Jordy Blog

Many of my readers will already know that Gabe and I have been busy launching a business for the last few months.

Well, we’ve finally got Izeni officially incorporated, and since we hope to launch our first product soon, we decided we’d better get something of a corporate website thrown together.

It’s really not much content-wise, but it is live; and it’s just in time for us to start pumping the engines of hype and hearsay. Check it out.

Our other (product) website, which is where the majority of our development has been, will be launched shortly.

So, how do you know you’re a developer in a bootstrapping high-tech startup? You have neither business cards nor a corporate website until your product is nearly ready to hit the market. This is pretty much opposite the spend-all-your-money-making-yourself-look-cool approach that many companies take. I hope our product-first approach is vindicated, but we’ll see. :)

Anyway, sign up for Izeni news updates, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, anyone know where we can get some great business cards?

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From yesterday’s excellent Campaign for Liberty mailer:

After the Paulson $700 billion bailout package passed in early October, we knew it was only a matter of time before Congress moved to use your money yet again to bail out a struggling industry.

Now, a vote to give funds to the “Big 3″ auto manufactures, GM, Ford, and Chrysler, is likely to come up in the Senate tomorrow [today].

Call your Senators today and ask them to oppose bailing out the auto industry, whether with funds from TARP, revisions of previous loans, or any new grants. To find the information for your Senators, click on our “States” page and look for your state. Phone numbers and links to contact forms can be found near the bottom of each state’s page. We have included recommended letters at the end of this email to send your Senator.

Who knew when we started giving out “free money” with no strings attached that other people might want some as well? This whole thing is absolutely scandalous and inexcusable. Bailouts are nothing more than legalized theft.

Please sign up for Campaign for Liberty if you haven’t yet. Hopefully enough people will rally to the cause of liberty that we can put a stop to this kind of crap.

I’m pleased with how much opportunity for personal development and professional networking there is in Utah. Yes, I do want to see it grow even more, but it’s nice have more good options than I could possibly attend.

Tonight for example, the Utah Tech Events and Utah Business Events calendars show four events in which I have genuine interested, all occurring at the same time.  At 7:30 tonight I would be perfectly content to be at any of these four events:

1. Twelve Horses: Brand Evolution
2. Ignite Salt Lake
3. BYU Web Startup Group
4. Utah Python Users Group

Incidentally, I’d also enjoy being at home with my family, but this abundance of events centered around professional networking and personal development shows that Utah really does have a great (albeit budding) tech and business ecosystem. These mostly non-profit knowledge-sharing groups constitute, I believe, some crucial intangibles that are important underpinnings to a vibrant economy. I’m glad to see them, and I’d love to see them grow.

Anyway, there’s no excuse to not be developing your personal and professional skills at some of these events. Just don’t try to substitute them for hard and diligent work. :)

If you’d like to be a contributor to out local tech and business calendars, please ping me or any of the other calendar admins. Especially if you’ve got a utah-based business or tech group and would like a channel to attract more people, we’d love to hear from you.

I just added the BYU Web Startup Group to my comprehensive list of Utah Tech Groups.

From their website:

The Web Startup group was founded to bring together people interested in creating new sites and services online. Group members include web developers (programmers and designers), marketing and business-minded individuals, creative idea people, and others with technology related skills. The group meets regularly to discuss and make Web Startups come to life. If you are interested in making a difference online then join us!

Their next meeting will be this Thursday and will cover Android and “Jump Starting your Website”.

I also added one of the founders, Adam Chavez, to Utah’s Business Blog Aggregator and invited him to contribute his events to the Utah Tech Events Calendar. If you or anyone you know should be added to these Utah business community sites, please contact me.

BTW, there’s also a Utah Business Events Calendar which hasn’t caught on nearly as much. Let me know if you’d like to contribute. Maybe I’ll merge the two calendars in the future; we’ll see.

Anyway, checkout the Web Startup Group. I think they could end up being a really valuable resource to the Utah business and technology communities.

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

Universal Wishlist Review

I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)

I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.

Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality.  I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.

It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.

Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.

Lessons in Open Marketing

But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”

Answers:

1. Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
2. I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
3. Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.

Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.

OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.

Does anybody know of a plugin like that?  I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.

What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?

Now is probably a good time to remind you to sign up for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty if you haven’t already. Here’s the message showing on the site:

If you want to make a significant difference, it’s time get rolling for 2010. Sign up today.

I was listening to the Nightside Project on KSL when one of the radio hosts (I don’t know his name) said he hates it when he sees people wearing the “I voted” stickers. He listed a number of reasons, but the one I got a kick out of was basically that the people who don’t know it’s election day are the last ones you want to remind to show up at the polls. Funny, but true.

So anyway, I came up with these sometimes humorous “I voted” sticker parodies as pleasant way to guilt trip sheeple who show up at the polls without doing any homework:

In case it wasn’t blazingly obvious, my overall point is that voting is NOT your civic duty. Voting smart is your civic duty. Voting smart takes a lot of time, thought, and research. Voting just for the sake of voting is quick, effortless, and counter-productive; it skews the numbers away from dedicated citizens who really did do their homework.

Hopefully these tongue-in-cheek “I voted” stickers are fun way to remind people to do some serious research before hitting the polls. Feel free to forward them to friends and family, or anyone you feel may be just flying by the seat of their pants! :)

And no; watching Oprah, SNL, and Fox News does not count as research.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for Voting Smart!

UPDATE

Some others I have thought of:

I (unwittingly) voted for more of the same (change vote)
I voted for a socialist in mainstream clothing (major-party vote)
I voted because it was on my way (convenient vote)
I voted exactly how the MSM wanted me to vote (sheeple vote)
I voted and all I got was this lousy sticker (freebie vote)
I voted without ever having read the constitution (public ed vote)
I voted how the source code made me (Diebold vote)
I voted to reinforce the illusion of liberty (depressing vote)
I voted for the guy who worships like me (blind faith vote)
I voted because I’m better than you (ego vote)
I voted because it makes me feel good (insecure vote)
I voted because some people don’t have maps (hot chick vote)
I voted based on one issue only (one-dimensional vote)
I voted for all the candidates (Florida vote)
I voted despite being dead for 50 years (electoral shenanigans vote)

Please post your own funny or poignant “I Voted” stickers in the comments!

UVU is showing an important (although significantly flawed) documentary tonight. “I.O.U.S.A.” is important because it highlights just how bankrupt we are as a country. It describes how our current debt and obligations (unless significantly curtailed) will enslave future generations for years to come, essentially charging the cost of our glut to our children’s and grandchildren’s credit cards.

“I.O.U.S.A” is seriously flawed because it entirely ignores the very central role the Federal Reserve has played in enabling this glut. But it’s still important to see nonetheless. Here are the details:

OREM, UTAH — UVU Student Government, many UVU clubs, and the Concord Coalition are hosting a screening of the free full-length featured documentary titled “I.O.U.S.A.” The critically-acclaimed “I.O.U.S.A.” documentary, directed by Patrick Creadon (”Wordplay”), follows The Concord Coalition’s “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour” and tells the story of America’s four key deficits — budget, savings, balance of payments and leadership — and their implications for the nation and U.S. citizens. The movie, an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, features Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert Bixby and Fiscal Wake-Up Tour keynote speaker, former Comptroller General of the U.S. David Walker. It contains interviews with Concord Coalition President Peter G. Peterson and Concord Board members Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker.

Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Third Party members all agree that something must be done about the nation’s growing deficits and accumulating national debt. The topic of debt is too often ignored by the media and misunderstood by citizens. However, the national debt affects us all. This movie will leave you stunned and wondering why nobody is doing anything about it. The movie will cover the debts’ history and what can happen if we don’t immediately address the issue. The will be shown on November 3rd and held at the UVU Ragan Theater in the Student Center and is movie is free and open to the public. UVU is located at 800 West University Parkway Way, in Orem, UT. Doors open at 6:30 pm and the movie will begin promptly at 7:00 pm. For more information please visit www.iousathemovie.com or email Tyler at petersty[at]uvu.edu.

You can also view the condensed version of I.O.U.S.A. online.

On this election day eve, it’s important that we understand the fiscal crises facing Americal so we can take the steps necessary to correct our “leadership deficit” and get ourselves out of this mess before it’s too late. There is an alarming silence in Washington on the precient issues of over-spending and inflationary debt. I hope you watch this film so we can correct those issues before the price of our glut tears our country and families and apart.