money and I’m really happy about that. It’s amazing to have a digital asset that can be liquidated so quickly and easily. However, I should point out a couple things:

• After auction fees of 10%, taxes, and bills, it actually doesn’t leave me with a lot of funny money
• I’m sure turntable.com could have fetched more if I had the time and energy to shop it around extensively

I loved the domain and I’m sad to see it go. I thought I’d have it for life. As corny as it sounds, I thought it would be something that my kids would “inherit”. It’s been my brand for over 12 years and it’s served me extremely well. Since moving to New Zealand I’ve continued to do work for US clients, partly to pay the bills and partly to keep my chops strong. That work has generally come through referrals and LinkedIn, rather than exposure through the Turntable site.

In the end, I decided to sell because Turntable was no longer my main focus. My main focus these days is Xero.

The selling process with Sedo was actually a bit disappointing. The mechanics of putting the domain up for auction was pretty simple and straight forward. But I expected for the 10% fee they charge, with a premium domain, they would have provided much better service. On their site they invite you to contact a broker if you think your domain is worth more than $10,000. Their broker took 4-5 days to email me back and responded with a useless, generic cut-and-paste FAQ template. Since they have such a high stake in the selling price, I would have hoped for some consultation on pricing strategies to get the best deal. Their lack of effort really made me wonder how much involvement they have with the buyers.

I knew that switching domains was going to cause some chaos around emails and logins. With 12 years of the same email, I had a lot of logins that suddenly needed to be switched. It was crucial to get that sorted quickly because many of those logins were on sites that have my credit card details saved. It was also quite a mission trying to remember all the Web 2.0 sites where I have a login registered with my email address. It really nailed home the need for much better online identity management.

I’m grateful that the new owner was willing to forward my emails. This was another pain with Sedo. They completely ignored my request to arrange email forwarding. I had to delay pushing the domain and then phone them up to make it happen. If I had already pushed the domain to the new owner I’m certain they would never have connected me with the buyer.

I definitely give Sedo credit for providing an active domain marketplace along with some relatively usable tools to manage your domains. The Great Domains site lives up to its name as the best place to buy and sell high quality domains. Just don’t expect to get any answers or support from them. I’m still unclear about the finer points of their auction process – ie, why do some auctions appear with the reserve price range, while other auctions publish an “expected price”, among many other questions.

It would be really useful to hear from other people who’ve had similar experiences with Sedo and managed to get some answers. Also, it would be great to get some tips on strategies for selling domains for future reference.

It’s the end of an era for me. In 1994 I founded Turntable. I’ve had the domain Turntable.com for over 12 years! I recently sold it and I’ve switched over to using www.turntablemedia.com.

I plan on posting about the change over, but for now please change your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions for this blog to http://turntablemedia.com/blog.

This SlideShare presentation by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in product design and marketing strategy.

My take aways:

• Why user experience is the differentiator
• Experience first, then features, then technology
• A real vision focuses on the user experience
• The value curve of the Wii vs. Xbox and PS3 proves: experience matters, technology doesn’t
• Leverage the system, place functionality where appropriate in the ecosystem
• Products are people – what kind of person is your product?

I’ve always been disgusted by patents, especially software patents. So a while back I was impressed when one tenacious Kiwi decided to take on Amazon.com over their utterly absurd ‘one-click’ patent.

He’s not the first to take up the cause and even Apple has relented to the patent, paying Amazon royalties for using the concept in iTunes.

Now it now looks like he’s won the case.

Hopefully this sets in motion a trend similar to the end of DRM – which has been greatly accelerated, somewhat ironically, thanks to Amazon.

I’ve been a bit remiss for not posting on this sooner (and not posting in a while). I’m so proud of how well Dave and Tim have accomplished getting their startups off the ground. Both their startups recently received some serious global exposure and both were met with outstanding reviews, which they well deserved.

Ponoko

On-demand, social manufacturing – design, share, and buy laser-cut products from a variety of materials

Dave launched Ponoko at the TechCrunch 40 event with big buzz and fantastic reviews like this from Michael Arrington “Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production.” It was also hilarious that Dave emailed me afterwards and said that the first person who approached him was a VC who started off asking “Do you happen to know an American interaction designer…Philip Fierlinger?”

I was really lucky to have the opportunity to work with Dave for a short while. When we were just forming Xero, Dave consulted for us and worked along side us in the 404 apartment. I got to hear Dave’s early concepts for what would become Ponoko. From the outset I loved it and I was quite impressed that he was so unphased to take on, what seemed to me, such a daunting project. It’s definitely not your usual web startup. And that’s one important reason why it’s such a great idea.

PlanHQ

A collaborative planning tool to help start a business and keep it on track

Tim is a born entrepreneur who has a never ending reserve of passion and ideas. He presented his product PlanHQ at DEMO, which also got an excellent review from Msr. Arrington.

Tim is really active in the NZ web and business community. A little while ago he did a fantastic presentation on getting your startup funded:

The entire set of videos is well worth watching. It’s refreshingly frank and well informed, with great insights and tips, based on priceless experience.

Go New Zealand! Go Wellington. Let’s just not mention the rugby.

Common Craft has come up with a way of explaining some fairly complex technical concepts using raw stick figure drawings, cut out bits of paper and Mr. Hand. They do quite a good job explaining things in a clear, engaging way.

Google Docs in plain English…

Social Bookmarking in plain English…

RSS in plain English…

The lo-fi approach is brilliant, but the reason it’s really effective is the way they contextualize the technology using ordinary, day-to-day scenarios of interpersonal relationships.

It’s been my mission with Xero to make the user experience a bit like a game. Money essentially is a game. It represents your score, your points and your power in the game of life. Yet, for most people managing money is a painful chore that is dreaded and avoided.

The latest update to Xero includes new functionality and design ideas that really begin to exhibit what I see as a game play experience. For instance, we’ve designed the bank reconciliation so that it’s fun to use, it’s an experience you actually enjoy and look forward to.

With the bank rec in Xero your job is to match transactions coming in from the bank with transactions you have recorded in Xero. Often Xero can predict the match for you, so with one click you can easily clear a row. You get a big green tick and away it fades, bringing up the next line – the next little piece of the puzzle – to be matched. It’s a bit like clearing rows in Tetris (as seen in the short video above).

Our new ‘fast code’ design lets you do it even quicker, by letting you create an instant match, on-the-fly. After that, Xero learns how you code your transactions so that the next time it already has the details filled in for you. Pretty soon all you do is: click, click, click down the page and you’ve cleared away a whole bunch of rows, knocking them off in rapid fire.

It gives you a real rush of instant gratification.

When you come across a transaction that reconciles to multiple items you go into “find and match” mode, tracking down the transactions that add up to the one bank statement line. It’s another type of simple puzzle that gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction when you find the exact match.

With Xero, we’re now getting into a phase of the product design and development where we can really start to optimise the work flow across the system to make the experience smarter, faster and genuinely fun.

I love seeing it all come together. It’s even better to see how much customers are loving it.

I’ve been loving Slideshare. It’s an extremely useful tool that makes it dead easy and actually fun to share presentations online. It’s bringing to the surface some outstanding expertise. I’ve collected quite few goodies in my Slideshare favorites. Below are some presentations that are particularly relevant to my most recent slides.

Agile Usability Testing