Author: themshow

Audiophile Update

Longtime readers know of my love for music and audio, and regardless of the quality of my marketing thoughts here the linkbait of my headphone review trumps everything else at this site.

The original review was in 2007 and is posted here covering Shure, Sony and Bose. I also get a lot of traffic on how to get better sound out of your iPod if you are willing to cough up another $50.

So what’s new? I also mentioned the Nike earphones that I use for running, they died a couple of weeks ago at the Falmouth Road Race. After at least 3 years of sweating and pouring water over my head in hot weather I can say they are a superior product and served me well at the price.

I have replaced them with the Sennheiser PMX80 running earphones, which I had considered when I bought the Nike set. They are also great but it comes down to sound quality vs. comfort and isolation. The Sennheisers sound much better but they are a tiny bit heavier and they fight much tighter in my ear, this results in a much better sound, but I’m not able to hear what is going on around me as well. It comes down to much better music, or hearing what’s going on around you with out as much in your ear. For now, I’m liking the music, we’ll see how the hold up.

Shure Update – I got an email notice that Shure is refreshing the line of products. The big thing I noticed is that the cables are now removable. After a couple of years of heavy use the cord on mine broke because of the way they twist over my ear (and it should be mentioned that they repaired them for free). These are still getting heavy use and sounding great, although I haven’t tried anything new lately.

In other gear updates I got a Sony NEX-5 and will be posting some pics on Flickr soon.

Daily Life

Not to be cryptic

Thanks to everyone that got in touch with me after the last post, your concern is truly appreciated. I had written that at a point where I was tired and waiting for things to move. This is why I know I am better than marketing than sales, I like the long term view, and the quick hit of response rates. The sales guys that grind out the large deals one at a time deserve to get the best cash comp in the organization.

Part of writing that was the fact that I know that when it was all done, I wouldn’t really feel like writing, but I wanted to have something in the pipeline for when it was done. The weekend is finally here and I have a chance to clean up a bit. I just finished my first week at Boston Software Systems, a company that takes the paperwork and data entry out of healthcare. Hospitals often have multiple IS systems (and worse yet there are many groups of hospitals that share data between the multiple hospitals with multiple IS systems), and Boston Workstation can automate the data entry across systems. It’s simple to use and powerful because it is flexible enough to automate almost any task.

I’m excited to be working with a couple of guys that I have worked with before, Mark mentioned I was like the Blues Brothers getting the band together again. Now that my evenings are mine again I’ll be able to get back to more reading, which will result in more to talk about. Thanks for checking in with me here, I’m off to enjoy the weekend.

Daily Life The Marketeer

If you are reading this, then it’s all over

Post author By themshow
Post date September 15, 2010
2 Comments on If you are reading this, then it’s all over

For me, this is a sad post to write, but the good news is that if I ever hit the publish button, then I am probably enjoying an adult beverage and watching the sunset with a smile on my face.

How did I get to this point? Writing a post as digital therapy in July, knowing that it will sit in the draft bin for who knows how long. There have been two things this month that led me to this confession: I had touched base with Greg Verdino about his new book and he said “Man, where have you been?”. The other was Chris Brogan saying he was glad to see some blog posts out of me. Seth Godin said something to the effect that a good measure of your work is if people notice if you are missing. Given the busy schedules of Greg and Chris, that makes me feel pretty good.

So, where the hell have I been? Let’s rewind the clock to October 2009 for half the story – at Newton Wellesley after being awake for more hours in a row than I ever have before, our son arrived. That has been a wonderful adventure, taking up most of our lives but worth every minute. But the other half… that’s why this sits in the draft bin.

In December 2009 I did my annual review of how the year went. The dead week between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time to take a look at the bigger picture. The elephant in the back of my mind was that it would be my 5th anniversary at work. In June I vested in the last of my options, and in the startup world this makes you start thinking about the next big thing. If everything goes perfectly (I know maybe 4 people that have scored that lottery ticket), the startup you are at goes public or gets acquired and you tough out the days until you get all your shares. There are many tales of people throwing the vesting day party and then riding off into the sunset for a tour of Europe, writing a book, start a Daddyblog, taking up Yak farming, whatever…

Although we haven’t hit an event, everything is going very well. The company has grown 6x in my time there and it’s been great to watch the business grow and see customers like the Auto company that Monty hangs with arrive, and the first monster deal (and the monsters got bigger every other year or so).

After many discussions, coffees, lunches with friends asking about what I should be looking at next, the nuclear winter of the current economy was confirmed. In April I decided that there was no point in starting search with the summer coming on, and decided to stick with working only one job (a job search is always a full time job), and setting up the summer vacation.

This was the impetus for the end of the M Show, giving it a proper finish, silencing the nagging voice in the background that asked when the next show would go out. This freed time up for Marketing Over Coffee, which has continued it’s run this year and has been a fantastic source of networking for me.

As usual, the universe has no regard for my plans and has its way of telling me so. From the silence of the summer I was contacted by some folks that I used to work with and started talking to them.

And here I sit in a random coffee shop. As I write this draft, I really can’t talk to anybody about anything. I’m not writing anything, not getting myself into situations where I have to talk about anything on the horizon. I’m all set with phone calls at weird hours so that I can respect the day with my co-workers. The only laugh I had was from John T., we were talking about catching up over lunch so I could give him his Marketing Over Coffee Award, and he joked that we could try to eat lunch at the Newton Marriott but that they probably wouldn’t let us in since it wasn’t a job interview (sorry for the local 128 humor).

One day I soon will hit the publish button. I’ll have plenty of stories in the backlog, but I’m sure that by then I’m going to be spending all my time on the next big thing, and will be more than ready to stop staring at the horizon and itching to get down to work.

So after this gets posted I’ll be pretty busy with other stuff, but at least you’ll know where I’ve been.

Daily Life

Back to Work

Some random stuff today that I wanted to put out on my first day back. I completed our first Griswold-style road vacation, logging 2,000 miles in less than 2 weeks driving from Boston to Torch Lake, Michigan.

Aside from some podcast editing I was able to get by with only my iPad for the entire trip. It does everything I needed, and it was great to spend the half hour in a line of cars trying to get through customs watching Ricky Gervais in Extras.
The iPad is fantastic for managing photos. I was able to plug in 3 different digital cameras, review photos and delete the ones I didn’t want. What was normally at least an hour going through photos after a trip was eliminated, and everybody got to see photos real time.
I was issued a new Dell at work today, it was sort of stuck between off and on, the keyboard and power button were lit, but I couldn’t get it to wake up without doing a 10-second hold of the power button. It’s disappointing when the first experience with a tool is “Geez, is something wrong with this thing?”
While getting to the podcast backlog this morning during my commute, I picked an episode of Manager Tools randomly out of the pile, and was surprised to be mentioned in the show. That was very cool, I’ve never heard these guys give out a plug and they have an blue chip brand that is doing very well.
Bill Green mentions Update: I had this all wrong, the term “Auto-Downloading” for podcasts was created by Bob Knorpp, host of the BeanCast. This is the most profound thing ever said about podcasting in its history. The fact that it took 5 years for someone to connect the dots and come up with this shows why marketing is so difficult, and by extension, why Bill Bob could be the best marketing guy on the planet.
Addendum: So I wasn’t clear on this – It’s nothing big, but hugely profound. Bob has shown his ability as a gold standard copy writer when he coined “Auto-Download”. For five years podcasters have been saying “Subscribe to Podcasts” which has no intuitive meaning. “Sign up for Auto-Download” is intuitive (Zyman refers to this as “Cup of Soup” Marketing, a triumph of usability where the name tells you everything you need to know).
Travelling with a baby is not really a vacation.

Ok, I still have a lot of stuff to clean up, I hope you’ve had a shot at a summer vacation this year. I’m going to be running the Falmouth Road Race this weekend, please DM me if you are doing the race.

Productivity Booster Uncategorized

Smart Warranty – How to save $1,000

Post author By themshow
Post date July 26, 2010
2 Comments on Smart Warranty – How to save $1,000

I worked for 5 years in the insurance industry and one of the important points in the theory of insurance is that you should not insure anything if you can afford to withstand a total loss.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a financial professional. If you take any of my advice just assume that you’ll be sued, you’ll lose all your money, end up in prison, your house will burn down and you’ll probably get a really mean case of athlete’s foot.

Now that we’ve weeded out all but the fearless, and those not afraid of itchy feet, read on…

A common insurance mistake illustrates the principle – many people have comprehensive and/or collision coverage on their cars. This is a good idea for the first five years you own the car, and if you have a car loan it’s required. The mistake many people make is not reviewing this coverage when the value of the car falls below $5,000. If you look up the blue book value of your car and it’s worth $2,100 because it’s 8 years old and has almost 200k miles on it maybe you shouldn’t be paying $200 a year to protect that $2,100. Now yes, it is possible that a tree will crush your car and your insurance company will give you the $2,100, but the odds are you’re going to do that for 3 years, and pay over $500 for peace of mind that your car was protected if it had been crushed. At this point, rather than feel content, you should picture yourself content and short $500, while your other self could risk the car and be enjoying a weekend at the beach with cash to spare.

The easy way out of this is Self-Insurance. You, as an individual, can use the same strategy used by many large corporations to avoid paying insurance premiums. Every time you get offered insurance coverage at check out (say from that store with the gadgets and the guys in the blue shirts), if you actually consider it, refuse it and put that money aside in a savings account. You can do it on a whiteboard if you want to see it in action, but it’s more fun to actually have the cash sitting in an account. What you’ll find is that just like a casino, over time you will win big. A co-worker of mine has been keeping track and by the time he got to his second big screen TV he had a pool of a couple thousand dollars ready for repairs.

You’ll get to a point where you have more in the fund than most stuff costs, with the exception of your car and house – the things you do need to insure. Everything else is giving it up to the casino.

Productivity Booster

iPad Wireless Keyboard vs. Bluetooth Keyboard vs. Griffin Loop vs. A-Frame

Post author By themshow
Post date July 24, 2010
2 Comments on iPad Wireless Keyboard vs. Bluetooth Keyboard vs. Griffin Loop vs. A-Frame

I’ve been trying to see what works best for typing on the iPad. When I bought it I also got the keyboard dock. After using it once or twice I found that I didn’t like the fact that it held the iPad in a portrait orientation (tall rather than like a normal widescreen TV). I’ve found the widescreen to be much more useful for reading and going through my GMail.

Dave Delaney hooked me up when I mentioned this on Marketing Over Coffee, and sent over a Griffin A-Frame. It’s a nice heavy duty frame but I had seen a different model they make, the Loop, and wanted to check that out too. So, here are the final stats:

Keyboard Dock – 20 oz (note: I am using a really crummy food scale so these numbers may be way off, but they are good enough for relative measures), $60 as of this writing from Amazon. This can be your complete solution if you don’t mind looking at it in portrait orientation all the time. Another benefit – it requires no power so you won’t be foiled by dead batteries.

Bluetooth Keyboard – 10 oz. $69, that weight is including the 2 batteries it takes. I was surprised how light it was. You now add the risk of dead batteries, but if you go with a Griffin stand, now you can view the screen in Landscape orientation

Griffin Loop – 12 oz. $29.99. A single solid plastic loop that is a bit taller than the A-Frame stand, but considerably lighter

Griffin A-Frame – 17 oz. $49.99 (retail, $36.99 on Amazon as of this writing). It’s rock solid, but heavier and more expensive. It does look more heavyweight than the Loop and it folds down to be flatter. I’d consider that a benefit for travel except that I prefer the weight reduction of the Loop over an inch space saving.

End result: I’ve gone with the bluetooth keyboard and the loop. I think it’s worth the extra $30 to get a landscape view, and it’s only 2 oz. more than the keyboard dock. There is the battery risk, but it can also be used with a Mac to recycle it, the keyboard dock is a paperweight for anything but an iPad. The A-Frame is nice but more money and weight are the deal breakers for me.

Geek Stuff

A Sad Day

There is some good news first, this is the first time I have posted to the blog from iPad. I’m using the keyboard with the stand and it works very well (yes, the hardware keyboard supports the dvorak layout for any fellow typing geeks).

My only thought is that it might be better to use the bluetooth keyboard and a stand so that I can see the monitor in landscape view, the portrait view is not the best for the Gmail interface, or wordpress for that matter. Scrolling up and down works well, side to side causes problems with readability.

So… back to the sad day thing… A little more than a year ago I mentioned that I was using a PSP to watch movies while traveling, and that I had checked out a comic book application that wasn’t too bad. I could see the writing on the wall that eventually this would become a problem for the local comic shop, much the way the small local bookstore has been taking a beating for the past 5 years or more.

Fanboys like me know that Wednesday is Comic day, that’s when the new publications hit the stores. I’ve followed the stories of adventure for more than 25 years, but last Wednesday was the first time that a comic I was going to buy in the store was also available via the Comixology Application for iPad. Instead of driving to the local shop to buy it, I just clicked and had it instantly. Comic shops are like antique stores, fishing stores and hardware stores, just fun to walk around and see what’s interesting. I wish I could say that comic shops will stick around, but I think they have a lot more in common with newspapers than boutiques. Hopefully I’m wrong…

Addendum: Seth Godin wrote today in a similar vein about the quest to save the paper.

Daily Life

40 Lessons I’ve Learned

40 Things I have picked up along my voyage:

My first memory is Look Park in Northampton. Not much of a lesson, but it was the day I was “switched on”.
Read – My parents got me into reading. At the local library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, I had a game card that would be stamped once for each book I read. Two important lessons – reading is an efficient way to acquire knowledge, learning from other’s successes and failures, and people will do just about anything in return for worthless crap like stamps if you set up the rewards system properly.
You will have to live with contradictions – Spending money on the tools of war will generate a peace dividend. My Dad’s work for the military paid for my college education. You can like the Yankees and the Red Sox.
4^th of July is the best holiday – you don’t have to buy people crap they don’t need, the weather and barbecues are usually good, and if you are daring you can blow shit up.
Go UMass – If you put a bunch of working class people together they will drink a lot, have fun, and maybe learn some stuff.
Read things that inspire you. I still read Superman to remind me that heroes never give a second thought to helping others or standing up for what’s right.
Debt is risk taking and is ok. I learned that from selling drugs (on a computer game).
It’s all about how you choose to respond and how you communicate. Read The 7 Habits – you have the power to choose.
Photography – Take pictures, get closer than you think, take hundreds and only show your best work, use the rule of thirds
Hobbies are a stupid waste of time and money, except for mine and yours. I don’t care if my car is crappy but god forbid my Hard Drive isn’t an SSD. This is where tribes come from.
I care a lot about computers, they are my craftsman’s tools (back to the 7 habits – keep your saw sharp). Tiny increases in productivity make a huge difference over time.
Karma does earn interest – doing good may not pay off right away, but it pays back big over time.
If heaven doesn’t look like Tanglewood I’ll ask to be sent somewhere else.
Golf with my family has brought me many memories. My Uncle gave me my first clubs two weeks before he died. My Mom used to joke that on the course was the first time she heard me say “Fuck!” and really mean it. Before she passed away we had a great laugh when my brother drove his cart over his bag.
Going to see James Taylor at Tanglewood is to understand the Berkshires in one night.
Remember that everyone dies and your time here is limited. Don’t waste even a day.
Laugh once every day, humor is everywhere, take advantage of it.
You can predict the future if you work to create it.
Normal people aren’t very interesting.
People hire the people they want to work with, not the ones that are best for the job.
You have to balance saving for tomorrow versus having a good time today.
Audio is my favorite medium, music is a gift in my life.
Worry has no value at all.
Character is only revealed when things get really bad.
Nothing is worth more to the sick than compassion.
“If you are going through Hell, keep going” – Winston Churchill
Jazz is music for musicians
The Boston Marathon is the only World Championship open to the common man, but the Falmouth Road Race is more fun.
No one will ever love you more than your Mom, No one will do a better job of teaching you responsibility or duty than your Dad
No one can make me laugh as easily as my brother.
Spend all the time you can with your Grandparents
Our annual family celebration is important because, contrary to what Aunt Bonnie may say, I am the best Scrabble player in the family, I just don’t brag about it because it’s at her house on Torch Lake.
Faith – If I try to be a good member of my community and leave the world better than I found it, everything else will takes care of itself.
Getting married was the best decision of my life. Having a big wedding? Let’s just say I’m taking “’til death do us part” seriously because I don’t want to go through another wedding.
Sometimes men have to go back to their cave, they don’t talk things over.
Women just want to talk things over, they don’t want you to go fix them.
Read “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, it explains a lot.
I waited my whole life for Carin.
Like most things, having children is hard work, and that’s why it’s so satisfying.
Look out for each other and never give up – W.S.

Podcasting

The Last M Show

Back in January of 2005, I started podcasting. Since I was playing with a new technology, I didn’t give much thought to what the show should be about, so I just copied Don Imus and did my own talk radio show.

It had a pretty good run, at it’s peak around 2007 it was getting around 16,000 downloads a month. Over the 5 years I just hit a half million downloads. Just over 3 years ago I started doing Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn, and that show has a real niche, instead of me playing Morning Zoo guy. MOC is getting over 20,000 a month now, and it will hit a half million in the next two to three months.

For The Last M Show, I invited a bunch of folks who were in town for the MarketingProfs event out to dinner at Morton’s at the Seaport. It was a great night, and it was fun to do one final show. It’s always been kind of a show for insiders, if you’ve never listened before but want to check it out, listen to Show 100, that explains everything.

If that doesn’t dissuade you, take a listen:

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/themshow/TheMShow206.mp3]

Daily Life

The3six5 Project

Bill Green mentioned The3six5 project during the Beancast around December and I signed on.

The idea is that 365 authors do a short diary entry about their day. If you want to read about my day yesterday, or get a look at some of the 150 or so others, check out the 3six5’s posterous: June 24, 2010 John Wall.

If you’ve come here from The3six5, welcome aboard! You can see links to the popular stuff on the left column, and please check out Marketing Over Coffee if you are interested in audio programs at all.