Zeigen

Yesterday evening, right before I was leaving for home from work, Kimi called me and said the cleaners were at the house and instead of me coming home we should meet for dinner at Tomatina’s (one of her favorite places). Great idea, sweetheart — we don’t eat out very often now with Sammy.

When I got there and saw Kimi and Sammy I also saw that she had three balloons, one blue, one pink, and one yellow. She told me she had a present for me. Attached to the balloons was a pregancy test, and it showed positive. Positive!

Yup — Kimi’s expecting. It’s too soon to tell anyone, though, so this is a secret, private blog post. Boy or girl, I’m ecstatic. We’re very excited, but also a little nervous…

EDIT August 13th: No longer private!

MSNBC says it could approach $1 trillion (and this was last March).

One organization says $363 billion and climbling (a figure backed up by this other site).

Another organization says $151 billion (but as of when?).

This site lists the costs of U.S. wars for comparison (at the bottom of the page). If we go with the $363 billion figure, then the current Iraq war is second only to World War II.

(Of course, the true cost includes an accounting of the dead, wounded, and human misery. In this case, we’re only talking about billions of dollar bills.)

People tend to remember HBO’s hits (The Sopranos, Sex & the City, Big Love, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Deadwood) more than its misses (Lucky Louie, Family Bonds, The Comeback, Arliss, K Street). However, generally speaking, I’m interested in most new series that HBO decides to put on the air.

I’m also a big fan of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. I got Kimi’s sister Tomi hooked on them too last time she was out. They’re sprawling books with multi-character viewpoints set in a meticulously detailed world, with more politics and backstabbing than magic, and Martin manages to avoid all of the fantasy cliches. The only warning would be to not get too attached to any particular character, since anyone’s vulnerable. (Sort of the opposite of this author.)

So I was thrilled to read this news. HBO plus GRRM, can’t wait. I haven’t been this excited about a TV series in a long time.

I grew up in England during Margaret Thatcher’s era as Prime Minister. When I moved to America (I was 12, and entered 8th grade), the idea of a woman as President was something my classmates talked about sometimes. It was usually something a boy would say to a girl, as a taunt: You could never be President, because you’re a girl. I was a bit mystified by that, having seen Ms. Thatcher’s domination of British politics, but the taunt seemed true in 1979 in America. No woman seemed likely to even run for the office, let alone win.

In high school and college (most especially in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was the Dem’s VP nomination), during political discussions we sometimes wondered at what year would America progress to the point where a woman candiate or an African-American candidate would realistically stand a chance of winning. The answer, usually, was it would take a couple more generations for that to be realistic. 2020 or so at the earliest.

Now that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both declared their intentions to run next year, it seems to me that no other Democratic nomination will have either the name recognition or momentum that they bring to the race. And given the Republican performance in 2006’s House and Senate elections, it doesn’t seem too far a stretch for me to predict that America’s next President will either be a woman or a member of a minority. So, the answer to the high school and college speculation should have been 2008.

Every other Tuesday we have a poker night; mostly it’s folks from TiVo, but we also have folks from Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay show up. (We used to play at TiVo HQ, but HR put a stop to it for insurance reasons. If you play poker and want to join in, drop me a line.)

Happened to be that one of our poker nights was on the Tuesday of MacWorld and the iPhone announcement. One of the guys from Apple was at Macworld and couldn’t play. Turns out he’s on the iPhone team; he told us about it at last week’s game.

So, for months, he had been working on the iPhone. He couldn’t tell us about it, though, because the project was a secret. He couldn’t tell his friends about it. He couldn’t tell his family about it. The other poker player from Apple is one of his best friends, who he’s known for years, who works at Apple, but still he couldn’t tell him about it.

We tried getting all kinds of questions answered on Tuesday, but he really couldn’t say anything. We wanted to see an iPhone, but he’s not allowed to take any of ‘em outside the building where he works.

That’s secrecy.

Some people wondered why Apple revealed the iPhone now when it won’t be available until June. Jobs said (during Macworld) it was because they had to make semi-public filings about it, and he wanted to tell the world about it himself rather than let the FCC leak it.

I believe that. Sure looks to me that Apple takes secrecy a whole lot more seriously than our government does.

Want to save money or increase efficiency? “Eliminate the middle man” is the normal advice. The fancy word for that is “disintermediation.”

Of course, if the middle man adds value, and you find out after switching to selling your product directly to consumers that you really do want shelf space with a high traffic retailer, the act of changing your mind and putting the middle man back in is called “reintermediation.”

Reading the newspaper today, it struck me that a significant percentage of the stories I read quoted bloggers or had commentary on what different blogs were saying on the subject, regardless of whether that subject was Iraq or movies. Taking the blogosphere pulse has been a trend in old-media stories for a few years now. Some what could it lazy journalism, since it takes only a few seconds for a reporter to do a search and get a good quote. But really I think it’s an example of disintermediation. Rather than ask a think-tank representative or pollster or PR flak what people think, reporters can quickly find out directly what (certain) people think on any particular subject.

The same goes for CEOs. If I were a big shot CEO with little time and a momentary inclination to find out what my customers think about my company, I could very easily just do a Web search and peruse a few blogs. Now, suddenly, there’s a direct line between a blogger ranting about a particular bug and the CEO.

Most consumer companies have support organizations who work to classify what issues customers are calling about. (It always shocks me when I work with a partner company and find out that they don’t really track customer support case topics, but that’s the minority.) If that support organization is worthwhile and has good data analysts, they should be putting together presentations and evangelizing through the company about the topics that people are complaining about, and be working to make sure the entire company knows how to reduce support calls and improve the product. But in general, the second hand nature of those presentations dilutes a lot of the impact. It’s a lot different to hear a customer complain to you directly than to see bar charts.

Contrary to that, bloggers and customer support forums have tremendous power because (assuming the search results for that blog or forum are high) odds are that a CEO, VP or other influential person might read it directly and have their thinking changed.

Trouble is, blogs are usually one person’s opinion, and forums are probably not representative of the general customer either. To get the big picture, you really need some reintermediation — someone with access to the support data who can really tell you what the trends are and what customers are really upset about and want to see fixed or improved.

Two personal examples. Before TiVo, I worked at SGI. Their support organization was about as far removed as imaginable. I’m sure they had great data about what customers needed help with; trouble is, in the release and engineering organizations, we never seemed to hear about it. We’d set up cross-functional teams for new hardware and software releases, and those teams would either not include customer support folks, or if they did, those support folks had no voice and presented no data. So every decision about what to release seemed to be made in a vacuum, influenced more by the personality of individual engineers or product marketing folks than by data. And although there were a few newsgroups talking about SGI products, no one in the company really cared what was said there. The big clients (folks like Disney and the U.S. government) were what mattered, not individual users.

At TiVo, early on, Richard B. (”TiVolutionary”) was our evangelist. I remember the day he sent an e-mail to the whole company, back in 1999, when a TiVo usenet newsgroup was created. His excitement was contagious. Not long after that, the TiVoCommunity forum came along. We made sure to encourage the forum and it’s been a big influence on the company ever since. A couple of years ago if a blogger said something about TiVo, there’d be a few of us who knew about it. Nowadays people come up to me and talk about blog articles all the time. It’s fair to say that the forums and blogs influence us a lot, since we’re a consumer company and it’s very easy to hear the voice of consumer directly. We also, fortunately, have an excellent customer support management team who, if I do say so myself, have access to great data about what customers call about.

I think it’s vital that both the individual (blogger/forum poster) and mass (general support call) voices are represented.

There are two big mistakes a consumer-oriented company can make. The biggest mistake is not tracking support call data. If you don’t have data, your decisions are based on anecdotal posts, and you can wind up making huge mistakes in what you prioritize and you have no basis for making return-on-investment analysis. So, if you’re a CEO:

• If you don’t have a support organization that can give you data, reintermediate immediately.

The second biggest mistake is relying only on your support organization and not letting the individual voices of customers ring through. Without reading the narrative of a real customer directly, it’s too easy to dismiss an issue as unimportant or not realize just how much customers care. So, if you’re a CEO:

• If you don’t read blogs or forums talking about your company, disintermediate immediately.

I publish my e-mail address and get probably a dozen customer e-mails a day (even now, when I don’t work in service operations or support at all). Sure, it takes time to answer those and direct them to the right place. I also read up on what the blogs are saying about us just about every day. It definitely takes time for me to look at the support data. But because I do both, I feel connected to TiVo’s customers and I feel confident when trying to influence what happens at TiVo.

Ten or twenty years ago, prior to the Internet, individual customer voices rarely had a chance to influence anything. Sure, a well-written complaint letter to the CEO might actually end up in the CEO’s hands. But that was rare. Additionally, thanks to data tools becoming more widespread, support organizations are now much more likely to have folks who can figure out the trends and use that data to influence the rest of the company.

Thanks to the Internet, it’s a much better time to be a consumer.

Saturday, raining, Kimi and I took Sammy down to the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose. Sammy loved the water exhibits (although he got soaked) and was so into playing with the sand in the tactile area that he pitched a fit when I tried to get him to move on to another exhibit.

Sunday was Kyrie’s birthday, and since we had missed her party the night before (having been previously invited to dinner with the Restricks in Saratoga), I took her twin boys (Jack and Andy), plus Sammy, to the same museum. This time we focused more on the downstairs road play area (with a real ambulance and fire truck), as well as the play pizza parlor upstairs.

I have to say it was exhausting to keep track of three little kids, but everyone had a great time. I was a bit late getting Sammy back home for his nap, though, and he was so tired he cried for an hour before settling down.

We also had a nice dinner a little bit ago with Kyrie, Jack, Andy, Nick, Thomas, Zoe, George, Nancy, Bob and Katie. Happy Birthday Kyrie!

I bought my house in Mountain View in April of 2001. At that time, there was one Starbucks within walking distance, at the foot of Castro (near El Camino). And that one was a good 45 minutes’ walk.

I now realize that there are at least four more I could walk to:

1. A new mini one inside the Rinconada Safeway on Shoreline.
2. One near the Century 16 movie theatres on Shoreline in a new mini-strip-mall.
3. One in the new (doomed-to-fail) shopping plaza off 101 (near Costco), with the new Best Buy, PetMart, Bed Bath & Beyond, and other stores I don’t go to. (I say that’s a mall that’s doomed to fail because it has too little parking and is too hard to find from the freeway if you don’t already know the area.)
4. The Starbucks we actually sometimes visit, on Rengstorff and Middlefield, where a video store used to be. Sammy likes steamed milk and on an early morning it’s not a bad place to have as a walk-with-Sammy destination (since few other stores open early).

I don’t drink coffee much at all, and personally prefer to visit Red Rocks on Castro if I want to go to a cafe, but it is mind-boggling to me to think of how packed in these franchises are. Starbucks says that even two stores across the street from each other isn’t really too close since they’re all about convenience and need to be there when the urge strikes.

I realize people like their coffee, but I predict a great Starbucks crash will come after some impending cultural shift that causes tastes to move on, and there will be a huge shakeout period for the franchises. Fewer than 1 in 5 will survive. Also, simultaneously, the moon will turn red, cats will be able to speak, and reality shows will leave the airwaves. I know this for I am NeuvoNostraDamus. You read it here first.

EDIT, Jan 30: Using the store locator at their site, I saw the one on El Camino (next to the Jamba Juice) which I had forgotten. I’m not sure when it opened — but that makes six within two miles. If I expand to five miles, there are 24 stores. Within 10 miles, 81 stores. Within 20 miles, 207 stores. Within 50 miles, 489 stores.

Has there ever been a more densely franchised brand in the history of business?

EDIT, Jan 31: So, what’s your Starbucks Density Quotient? Indicate in the comments how many stores within 5 miles you have per their locator.

Sammy had his 15 month checkup yesterday (even though he’s now 16 months). He’s in the 8th percentile for weight at 22 pounds, but in the 70th percentile for height at 32 inches. So he’s a basketball player in grooming, or something. He did very well against all the developmental milestones (for example, he’s got more words than listed, and can identify a lot more than two body parts) but then again those were from a month ago.

We babysat Jack and Andy last evening; Kyrie dropped them off with some pizza so she could go to a class. Jack and Andy were very happy to see Sammy, and Sammy was just thrilled to see his “big brothers” again. Sammy much prefers the company of older boys to those his own age. I’m stunned by how eloquent Jack and Andy are. Their vocabulary is just immense for boys who are three and a half.

I wrote about James Kim previously. A lot of us at TiVo saw his CNET reviews on TiVoCast, and were moved by the story of his tragic death. As a fundraiser, our events coordinator, Greg, had two unique items created — a TiVo snowglobe, and a TiVo toaster. You can read about this TiVo Inc. employee fundraiser over at TiVoLovers, where the internal mail was leaked (not by me).

Right now, the only way to get these two items is if you’re a TiVo employee. But Dave Zatz, owner of ZatzNotFunny (a great site for commentary and reviews on digital entertainment technology, with lots of coverage of TiVo) had the bright idea of creating a fundraiser that’s open to everyone, and he worked with me to get one of the toasters as a raffle prize.

Head to Dave’s entry for today to get the details, but the basic idea is you send a $10 paypal entry to Dave Zatz (don’t worry, you can trust him) for a chance to win the toaster. Dave is generously donating the toaster and the PayPal fees, as well as all of December’s advertising revenue from his site, to the James Kim fund. One lucky winner from all the raffle entries gets the toaster shipped to him or her.

James had two young daughters who are now without a father. Your entry into the raffle not only gets you a shot at a unique item, but also helps pay for their college and other expenses. Please consider entering the raffle.

If you found out about this through my site and chose to enter the raffle, let me know by leaving a comment here. I’ll make a matching $10 donation for the first ten people who enter the raffle.

One year old today. 141 posts, 260 real comments, and over 10,000 spam comments. I’ll try to beat those first two numbers this year.

Two new TiVoCast content partners launched today and now have content listed under TiVo Central -> Find Programs -> TiVoCast as well as the TiVoCast section of Tivo Central Online. They’re listed in alphabetical order in TCO and at the bottom of the HME App.

• GolfSpan is the world leader in online video golf instruction with 600+ videos from the likes of Jim McLean, Hank Haney & Jimmy Ballard. Update frequency is twice per week (Tuesday and Thursday). The first episode of GolfSpan is “X Factor Power Set Up” (6 minutes).
• LX.TV is your exclusive destination for original lifestyle and cultural programming. They will publish the following two programs:
  • Drinks W/LX (Tuesday and Thursday)
  • LX/101 (Monday, Wednesday, Friday)

Note that if you get a Season Pass to LX.TV you will get both programs. The first episode of LX.TV is “What’s your Beef?” and includes a lesson from LA’s Boa Steakhouse about some of the finer points of meat (2 minutes).

In the first week or so, these might not be published as regularly as normal in order to allow time for customers to subscribe.

I don’t play golf, so I don’t have much to say about the first one. But I enjoyed the first episode of LX.TV (even though I don’t eat red meat).

Yesterday afternoon I started feeling miserable and after putting Sammy to bed at 8, I went to bed myself. We both woke up at the same time, 8 this morning. I do feel a lot better today (although I’m definitely still fighting a nasty cough), and I can’t remember the last time I had 12 hours of sleep. I think it’s because of the lack of sleep from working over the weekend — I stayed up late and got up early and may have knocked my immune system for a loop.

The big downside is that I didn’t publish to the blog yesterday. So, my New Year’s resolution to post every day has not been fulfilled.

To make up for it, I’ll post twice today. And in fact I’ll amend my resolution so that I’m satisfied as long as I get 365 posts in this year, regardless of whether or not they’re all on a separate day. That way I can relax if I go out of town (which, for example, we’re doing this weekend, heading to Tahoe with friends, where we won’t have internet access).

I last went to CES in January, 2000 (and there’s a photo of that brave TiVo crew near the front lobby). At that time, our Series1 box had been on the market for less than a year, and version 2 of the software hadn’t shipped yet. No Wishlists, no distinguishing between first run vs. repeats on Season Passes, and none of the advanced features that came later. We were in a deathgrip rivalry against ReplayTV at the time. We didn’t have many employees back then, and about thirty of us went to CES. When we came back, we found out things had been a bit chaotic in our absence. Ever since then I’ve stayed behind to help mind the farm. And truth be told, CES is exhausting, so I haven’t really missed going too much, as much as I enjoy visiting Vegas.

However, I do think it’s scheduled at the worst time of the year imaginable. It’s a lot of work to prepare for CES, and Q4 is always the busiest time of year (not just because of the huge amount of orders that are placed, but also because of budgets and project proposals being due, and almost everyone being on vacation or sick). If you’re on the hook for creating a CES demo, you just can’t relax during the holidays.

To compound the scheduling woes, this year CES occurs at the same time as Macworld. To me that’s just insane. Why splinter the press and attention of the consumer enthusiasts who like both Macs and other gadgets, forcing them to pick between Las Vegas and San Francisco?

Anyway, Apple announced their new iPhone today. Pretty compelling demo (I liked Engadget’s minute-by-minute coverage) and I’m a sucker for iPods (we have three already), but it seems a little big and I don’t like the idea of dialing numbers on a touch screen. Although that Bluetooth headset looks great. $499, hmm. Time for me to talk to the TiVo Rewards team and see if we can add it….

If you’re curious about what TiVo’s announced at CES, check out our press releases:

• TiVo and Comcast (demoing the upcoming TiVo Experience on Comcast cable boxes) — there’s also some great coverage from Megazone over at TiVoLovers, including a lot of photos;
• TiVo and Rhapsody (bringing the Rhapsody music service to broadband-enabled Series2 and Series3 TiVo DVRs);
• TiVo and MusicChoice (adding a great new music content partner to TiVoCast);
• TiVo and Roxio (Mac TiVoToGo, available now) — which I didn’t know about when I made my post mentioning Mac TiVoToGo earlier in the week).

Plus we won an Emmy for our interactive advertising platform!

Sunday night started the new season of The Apprentice, and I could barely stay awake through it. The changes smack of desperation to try to breathe life into a format that was interesting for the first two or three seasons and then became staler than thrice-regifted Christmas pudding.

But the NBC promo folks are in full battle gear. Just check out the wacky new hijiinks! (Or don’t check them out if you don’t want the show spoiled.)

• It’s set in LA now!
• Caroline is so fired!
• Instead of her and George, there’s the strangely compelling Ivanka, who studied at Wharton and is very impressive or so her father, The Donald himself, tells us!
• The losers sleep out in a tent!
• The winners sleep in a mansion and lounge around in a hot tub!
• Eighteen candidates now! (Wait, only season 1 had 16, the rest had 18.) That’s NOT changed!
• The winning project manager continues on as project manager next week!
• The winning project manager participates during the board room firing of the losers! Although since he or she didn’t really see what the losers did, they don’t really have much they can give input on!
• Writing bullet points with exclamation points all the time is tiring!

I think I’m gonna drop this show.

So it’s 2007, and later this year Kimi turns 30 (in February) and I turn 40 (in April). These are momentous and intimidating round numbers. (Sammy turns 2 in September, which isn’t quite so round a number, but binary for 2 is 10.) Turn over “2007″ and put it in l33t speak and you get “lose.”
Bobby V. ran 40 miles when he turned 40, and 45 miles when he turned 45. (We ran a bit of the way with him on that latter run; he arranged different running buddies for a bunch of different legs, which made it very social.) I could probably run 15 miles, but I’m not really interested in training to run 40.

Jane K. got a bunch of her friends together and we all climbed Halfdome at Yosemite to celebrate her turning 40. I thought that was great, but it’s been done. Plus I don’t think I could safely bring Sammy up there with me in April.

Skydiving? Rent out some hall and have a joint shindig in March? Visit an ashram? Blowout in Hawaii? River rafting in Colorado? Kick back in Costa Rica? Pizza, beer, and a $500 poker tournament? Board games ’til dawn? Nude twister at Esalen? I need your ideas, kids. Lay ‘em on me.