A typical day for me begins with the following before getting out of bed:

1) Turning off my alarm (iPhone 3GS).

2) Starting the download for the WSJ This Morning podcast (iPhone 3GS).

3) Checking the temperature (iPhone 3GS).

Once I get out of bed:

1) I get dressed to take my dog for a walk while listening to the WSJ podcast on my iPhone that has finished downloading.

2) I feed myself and my dog while continuing to listen to the WSJ podcast.

3) I connect my iPhone to some powered speakers and finish the WSJ podcast as I shower and get dressed for work.

As I leave the house to go to work:

1) I listen to music on my iPhone as I walk to bus stop.

2) While waiting for the bus I check my personal and work e-mail.

3) After checking e-mail, I play games and listen to music on my iPhone until I reach work.

It’s amazing how fast time seems to pass when you have so many productivity and entertainment options available.

Depending on what I’m doing that day at work, I might listen to music, Pandora, or local sports talk from Dallas (the ESPN Radio iPhone app is great) as I work.

At work I’m always connected to the Internet. Most of my collegues are located remotely or at another office. Work is done primarily via e-mail and chat. I’m on the phone no more than once or twice a day. I used the phone far more when I was doing Business Development.

My primary applications include Outlook, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Excel on a 10″ Dell laptop running Windows XP docked with dual 20 inch LCD monitors. I use Word and PowerPoint far less in product management than I did in Business Development.

I also keep Meebo’s web-based chat application open all day on a small USB monitor to access AIM, Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. I keep up with industry news using Google Reader and Techmeme.

Prior to heading home from the office, I start the downloads for a few ESPN podcasts which keep me company until I get home and walk the dog.

After I walk my dog and feed the two of us, I catch up on TV shows waiting for me on my DirecTV DVR or stream some music using my Apple TV.

I’ll typically surf the web and read the days news and tech blogs on my laptop as I watch TV or listen to music. I have a 17″ Dell laptop running Windows 7. I primarily use Google Chrome to browse the web at home.

I actually have print subscription to Business Week (it was free).

When I crawl into bed at night I set my alarm, plug in the charger, and turn on some relaxing tunes on my iPhone 3GS.

As you can see, the iPhone has been deeply integrated into my daily activities. I have a hard time seeing how I’d get by without it.

]]> http://randyweber.com/blog/2010/03/13/technology-and-me-a-day-in-the-life-of/feed/ 0 http://randyweber.com/blog/2010/02/06/the-sad-truth-about-online-personals-sites/ http://randyweber.com/blog/2010/02/06/the-sad-truth-about-online-personals-sites/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:56:17 +0000 Randy Weber http://randyweber.com/blog/?p=421 Having spent some time working in the online personals biz and having used most all of the sites both personally and professionally, I can tell you that the following joke ad from College Humor is dead on. It’s especially true for the smaller sites like the ones that have the racy ads on Facebook.

Your best best is sticking with the major players like Yahoo, Match, and eHarmony (personally I dislike eHarmony, but it works for a lot of people). Some of the niche sites are OK too, like JDate.

After holding steady for most of 2008, Yahoo’s share of all search engine advertisers dropped like a rock in October, November and December — plummeting from 30.4% to 19.4% at the end of Q4, according to search marketing firm AdGooroo.

How do you explain this? Everyone else is gaining share and they’re losing it. This is very sad to see. I’ve always liked Yahoo!

The deal was announced on Search Engine Watch.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.

Another point made in the article involves physical attraction and is a dig on eHarmony. For the record – looks matter and eHarmony sucks.

Certainly this stuff helps some people find a match. But basic human nature seems to be more visual when it comes to attraction. People don’t necessarily want to fill out an excrutiatingly long personality profile to help them sort through potential matches, then to find out there’s no physical attraction.

Kudos to Yahoo. If we get those users off of eHarmony and onto Yahoo and Match, the matchmaking world will be a much better place.

Let me start this with the fact that I LOVE TiVo. However, the lack of a viable HD product has led me to use the PVR in the set-top box from Time Warner. I hate it, but I have no choice. None-the-less, I still have my TiVo which I use as a music server to get my tunes from my PC to my entertainment system. It’s slicker than anything else out there, trust me, I’ve tried them.

Now, on with my point. I want TiVo to survive. I think it has major opportunities that it has not been able to capitalize on:

1. The set-top box that integrates audio, video, PCs, and the Internet in the living room.
2. It could change the way that audio and video is monetized by content owners and distributors.
3. It could change they way that audio and video is distributed by content owners – pay-per-view, video on demand, stored content that can be moved to various devices, etc.

I want this device BAD. PVR Wire has their arguments on who is most likely to buy TiVo – they believe it will be Yahoo or Google. I want it to be Yahoo or Apple. Yahoo seems to be able to integrate a variety of Internet content and could really use TiVo rather than screwing around with their own vaporware product. Apple would be great because they’d be able to avoid screwing up TiVo’s incredible UI (they might even be able to improve it) and they have done very well with integrating various types of content on various devices.

Whether it’s Yahoo or Apple, please let it happen.

Using the strategy put forth by the author, a start-up would be building a business around content and traffic from third parties and monetizing everything via Google AdWords or some other advertising network. Examples cited by the author include:

* YouTube makes it flash video player available via embed code on MySpace and their traffic takes off.
* TripAdvisor search engine optimizes its service and becomes one of the most popular travel services.
* Technorati hits delicious’ api for its tags and builds the web’s most succesful tag search service.
* Indeed crawls the Internet for jobs and builds a popular job service overnight.
* Kayak crawls the Internet for flights, hotes, and cars, and builds a popular travel service overnight.
* Qoop takes Flickr’s API and builds a Flickr printing service without ever engaging with Flickr’s team.
* Netvibes takes a few RSS feeds and builds a start page that looks as complete as MyYahoo overnight.

Nice for a business that has a handful of employees and no expenses, but it isn’t sustainable. Here’s the problem:

1.     No barriers to entry. Anyone can copy your business. Think about the example of the start page. Netvibes is competing with every major portal, as well as start-ups like Pageflakes, webwag, and protopage, with more popping up every day.
2.     No barriers to exit. Users can easily leave your business for the next big thing. Remember Friendster?
3.     Nothing of value is owned. You don’t own the content, nor do you own the advertisers. The eyeballs are yours, but without the content the eyeballs will go away. Without the advertisers, the money will go away.
4.     No control over your own destiny. Being completely dependent on “partners” (I use this term loosely) that have no contractual obligations to each other is dangerous. Content, traffic, or advertising “partners” could cut you off at anytime for any reason, like being acquired by a competitor, entering into an exclusive partnership with a competitor, suddenly viewing you as a competitor, or simply getting mad about something you’re doing with their content. Recent examples include YouTube entering into competition with Facebook, MySpace threatening YouTube, and Craigslist getting pissed at Oodle. If you’ve ever read Google or Yahoo’s terms of service for their advertising distribution programs, you know that they can pretty much change how their program works or cut you off at any time.

Biz Dev Classic may be slower, but it affords much more protection and stability for your business.