Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

When I was starting my first company and moving out to San Francisco a year and a half ago, I remember attending one of the first meetings of SFWIN. I took place in the backroom of a sushi place and had about 20 or 30 people at it. Everyone there was an entrepreneur first and foremost, but I remember the meeting having a distinctly geeky feel about it.

Fast forward to the present day, and the geeks are pretty much gone. I’ve been to a ton of networking events since that first one, and I’ve watched them fill up with more and more suits (and a bunch of geeks, me included, turn more and more into suits). This is good, as it means that there’s lots of money floating around the Valley right now, and it has helped me learn a ton about business since those early days, but there isn’t really anyplace anymore that has that geeky edge to it.

It looks like someone is finally taking steps to change all of that. I got an e-mail today from Christian Perry of SF Beta announcing geekSessions, a new networking event in the SF area that tries to inject a bit of the geek back into things. It’s not quite in the back room of a sushi place anymore, but hey, we’re all used to spending our time at throwing down drinks at 111 Minna now, so I guess the upgrade was inevitable.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

I’m not sure what to make of my experience with United today. I’ve given them a good review on this blog before, but today made me remember why I hate dealing with them.

The story starts last night when I sleepily booked two tickets to Chicago from San Francisco for later this month. This morning when I woke up I realized that I used my girlfriend’s nickname on the ticket instead of her proper legal name. No problem, I thought, I’ll just call up and have them change the first name on the ticket.

That’s when the fun began. After I spent fifteen minutes navigating the robot phone system to get to a (hard to understand, off-shored) person, I was told that I couldn’t change the name on a ticket without a $100 change fee.

A $100 change fee.

To change a first name.

I wasn’t aware that this is what the change fee was for. I can understand charging me if I want to change to a different flight, but why would they try to charge me $100 to change the first name of the person on the flight. The only explanation I could come up with is that they were intentionally trying to irritate me.

So i did the only sensible thing. I hung up and called back under the assumption that the first person was crazy. (But not before checking on gethuman.com before calling back to figure out how to avoid the robot phone system.)

This rep informed of the same thing that the last rep did, but luckily, I had another out. The customer service rep on the phone informed me that since I had purchased the ticket within the last 24 hours, the ticket could be canceled with a full refund and rebooked. That made sense, so I told her to go ahead and do that.

Unfortunately, due to the magical airline ticket pricing system that we all know and love, the price of the exact same flight had increased by $96 since 12 hours before. And there was a $15 fee for booking over the phone.

Wonderful.

So I had two choices, change the name and pay a $100 change fee, or cancel the ticket and pay the $96 + $15 difference.

Obviously, neither of these options appealed to me to change a first name.

So the first tact I took was to try to get them to waive the change fee. This has worked for me before on a number of airlines (Continental, Frontier, etc) and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, since this wasn’t really a big change to the ticket.

After being put on hold for 5 minutes, I was informed that that couldn’t be done.

I would love to personally thank the supervisor who made that decision.

Eventually what I ended up doing was to have the original ticket refunded and book in a different time that was only $15 more expensive then the original flight that I booked.

So far this cost me $15 and an hour of my time.

To change a first name.

And I ended up with a less convenient flight.

Absurd.

The final slap in the face came just now, when I checked back on United’s site. It seems that the pricing fairies have set the price of the flight that I wanted back down to the price of the flight that I booked today.

Thanks, United. I’m done flying your friendly skies.

Today’s iPhone announcement and subsequent heaping of praises upon Jobs and Co. reminded me once again why I use an Apple every day. Things just work. It’s also another reminder that we should try to create things that are simple enough that they just work

Which brings me to a story about helping my mom set up the Mac Mini I got them when I was home over the holidays. I set up Apple Mail, their new scanner/printer/fax, and my mom’s new iPod. At every turn, things were easier than she expected them to be. That’s really Apple’s secret. Users (real users, not tech geeks) don’t want choices, they just want things to work, and Apple currently does that better than anyone else.

Questions like “How do I get this CD onto the iPod” that were answered with “Put in the CD and then connect the iPod” were like a breath of fresh air. Users coming from a Windows world expect things to be harder than they need to be. I configured Apple Mail to use her Gmail account and she’s already sent me a scan of a postcard that she got from an old friend of mine. I can’t imagine explaining to her how to do that on a windows machine. There are too many options, too many ways of doing everything, and too many steps to remember. On the Mac you just push the scan button, click the paper clip on your e-mail, and grab the image out of the Pictures folder. Isn’t that what we really what should happen.

The key point, I think, is that even though everyone in the world thinks that they need a general purpose computing device, very few people actually do. Just give most people a few easy to understand, use, and, most importantly, integrated apps and they’ll be far happier than if you give them everything in the world and leave it up to them to figure out how everything fits together.

I know that my mom sure is, and isn’t that really the ultimate test.

I’ve been really feeling the pain of trying to hire a good developer lately.

We’ve been posting Craigslist ads, and we feel that we have all of the right keywords in place (Rails, Agile, Cheminformatics, Data Mining, Java, etc), and a bunch of cool challenging problems to work on, but we’re not getting back much as far as quality responses go.

Maybe the job market really is that hot right now. Everyone I know seems to have multiple offers on their plate. Still, we’re refusing to lower our standards, but we are starting to feel the drag of just not having enough people to get everything done. Anyone out there with any suggestions (or better yet, resumes of good people)? Email or comment if you’ve got them.

I’ve often wondered how a brand new college graduate can come in to a company and show them how to manage their people better. I always figured that it was just some sort of a really good scam. Good to see that Joel has figured out how works. Now we just have to figure out why people keep falling for it…

It seems that yesterday was the day that my co-hosting provider was moving all of my Squishr boxes from one location to another, and our app got bonked. Of course, it’s also the day a bunch of traffic comes in from a TechCrunch comment and then gets routed to an old landing page for the app that hasn’t been up for months.

Oh well, things are back up now. The lesson here is to make sure that your machine comes back up in the correct state after being rebooted. Live and learn, I suppose.

It’s yet another review aggregation site. This time for gadgets.

Marshall says:

The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100)

This is the same thing we’ve been doing at Squishr with music for a while now.

This is actually a bit of deja vu for me, as we originally had our technology working on gadgets, but we moved to music because we found that gadget reviews just didn’t end up that useful in the grand scheme of things. People tended to say the same thing over and over again in their gadget reviews (good/bad interface, good/bad battery life, etc), and let’s face it, if you’re going to buy an mp3 player it’s going to be an iPod.

I do agree with Marshall when he says that there’s room for a lot of entries into this space. Things should be interesting.

Occasionally, we here at the Ten Ton Labs take on a consulting gig or two. After some discussion, I’ve come up with the following easy-to-follow chart for consulting gigs. It lists all of the languages that we write applications in, and gives some idea of what we would charge to produce an app in each language.

This chart is rooted in our belief that making someone write C++ code is somewhat similar to straight torture.

The irony, of course, is that it takes quite a bit longer to write something in C++, on top of the higher rates.

As always, contact me at kurt@tentonlabs.com if you want to discuss a potential engagement.

I once worked at a bank where someone got in trouble for checking her e-mail from work. It was a consultant I was working with, and she was checking her legitimate work e-mail through a web interface, but it was still a violation of IT policy to check outside e-mail. She was even checking her mail over SSL, but the IT department noticed her behavior by analyzing traffic patterns, not by actually seeing the contents of any of the traffic she was sending out.

That’s just what I thought of when I saw meebo repeater today (via Venture Chronicles). I imagine that sooner or later someone is going to get fired for using this. If there’s one thing that I know about big corporate IT departments, it’s that they hate to be fucked with.

I can’t believe that Kevin Rose is up in arms about paying the people that make his site valuable. Calacanis isn’t a genius, he’s just right.

I get the feeling that the era of people making millions off of user generated content is quickly coming to an end.