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Selling to people who havent bought yet

Selling to people who haven't bought yet:

No, they won’t respond to a better-than-them pitch. Instead, they’re much more likely to respond to a new statement of their problem and a new statement of the solution. Don’t ask them to announce that they were wrong when they decided that they didn’t need a tablet, a survival kit or an anti-impotence drug. Instead, make it easy for them to make a new decision based on new information.

[A lesson that needs to be heard in many fields.]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Air-O-Swiss Travel Ultrasonic Humidifier

Air-O-Swiss Travel Ultrasonic Humidifier:

It’s a little bigger than a Macbook Pro power supply, and twice as thick. It has a clever water reservoir, any .5 liter or smaller water bottle snaps into a fitting, and will supply 6-10 hours of vapor, depending on the setting.

Berlin apartments are as dry as a brush fire, so we also ran it all day in the living room, and even in a large room, it made the air so much more pleasant. Then we ran the Air Swiss all night for the baby, and again it performed perfectly. That’s day and night for 30-days non-stop; it’s built solid.

The only drawback is that there is a rather bright blue light that illuminates the vapor when the unit turns on, which changes to a red light when the water bottle is empty. If you’re a light sensitive sleeper, it might be an issue.

[Heh. I like it.]

Source: Cool Tools

Sergey Brin is worried

Sergey Brin is worried:

You mean like how google drives around filming the world, mapping your home wifi network, and when you complain tells you “Set up your network better”? That’s scary, but of course, that’s not what he’s scared of. Because that would be evil and google’s not evil.

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive,” he said. “The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.”
How about the environment where Google can kill your adwords account at any time, keep your money, and not even have to tell you why. Or the clause wherein if they think you knew about a “violation” of the Adwords ToS, which of course, they never tell you what that violation actually is, because it would reveal “proprietary” data. Funny how Google is open only when it’s convenient. So a company well-known for arbitrary application of rules, and heavy-handed handling of violations of those rules that are never actually revealed to the people who violated said rules is “worried that facebook’s rules are restrictive.”. Clearly Sergey is an atheist. No one actually afraid of a hell would be that much of a hypcritical twonk.

[Introspection is hard. Google has not mastered it at all.]

Source: bynkii.com

Time and taste

Time and taste:

Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.

People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.

Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

[I’m not sure I quite agree with the “People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population” line. I think the subset is those who *think* about the design, rather than the more common, “yeah, that works, yeah, I like it” intuitive understanding majority. Since taste is the ability to discern and consider the differences rather than intuit them… The argument here is simple, most people would gravitate toward a better a better design, but they let a whole slew of other factors (what they’ve been told and by whom, and their own biases of many years etc) get in the way. Remove some of this, and the design that works, one that provides a good experience, every time.]

Source: Marco.org

$10,000 Lemonade Stand

$10,000 Lemonade Stand:

Drew said he felt sad and wanted to help his father with medical bills.

“He is so important to me. We like to play with each other. Lots of times we like to play games,” Drew told a local television station.

Randy Cox says he has medical insurance but still will have to pay thousands of dollars in medical costs out of pocket.

Drew opened his stand for business outside his home on Saturday morning, charging 25 cents a cup. Word of his benevolent venture spread quickly, with some customers coming from dozens of miles away. 
 
One person wrote a $5,000 check and by the end of the day, Drew raised more than $10,000.

[People can be so wonderful…]

Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter

Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter:

Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods.
So Migicovsky posted his watch on Kickstarter, a “crowd-funding” website where anyone can pledge money for creative projects that have yet to be completed. In the last few days, roughly 26,000 people plunked down their cash, with many pledging hundreds of dollars and about a half dozen folks promising $10,000 or more.

[It seems cool. I’m in. Crazy story.]