resistance to persistence

Apple’s New York City store

a very interesting article at CNNMoney about how well Apple’s stores are doing and how much effort was spent on perfecting the shopping experience.

“People haven’t been willing to invest this much time and money or engineering in a store before,” says the Apple CEO, his feet propped on Apple’s boardroom table in Cupertino. “It’s not important if the customer knows that. They just feel it. They feel something’s a little different.”

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus.

The most striking thing, though, is what you don’t see. No. 1: clutter. Jobs has focused Apple’s resources on fewer than 20 products, and those have steadily been shrinking in size. Backroom inventory, then, can shrink in physical volume even as sales volume grows. Also missing, at the newest stores, anyway, is a checkout counter. The system Apple developed, EasyPay, lets salespeople wander the floor with wireless credit-card readers and ask, “Would you like to pay for that?”

monday night i attended toronto democamp 12. i was at democamp 2, a year ago but couldn’t never make the others since they were on tuesday and i had conflicts with other activities. this one was on a monday so i made sure to make it. even through a snowstorm, the turnout was huge and packed No Regrets restaurant in King West, the tech hub of Toronto. thankfully, we arrived early, got a great table in the center and settled back for an evening of tech demos. i won’t give the rundown on each presentation, but i snapped a few photos, so they should count as 13,000 words of explanation for the night.

in general, good presentations, i’d like to see a few more demos, but the updates from past presenters showed how successful some have been ($3M acquistion for bubbleshare!) and how much press and recognition people are getting thanks to democamp. i’ll definitely try to be a regular at more of these events.

View the larger photos at flickr.com by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Photos from Toronto Democamp 12

I’ve been listening to Adam Curry’s [about] audio show, Source Code. I get the show as MP3s through an RSS feed with enclosures. There’s not a lot of enclosure feeds available, but they’re rapidly increasing.

I’ve been following the enclosures work closely. Now you can subscribe to RSS feeds to get news updates, but instead of just getting text, there’s an attachment. With the right RSS Aggregator, you can have it download automatically the attachment and save it to your hard drive. It’s an obvious evolutionary step in RSS subscription. I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get going.

Adam’s doing a lot to push the technology forward. The Radio Userland aggregator was one of the first (if not the first) to support enclosures. There was an article a few months ago about having bittorrent feeds as RSS enclosures and then BitTorrent would automatically fire up and download the payload from the torrent file. This will be the eventual progression.

Right now, Adam’s focused on the iPod. He started off creating some Apple scripts which automatically copy the incoming enclosures into his iPod. It’s a great idea. Overnight, let the RSS aggregator download the mp3 files which then fire up the applescript to sync the mp3 files into his iPod for listening on morning commutes, etc. From talking about this, he had an informal challenge to others to do the same and improve on the idea. There’s lots of idea copying and improving going on, which should be happening. There’s now an official site, iPodder.org. It’s very rudimentary at this point and is Java based on Windows. Give it some RSS enclosure URLs and it downloads all the attachments. I don’t think it automatically adds them into iTunes yet. I have to manually add them, but that’s not so bad. I’ve listened to about a week’s worth of his shows so far. I don’t have an ipod yet, but I’m working on it.

I’m looking to find mp3 versions of the Howard Stern show. They took it off the air in Toronto and I can’t listen anymore. I can’t pickup the Buffalo station that broadcasts it and I know there’s someone creating Stern mp3s each day. Once I can get those on a daily basis for my listening laughter I’ll be set.

I think the next step in the progression will be a slight improvement on the current work. Instead of attaching the MP3 enclosures directly to the RSS feed, it would be more economically and bandwidth cheaper to attach a .torrent file to the MP3. This would drastically drop the load on the server and bandwidth charges. Curry states he’s got about 100 people downloading his feed, so right now I don’t think there’s enough critical mass to feed the show with torrents. Once he reaches a certain number of users, he could probably then switch over.

Which makes me think even further down the road. What happens if the broadcasting industry starts towards that kind of a model. There will have to be dedicated torrent seeders on all the time if you want to ensure 24-7 availability. If nobody is seeding, then nobody else can download. Perhaps this will be a future industry. Torrent seeding hosting facilities.This may be something for hosting companies to branch into in the future.

2nd week of NBC’s The Apprentice. I love this show. It’s hilarious! Sam is my favorite because he’s a born loser. He’s been up to be fired 2 weeks in a row and has squeeked out of it again. The Donald is awesome. His straight faced delivery of firings is priceless. I couldn’t hack working for him though…I’d be a heartache case and my stress levels would be through the roof. Nick impressed me at the end of the show. I hope he’s on there for a while.

The Omarosa vs Ereka (or should I say Omarosa vs everyone) battles are annoying. I hope Katrina and Kristi get more airtime and stay on there for a while - hot! Is Jessie even allowed to talk? They haven’t showed her at all. Probably not missing much. Mark Burnett, you’re a genius. Survivor, Eco-Challenge and now this. Keep ‘em coming.

If you think you’re not getting paid enough and are poor, check out where you rank in the world. Go to globalrichlist.com, punch your salary into this site and you’ll see where you are relative to the world’s population. Scary to see that even if you think you’re not doing so well, you might just be in the top 1% of the world’s richest. Read about it at Wired. Here’s a scary fact - “The world’s 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That’s equal to the combined annual income of the world’s 2.5 billionpoorests people”.

Dave Johnson did exactly what I would do if I was outta work for a while. Write some software in between time spent searching for a new job. If the market is totally dry right now, prepare yourself for when an opportunity comes along in a couple weeks or a month. Write some software, learn new technologies and implement them, showcase it, and put it on your resume. Blog about industry related topics and how your work on this wiz-bang software is going. I think blogs are becoming the new resume.

I read about this sort of idea on ShouldExist a while back and this p2p client from Konspire has built it into their service. It’s a push based p2p service, rather than searching for things you would like, it should automatically get things you like. I haven’t tried it, and doubt I will.

Managability blog discusses an article on things to think about when you think you’ve got the next new business idea.