I’ve been in a bit of a funk of late, a special project I’ve been working on for almost a year has come to its conclusion, I’ve taken on a new non-caffeine/sugar/alcohol diet (yes I know I’ve previously espoused the virtues of said stimulants) and I’m at a point in my career where paranoia and anxiety usually meet opportunity.

I know it’s not uncommon to feel displaced or “spread-thin” when there are so many changes in ones professional life, I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again! However this week I went back to basics and adopted the business school mantra “what gets measured gets managed” to get a sense for how my life was tracking. And it worked! But how do you account for life? Is there a Personal Profit and Loss? Yes there is, you just need to measure the oblique.

Measure your Success
- When was your last career-defining moment?
- When was your last personal victory?
- You were just out of high school, how close have you come toward your aspiration?
- Remember that tyrant boss (you know the one), do they cast the same mental duress they once did?

Measure your Career
- What % of your income is derived for a source that makes you smile (in one way or another?)
- How often do you converse with customers (or at least someone on the front line) and resolve real issues?
- How often do you sit and work through your current personal/business promotion (advertising, resumes, bios, folios), and account for its success?
- Are you now in a position you lusted-over five years ago?

Measure your Efficiency
- Do 20% of your customers take 80% of your unpaid “support” effort?
- What % of your weekly to-do list is checked at the end of the week?
- Do you spend more than an hour a day in idle break-time?
- Are you working more than 80 hours a week, when 60 will do?

Measure your Mind/Body balance
- What % of your time is spent on physical vs mental exertion?
- Is your waistline over the diabetes-risk limit?
- What % of your lunch/dinners are with friends vs customers vs staff?
- What % of your time is spent on your “other passion” (you have one, yes?)

Measure your Perceptions
- What % of your dealings with customers are praise/criticism?
- When were you last talked about?
- Do you overstate your import with customers/staff/colleagues?
- Are you a David Brent or a Tim Canterbury?
It doesn’t take a mid-life crisis to galvanize action, all it takes is a little creative criticism to put things in perspective.

– Ben Prendergast

I’d like to make a confession this week that potentially jeapardises my eco-warrior status. I hope you can all forgive me, but you see I’m a seriously mad car nut.Nary a weekend passes where I haven’t tinkered, reengineered, raced, or polished my current weapon of choice (a highly-tuned Subaru STi), much to the chagrin of my wife (and conversely the excitement of my two young boys). I’m sure that this obsession with modifying my car stems from my little-scientist leanings, and while my car was already capable of face-reshaping torque from the factory, I just like to push things to their limits. I’m sure I’m not alone, the club I’m involved with has around 700 Members.

However, I’m also seriously mad for my planet, and herein lies the dilemma. Should I wish to continue to feed by petrol-headed-inner-child (I call him Gavin), I’ll need to either a) reengineer the Earth, or b) find greener motoring alternatives. The latter is the option I’m considering, so whether you’ll be buying a fleet for your staff, impressing your hippy girlfriend, or just want to get ahead of the curve, I present you the Ben Prendergast Approved Face-Mashing Whips for Tomorrows Entrepreneurs ™

1. The Tesla Roaster
http://www.teslamotors.com/
0-100 in 5 Seconds
250km range
180kw & a constant 220nm torque
1 hour charge time on 3-phase
3 hours charge on grid power

Kicking off is the Tesla Roadster, championed by the Governator himself, with sexy curves and a 0-100 time of around 4 seconds, you can cruise hollywood boulevard safe in the knowledge you’re not contributing to LaLa’s smog.

2. The Venturi Fetish
http://www.venturifetish.fr/fetish.html
0-100 in 5 Seconds
250km range
180kw & a constant 220nm torque
1 hour charge time on 3-phase
3 hours charge on grid power

Ahh the French, who create cars as they would a fine Creme Brulee (deliciously sweet innards with a fiery exterior), and who then use names befitting a car that pre-adolescent boys might pin on their wall. Take for example the Venturi Fetish, an all carbon-fiber electirc car with an electric-tuned chassis that places the engine in the back and the heavier batteries in the middle for better weight distribution and presumably handling. And just look at those curves, even the bonnet looks like a map of Tassy, mon amie!

3. Lightning Electric Car
http://www.lightningcarcompany.com/
0-100 in sub 4 seconds
400km range
520kw power
250kph+ Top speed

And where one frenchman treads there’s usually a Brit in tow, most often with a stiff upper c-panel. From the mother-land comes the Lightning Electric car, a 313 kilowatt beast with its design origins somewhere between TVR tuscan and Jaguar XLR. You can certainly see that that the Lightning mimics its petrol-fed predecessors, and rightly so given the car will catapult you to a top speed of 250 K/PH after dispensing with the first 100 in under 4 seconds. Hey, what!? I seem to have misplaced my colon back on the M4 good chap!

4. Audio R10 Lemans Bio Deisel
Audi World
BioDeisel
0-100 in 3 Seconds
300km range
180kw & 220nm torque
Charge time: as quick as your pit crew

You’re not likely to lease a fleet of these for your sales team, but perhaps you the CEO might consider a bum-frying race-track monster to ferry the Mrs in? I’ve included this because just as the technology of Formula One cars trickle down to the humble sedan, the R10 will attempt the next Lemans race on bio-diesel at the end of the month and as a result we might find that the interim class of green cars come to fruition via the bio-deisel path before their electric cousins.

5. The Zap-X
Zap Cars
0-100 in sub 4 seconds
563km range
480kw power
250kph+ Top speed
10-Minute Charge Time

Which brings us to the ZAP-X. Promising “one of the most advanced electric cars ever developed”, the Californian-based ZAP (Zero Air Pollution) has teamed with Lotus Engineering to produce the ZAP-X. With a range the envy of your great aunts Mazda 121 and a 10-minute charge-time the ZAP-X would be the first electric car to mirror the capabilities of the family sedan (e.g. interstate trips).

Should it look anything like the Lotus Exige, I’ll take mine in Black, and work on getting some extra batteries in there somewhere…

– Ben Prendergast

This morning we see another round of releases with the new Nano, Classic, and Touch versions being released.

Heading up the charge is the wonderful iPod Touch in 8gb ($419) and 16gb ($549) variants. The iPod Touch is a widescreen video-audio-web extravaganza, effectively the iPhone without the Phone. In an Apple first however, the product includes full iTunes Store support, so now you can download that latest album anywhere you like. I do wonder however if 16gb is enough for people to shift across from their larger capacity iPods.

Which brings us to the update to the iPod, now called the iPod Classic, now available in a massive 160gb storage capacity and starting at $349AUD. This is my choice for an ultra-portable music device, but more so as a removable backup device for all my files. Now with Coverflow (a really great way to browse your collection by album art) and in black and metallic finishes, its just a little it sexy!

Finally we see the replacement to the popular iPod Nano, which has historically been a strong Holiday season seller, and now features a redesign including a 2″ display for Video, from $199. Now my kids can get their Wiggles on in audio AND video, and I get my plasma back! **Wiggles frantic pointing hand motion**

– Ben Prendergast

The Apple machine continues to satiate the tech-hungry among us, and this week we’re in readiness for another announcement.

A number of rumours abound as to the content of the release, including a new ipod nano, an update to the iphone, wireless access for ipods, Apple announcing its own record label with Jay Z, and even the much anticipated release of the Beatles backcatalogue.

My money is on an iphone-esque ipod (with a 3.5″ screen and somewhere around 120gb of storage), but Apple just love brand by association so don’t be surprised if the Beatles back-catalogue is also announced. This rumour is made especially feasible given the John Lennon catalogue was recently secured, and that the tagline for the Sept 5th announcement is “The beat goes on”. Too clever by half!

While my guitar gently weeps, I wonder what the boffins at Cupertino think of some of the extraneous points of interest around the web, such as the sim-hack for the iPhone to enable any non-AT&T sim to use the phone, or the Google Phone a hotly anticipated iPhone competitor.

No doubt Steve Jobs will point to Apple’s stellar rise in the telecoms market with the iPhone outselling ALL other smartphones in the US for July (which counted for nearly 2% of US mobile handset sales) and present a big ingratiating graph showing what you and I already knew (the iPhone is a hit).

To whit, some of the statistical data is interesting, MacRumours (via Cellular-news) reports: 57% of iPhones bought in July were U.S. consumers 35 years or younger, with a 52/48 Male/Female split, and 1/4 of iPhone purchases switched to AT&T from another provider.

I’d imagine that those telcos in the Australian market looking to sway market share are now looking a little more seriously at the iPhone contract. I would be.

– Ben Prendergast

We just launched the new version of our Project Management Software, Copper 2008.

The origins behind this latest version can be dated back five or six years ago when we first started looking at building a web-based collaboration tool for a (now defunct) design studio. Back then, as now, we wanted a simple tool that did 20% of what the other tools like MS Project did, but did it in a fashion that was inclusive, intuitive, and helpful. That we were a design studio capable of building a nice interface was a handy piece of luck, given our latest interface is perhaps still a key differentiator to other products on the market.At that time I had really keen ideas on what a good collaboration tool would do, but budgetary and time constraints meant that our early versions were always light on with features. Our first license sold in November 2002, for $99. Now, our flagship Enterprise version starts at $2999 and is world-class as evidenced by its amazing customer-base.

Over the years however our ‘customer requests’ list has slowly been eclipsed by our ‘offered features’ list, and we’ve come to build a product that people rely on daily to run their consultancies, just as we do. I’m sure (as our early ’soft launch’ figures would suggest) that some of you will come to discover this tool thinking it was a spring chicken, offered by a fledgling silicone valley company interested only in the opportunity for that next round of funding!

However I’m proud to say we’ve been profitable and self-funded since that very first license sale, and to this day the CEO reviews every single piece of feedback offered. In short, I’m proud of our customer base, and proud of our little team’s effort in bringing this new version to fruition.

For the first time in six years I can truly say that we’re offering a product with unique features not found in any other software tool. For example the latest version offers a ‘business defrag’ a function by which you can review and manage your entire resource pool workload, creating the same kind of incremental efficiencies for your business as Norton did with your hard drive 20 years ago.

Add this to the formidable set of features that gel together beautifully and you’ll forgive me doting on my little six year old as I send it out into the world, they grow up so fast!

For more info or a demo visit http://www.copperproject.com

Here is the launch email with pics etc

– Ben Prendergast

One of the benefits of being a flighty entrepreneur is the natural ability to recall useless information at the drop of a hat, sometimes employing said trivia at an initial client meeting (”hey sandra, did you know Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours sleep a night, yeah its true! Now please sign here”), other times injecting some truth-deprived prose in our marketing literature (”31% of our survey respondents said they were 66% sure they might consider our product over the leading competitor!). However sometimes commercial trivia/statistics/lore can actually be quite useful.Take food facts for instance. Food technology, or Psychophysics fascinates me, as does the marketing and technological initiatives employed by those who tango with our esophagus (esophagi?).

So this week I thought I’d share this little passion, research, and then adequately present five food facts in such a way that they might indeed apply to your industry. Read on my succulent suitors, and by all means let me know if I’ve missed any juicy bits.

1. Fast Food Giant or Real Estate Circus?
   The Psedonym “The Golden Arches” should have been our first clue, because McDonalds isn’t actually a food business, nor is it a lifestyle brand, but rather they are one of the worlds most successful landlords. Harry Sonneborn (McDonalds 2IC) once said ““We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent.”. Mmmm bricks and mortar. So what’s the takeout here? Well I’d like to think that in all businesses the chief role of the marketer is to differentiate by presenting an alternate core message to one’s competitors, but perhaps the real message here is that we’re all missing some prime opportunity that exists right under our noses!
2. Red & Yellow
   On the subject of fast food, ever wondered why most if not all fast food chains use Red and Yellow in their logos/marketing collateral? The psychology of color has long attributed these colours to the conditioned responses of hunger, desire, and urgency. Others posit that it may hark back to when we as humans needed to decipher between raw and ripe fruit. In any case this phenomenon is completely at odds with my days as a branding consultant, where 9 out of 10 clients wanted a royal blue logo and some kind of swoosh. What colours are you employing in your identity/marketing collateral, and are you aware of the kind of affects they can have on prospects/existing clients?
3. The Just Noticeable Difference
   My Marketing Lecturer (Hi Bronwyn) once enthralled our entire class with the Just Noticeable Difference theorem (or the JND for the hip marketers out there). The JND is the statistical measurement of noticeable change used by marketers to (usually) reduce a product without raising the ire of the customer. While usually somewhat sinister in its application (e.g. charging the same price for a packet of chips that has 5 fewer crisps inside, or reducing a mars bar by 4% to save costs) the technique can also be applied to packaging for environmental reasons (e.g. cocacola reducing the amount of aluminium required in their cans) or indeed you might use it to cut costs or increase the time available to service your beloved clients.
4. Intermission - A video!
   One of my favourite business-related texts is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (if you’ve never read it go directly to your local independent book store and buy it, now! Go on! The rest of this blog pales in comparison). So here I pay my respects to Malcolm Gladwell, paying his respects to Dr Howard Moskowitz, the father of focus group testing and just generally making Americans Happy. Here Malcom recounts how Howard changed the entire food industry in the US, not by discovering the perfect pickle, but rather the perfect pickles.
5. Finally, a slight on supermarkets
   Supermarket Tech is perhaps the most conniving of all food-related marketing technology, . They position their bread and milk at the diagonal extremities of the building to encourage compulsive purchases, they position red lights over their meat to present a better product, they play Coldplay to slow shoppers down (you could just shorten that to “they play Coldplay”), and some parent-hating-venomous-visual-merchandiser out there once decided to place all of the lollies at 5-year old eye-level at the counter (right when you’re parental patience has ebbed to capitulation levels!). These are all amazing marketing techniques, and I love them for what they are, but please remember that using such techniques may increase your bottom line but will also increase your time in purgatory.

– Ben Prendergast

This week let us laugh heartily at the misfortune of others, and ask ourselves, cautionary tale or useful spin?Firstly Mattel, who last week famously recalled a number of products, saving our children (and fetishists) from the horrors of lead poisoning. While the Mattel share price took a 2.4% hit, according to Hitwise the websites of both Mattel and Barbie.com recorded their highest hit rates in over a year, AND have remained above average since. Verdict: Useful Spin.

Secondly VOIP provider Skype this week suffered some serious downtime across their entire network, due to the Windows software update causing a large number of Skype users to sign on at the same time (a self-inflicted denial of service attack if you will). By way of apology (delivered via email no less) all skype users were today given 7 days of free service. Verdict: Useful Spin.

Finally Atlas Co, producers of the arcade arm wrestling game, recalled their machines after reports of over-zealous gamephiles breaking their arms. To add salt to the wound the comments posted to the above blog suggest it won’t be long before the machines are recycled for use in Shinjuku’s red light district. Verdict: Cautionary Tale.

So there you have it, an overwhelming 66% result in favour of bad publicity. When your next crisis hits, how are you going to spin it?

– Ben Prendergast

Not a lot of time to dish this week, what with Satan’s Flu™ occupying my person, and Mercury entering my Fifth Equinox (which I hate!) so I thought I’d bust out a few of this week’s most interesting stories.

1. Medical
   Diabetes Mine, a blog covering diabetes, this week put out an open letter to Apple (aka Steve Jobs) to design a better Insulin Pump. Well actually, the call was for a competition to design a better medical aide, the winner getting the Apple design team to Pimp my Pump, as it were. Techcrunch also ran the story, with some promising traction. Medical technology is one of my favorite topics; don’t even get me started on nano-technology.
2. Business
   From Guy Kawasaki, who discovered the MBA in a page, a veritable cheat sheet of MBA business theories that one might imagine perfect for the David Brents of the world (or the Michael Scotts, depending on your preference). For mine, this would serve as an excellent meeting-bingo sheet, although conspicuous only by its absence is “synergize”. Hmmm, at the end of the day, moving forward, we’ll reconnect on that at a later date.
3. Online Tabloid
   Also from Guy Kawasaki, Truemors was launched a month ago to a chorus of criticism from the blogosphere, many citing that the User-Generated Rumours site was not only destined to fail but would also hurt Mr K’s reputation. (For those that don’t know, Guy was an original Apple employee and is now a Silicon Valley investor). However, I get the feeling there’s something behind this model that will work, because to my knowledge there hasn’t been a decent example of tabloid media (oxymoron?) moving to an online format, perhaps with the exception of Myspace. One can only imagine that Rupert Murdoch might see fit to acquire it in due course.
4. Second Life Dying, or art imitating life?
   “Second Life is like a giant porno. All people do there is have sex,” says Baris Karadogan (ComVentures). Interesting take, Baris, and I’m sure a lot of people would agree with you, but let’s not jump ahead of ourselves (for they said the same thing about the interweb once!). Enter Sony, looking to introduce their own virtual world attached to the PS3, who have even stated that their virtual world will be policed and that violators will be dealt with swiftly. I’m off now to build my virtual cat-o-nine tails and digital public stocks. You guys work up some rotten tomatoes and we’ll bleed the freaks!
5. Time Travel
   You know that excitable guy/girl who used to always go on about how one day we’ll invent time travel, and you’d always ask them if that were the case why aren’t we coming back to visit ourselves from the future? And then after a moment of sulking they’d counter with Time Police? (which is irrelevant to this point, but I just wanted to paint an accurate picture). Well it turns out they COULD BE RIGHT! Not about the time police, but according to Amos Ori (Israel’s Doc Brown) we would first need to the technology to build the receiving stations as it were, that would allow future generations past that “wrap” back around to the past point.

– Ben Prendergast

I’ve become progressively more adept at organising my business using nothing more than a cache of simple tricks, technical tools, and incredible typing speed.In fact I recently mused that I can type as quickly as I can think, which makes me somewhat of a precognitive typist – a scribe savant, if you will – or really just exposes me as someone who should think before they speak: take this sentence, for instance.

So this week I thought I’d share my personal tech time-savers for the digital entrepreneur.

1. Get down with RSS. “Really Simple Syndication” (or as Oprah called it, “Ready for Some Stories” woot! *pumps air with fist and then earnestly nods*) isn’t really anything new, but it does provide a way to keep track of interesting and high-value information (as it relates to your field of excellence). I wasn’t always a blog junkie, but lately I’ve really latched on to a few bloggists that boil my potatoes (intellectually), and using RSS is a fantastic way for me to keep on top of my game. The upside to all this extra reading is that I’ve become somewhat of a technological George Negus (minus the comb-over). The downside is that managing all this extra info can be a little tiresome. So I use Safari’s in-built RSS reader, which shows me the number of unread posts for each blog in my favourites. If you don’t have a mac, Safari is also now available for PC, or you could try Google Reader.
2. A mouse with ridiculous number of buttons. For example, I run with a Logitech MX900 (with an impressive eight buttons) and I also use some fantastic Japanese Mouse Controller Software (of course over there they just call it mouse controller software) called Steermouse. With this combination (and again, sorry, with my Mac) I can use my mouse to view my desktop, see all my open windows, close a window, and in my mail program I even have specific actions mapped to my mouse buttons (e.g. delete a message, reply, send to specific folders). With mice (unlike their mammal-equivalent) more is more.
3. Super Signatures. I’m not sure how many emails you send a day, but I usually receive about 150 a day – 100 of them in the morning. Most require a response. My all-time record for emails sent in a day? 180. Easy ladies! So I needed a way to clone my digital self, and canned signatures is the way to go. Here’s how it works: Say you often receive emails that ask the same question, all you do is copy your regular signature and create a new one, but this time add your canned response, for example: “Hi Jim, the answer to your question is eight mouse buttons, love, Ben”, then the next time that question rolls in you can choose the signature that contains the response and edit it from there. I know one organisation that has a set of signatures the whole sales department uses.
4. Multiple Monitors. Ultimate fantasy? Me and two… er… monitors. Two heads are better than one, that’s why I roll with two monitors. I also like to split my right and left brain functions to each of the monitors. So on the right monitor I have mail, skype, and calculator (ie, super serious side), and on the left are my creative applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Quickbooks. In short, monitor bigamy is the new fondu!
5. Type with 10 fingers. This one’s really simple: learn to type with 10 rather than two fingers and you’re likely to be five times more efficient. In an increasing textual world the Hunt & Peck technique is as passe as the celebrity counterparts.

– Ben Prendergast

Yes, let’s continue with the five vibe.

Despite this blog regularly benefitting from stories posted on other blogs, I felt it was high time I shared with you all my Top Five Favourite Internet Resources for Awesomeness (TFIRA).

Some of these are related to entrepreneurialism, some relate to current technological affairs (like Today Tonight, albeit with a smattering of credibility) and some of them are just cool.

So let’s get started on the TFIRA, each link guaranteed to please*

1. Trendwatching: I get this email once a month, and each month the trendwatching crew like to coin new marketing phenomena like “Trysumers”, “Customer-made”, and my favourite “Infolust”. This month we take a look at Female Fever, and no, it isn’t female menopause. Trendwatching is just wonderful Internetery! (that’s mine).
2. Treehugger: Green goes Pop! Make Treehugger your favourite resource for reducing your (and your organisation’s) carbon footprint. A fantastic look into the collective conservational consciousness.
3. Engadget: Yes, one of the most popular tech blogs going around, but nothing short of brilliant up-to-the-minute tech and gadget news to keep your inner-geek satiated.
4. Music Thing: This one is a little more personal, but covers amazing music-related gadgets, rare YouTube performances, robots that play Guitar Hero, and uncovers things like the ugliest band ever.
5. Littleladyluxe: This is an act of self-preservation, and OK maybe a pinch of pride. Each week my other half (who’s handy with a sewing machine) produces a new work. Each new item fondly reminds me that our credit card is safe for another week.

*Actual links may not please.

So, what are your favourite website sanctuaries?

– Ben Prendergast