Feature Request, Part II In Part I, I asked for time zone alerts on cell phones for off-hours and a mechanism for alerting people when they’re replying-to-all when they were bcc’d. Today, I ask for an iPhone (and I suppose Android) app: turn a photo of a whiteboard into a Word or PPT document!
Category
Technology
Investment in the Email Ecosystem
Investment in the Email Ecosystem Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet. Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards. The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less. At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years. I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.” First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications…
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part III
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part III My first thought when my colleague Jen Goldman forwarded me a SlideShare presentation that was 224 pages long was, “really?” But a short 10 minutes and 224 clicks later, I am glad I spent the time on it. Paul Adams, a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google, put the presentation up called The Real Life Social Network. Paul describes the problem I discuss in Part I and Part II of this series much more eloquently than I have, with great real world examples and thoughts for web designers at the end. If you’re involved in social media and want to start breaking away from the “one size of friend fits…
Agile Marketing, Part II
Agile Marketing, Part II I wrote about this years ago when I was temporarily running Marketing and was noting a lot of the similarities between running contemporary Product Development and Marketing efforts. Nick Van Weerdenburg just put up a great post called Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development which you should read if you run or work in, or work closely with, a marketing department.
Feature Requests
Feature Requests Here are two new features I’d like to see in life: Any time you hit “reply to all” when you are in the BCC line – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you really sure you want to let all these people know that you were BCCd on this thread?” Any time you place a call to a cell phone that’s outside of the person’s normal time zone – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you sure you want to call this person at 3 a.m. in Singapore?” before completing the call I’m not sure to whom these requests should be addressed, so I’ll just start with the open web.
OnlyOnce, Part II
OnlyOnce, Part II After more than six years, my blog starting looking like, well, a six-year old blog on an off-the-shelf template. Thanks to my friends at Slice of Lime, OnlyOnce has a new design as of today as well as some new navigation and other features like a tag cloud and Twitter feed (and a new platform, WordPress rather than Typepad). I know many people only read my posts via feed or email (those won’t change), but if you have a minute, feel free to take a look. The site also has its own URL now – https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com. With my shiny new template, I may add some other features or areas of content over time, as well. There are…
Automated Love
Automated Love Return Path is launching a new mini feature sometime this week to our clients. Normally I wouldn’t blog about this — I think this is mini enough that we’re probably not even saying much about it publicly at the company. But it’s an interesting concept that I thought I’d riff on a little bit. I forget what we’re calling the program officially — probably something like “Client Status Emails” or “Performance Summary Alerts” — but a bunch of us have been calling it by the more colorful term “Automated Love” for a while now. The art of account management or client services for an on-demand software company is complex and has evolved significantly from the old days of…
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part II
I think Facebook is starting to get out of control from a usability perspective. This doesn’t mean it’s not a great platform and that it doesn’t have utility. But if the platform continues on its current path, the core system runs the risk of going sideways like its various predecessors: GeoCities, MySpace, etc. Maybe I’ll go in there to look for something or someone, but it won’t be a place I scroll through as part of a daily or semi-daily routine. I wrote about this a year ago now, and while the site has some better tools to assign friends to groups, it doesn’t do any better job than it did a year ago about segregating information flow, either by group…
Why I Love Our New Product
Why I Love Our New Product Return Path officially announced a new product today called Domain Assurance, which I blogged a little bit about here. It’s a very exciting product that will help reduce and ultimately eliminate phishing emails – spam’s even more evil cousin that leads to identity theft, malware, further propagation of spam through botnets, and all sorts of other goodies. The product is in beta now with a bunch of top ISPs and brands. Those are a lot of reasons to love our new product. But for me, there’s more. For starters, this is the first new product (entirely new product, not just a feature or extension) that we’ve launched in years. While we’ve made some…
From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader
From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader After I spoke at the Startup2Startup event last month, one of the people who sat with me at dinner emailed me and asked: I was curious–how did you make the transition from CEO of a startup to manager of a medium-sized business? I’m great at just doing the work myself and interacting with clients, and it’s easy for me to delegate tasks, but it’s hard to have the vision and ability to develop my two employees into greater capacity… I’d be interested in reading a blog post on what helped you make that transition from founder/builder to manager/leader It feels like the answer to this question is about a mile long, but I thought I’d at…
Pivot, Don’t Jump!
Pivot, Don’t Jump! I spoke last night at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup, which was fun. I will write a couple other posts based on the experience over the next week or so. The Meetup is all about creating “lean startups,” not just meaning lean as in cheap and lightweight, but meaning smart at doing product development from the perspective of finding the quickest path to product-market fit. No wasted cycles of innovation. Something we are spending a lot of time on right now at Return Path, actually. My topic was “The Pivot,” by which the group meant How do you change your product idea/formation quickly and nimbly when you discover that your prior conception of “product-market fit” is off? …