pepsi economics

Ok so I have this habit of drinking diet pepsi. I drink enough to be an expert on where the deals are for a little can! Busy guy I know. Anyhow interestingly enough the other I go and buy a can on my way to work, the traffic was brutal, so may as make the journey enjoyable. I get to the counter and I'm charge 1.61$ for one 357ml can. I don't even clue in right away and pay, then I turn aroun and I ask did you just tell me $1.61? Yes sir - with the taxes going down they are increasing the price... Forget it I think just carry on. So the next day, it's snowing a lot in Ottawa these days so traffic is often brutal in the morning, so I stop at another corner store. I go get a can and I read $1.61 for 2 pepsi cans, so did I just get scammed yesterday? I go to the cash and the guy tells me "do you like diet pepsi?, I have the two liters behind you for $0.99" I looked at him and I said I don't like diet pepsi that much, but thanks for the offer. Now just yesterday I paid 1.61 for one tiny 355ml can and today this guy is offering me 2L of this delicious beverage for $.99. The cans are lucrative business and on 2L they make it on volume? what volume. It's still takes 5.5 cans to make up a 2L, what are those insane margins on a can so that pepsi is still making money on a two liters, for a prices that is no where being 5X.

Mathematica online

Back in the days, I had this teacher who had just bought a Mac and Mathematica, he was talking of an investment of 10k altogether. This guy really loved math, and was doing a great job and sharing/teaching his passion to us young punks. I wonder what he would say of O'Reilly putting Mathematica online. I think he would be happy because it's making a world class tools available to all. I think it's great of O'Reilly to go out and put this together.

BlackBerry the start of a new thing?

As you know I've been a huge Palm Treo user and fan for the longest time. Well thanks to my friends at Rove I'm now playing with a Blackberry curve to experiment with it and see what kind of trade-offs I would be making if I switch. Anyway more to come here to discuss my experience.

Maybe some of you know already, pls let me know!

Is your team Attitude : what are you going to do next?

When you're by the cliff - it's not how you got there that matters, it's what you do next! Look at this great add from accenture, this is what got me thinking about this saying again. When a situation gets tough, the org has to focus on how to get out of there as fast and with as much quality as possible given the situation. Sometimes people's attitude is totally wrong in this type of situation. Some managers will start asking and drilling the people involved for answers as to why we're there. Don't get me wrong we have to do this, but not at that time, their timing is off. What matters is what you do next, as the crisis manager what is available now to you in the form of people, processes, tools to transform the situation into a successful outcome. No amount of how the hell did we get there is going to help.

This picture from Accenture has helped jell a concept I was wrestling with a bit. I was trying to articulate clearly what Process Improvement's role is for my team vs Product Engineering Delivery. Following on the train of thoughts above, Process Improvements is the analysis of how you got there in the first place, and what an organization must make sure to do in the future to successfully avoid that situation. So when the post-morterm time comes, and not one minute before, for a given project that could have been easier execution wise the process improvement people will be drilling to find answers and devise a better way. Not one minute before, because it would be keeping the team from focusing on the problem at hand and waste precious cycles on how to resolve it.

I remember a scene from apollo 13 when they realize the mission is going really bad, the only outcome the team was looking at was "How do we bring the crew back alive and well", here are the facts, so much oxygen, electricity etc... and here are the tools in the shuttle, and here are the skills of the people, "get me a plan!". They didn't start analyzing what was going and putting conclusions and finger pointing, they went to solve the problem to salvage the mission. I'm sure when they got back to earth they did a post morterm of what went wrong so that the next crew would not go through the same ordeal.

So Product Engineering team is about the game going on now, and the process improvement team is the coach reviewing the game tape and understanding the performance so that it can be improved for the next game. It's not in the middle of a game that one start practicing a new shot.

Wal-Mart To Dump HD DVD Movies, Players -- Wal-Mart -- InformationWeek

Stick a fork in HD-DVD it's done! I'm one of the few who thought Toshiba could pull it off and since I had an xbox360 I bought a HD-DVD player, now I feel like a betamax dude. People were saying what killed the betamax was that the porn industry went with VHS format, well it in this case the porn industry went with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray still won. So Sex doesn't rule the world after all, and next time someone asks - my answer is Sony!!!

Is using a process making you less creative or innovative?

The story is often about getting push back about how a process hinders creativity. Somewhere along the way I think we're getting confused. As long as what a company has in place process wise always encourage the attitude "Do the Right Thing!" I'm all for good processes and automation.

My thinking is that only then can we get people to focus their creativity on what matters most, the mundane and repeatable stuff is taken care of. We're in the business of software creation, innovation - I have to make sure the intelligence of the team is put toward the creation, and whatever else is distraction.

Whatever can be de-risked through a risk assessment - then do it, so that the team focuses on solving the real problems, knowing very well the alarm bells will go off at the right time should they need to. This gives us all the peace of mind to focus and do on what is important.

Can you imagine how fast you would be driving in the city if your car didn't have breaks? One of the reason one can drive at the speed limit, is the fact you can get the car to accelerate and slowdown at will.

Bye Bye my Treo? a platform loosing steam?

bye bye palm? I'm sorry after so many years but that's it, No more patience for it anymore.  I didn't want to believe it but the writings are on the wall, I will have to make a decision. Mainly two problems

1. The battery life, even after latest firmware upgrade, I'm still baffled sometimes in the morning to see my phone's battery dead. I have add those problems with the 680 since I got the device and I don't have the time for this anymore. On the road this problem is just exasperated I can't last a full day with one charge.
2. The eco system which used to be Palm's strength is loosing steam. I several wonderful applications, but they are no longer updated. For example the best portable email around is snappermail, but it hasn't been updated in over a year and there is no schedule for a new release. I'm using IMAP from google now, and i have a problem with snappermail, there is no way to find support for the problem. The vendor website has little activity and the google web site has little palm activity.

So what should be my next smart phone device - must - long battery life, bluetooth, email, perfect syncing with outlook, good app eco system, would be very nice - wi-fi, camera better than lame 1mega pixel.

The rise of Flash Apps!

Flash/Flex/Air are making some in-roads, and the desktop application as we know it is getting it on the chin! It's an inevitable collision. Through the adobe technologies people can leverage the connectivity and a rich user experience. The browser is still required by most of this new generation of applications, but speaking with adobe people the paradigm is shifting away from the browser and "urls".

Nothing new here right? After all we've been speaking about this since Java came about in 1995. What is different, well I've been playing with Blist a database application, like access or Filemaker, or Corel Paradox(which I worked on back in the days). There is another one called joggle a photo management package(I haven't had the chance to try this one out).

What's common about those two apps and many others- They are slick, powerful and with no compromises on the user experience. Java on the client never delivered on that. The Adobe trio does. This is a wake up call for us all working in the shrink wrap space, up and coming smarty pants entrepreneurs in a basement are coming out of nowhere with offerings that are right up there in terms of value and experience.

The downfall of the platform from what I can gather around the web is that when it's time to do computations it's not up to snuff, compared to java, which in turn is not up to snuff when compared to C++.

I think we need to look seriously in Adobe's offering because it's got some powerful tools. The platform has momentum, offers the ability to develop fast. Last characteristic, but not least, it's a great equalizer the barrier of entry to complex interactive and connected applications is lower than before. I was told once - Never underestimate the market appetite for tools that will make them look smart and talented ie make them shine!

Too often in software engineering we think of building products using tools for real men, or technologically elegant, and we forget that time to market, the ability to iterate rapidly, and provide a compelling user experience is what really matters. We have to open our minds to tools that from the first look could be perceived as unworthy, or difficult to integrate with the existing code base.

time management - WaitingFor folder

I attended a seminar back in November by a very good consultaint on Workplace performance, his name is Jason Womack. I took away many things but like everything else only a few end up sticking, or making their way into the workflow. The one that is proving very useful and very simple is the WaitingFor Folder in Outlook or any mail clients.

The concept is simple - when you send an email and you need to keep track of the content of the email for some reason or another, like you're asking a question, you need to know about something or whatever, you bcc yourself and you add a rule that when you're in the bcc field it gets routed to the WaitingFor Folder. This way when I send an email that I know there is chance I might need to follow up on - I bcc myself. So on a weekly basis I make sure I review what is in the folder, and I take actions  from there, create a task, or send a reminder. For me it works well because I used to create a task after sending the mail, or taking a note or worst of all making a mental note I needed to revisit this issue later. This way the regular review of the folder does this automatically for me, and it saves me stress and time. Give it a shot!

Fastcompany social site - in User experience terms - What about the user needs?

So FastCompany the zine is re-invinting itself as a social play. In a way I'm thrilled because it may be a good place to get some good feedback on questions and ideas since I've been an avid reader of the zine, so I imagine I connect well with the readership of the zine, so value for me!

This morning I setout to register. I was happy to see the questions that members are asking are interesting and I think I can bring something to the discussion. I was also disappointed on the other hand by the approach the site is taking - it's positioning itself as the center of my universe as opposed to be an information source. What I mean by this:

• why can't I post to my blogs to get them redistributed on their site as opposed to have my fastcompany blog.
• why can't I subscribe to feeds from my news reader?

They want to make it so sticky that to me they are taking the value away. I want to use my tools and participate where and when I see fit. I don't have time to visit all the sites I'm interested in.

Maybe I miss an obvious way of doing what I'm trying to do, in which case great because I will participate actively, but right now I'm under the impression that my needs as a user aren't met. More customer research and task analysis would have helped them figure my problem.

Time Management - Weekly Review

I'm stressed all the time, and one great way to get rid of a lot of stress at once, is to know that things are taken care of. I don't mean knowing what my team is doing in this particular case, I mean all the stuff I'm supposed to be doing, I need to know it's written somewhere so that I can forget about it, and reminded in due time.

So reviews are a great way to catch things, weekly reviews are recommended by all time management consultants to improve your organization level and decrease your stress.

For me they decrease stress because I get to look at my todo, my calendar, notebooks, you get the picture all the places where I enter information throughout the week to review what's in there. The review process is simple it's all about gathering the items into Outlook, so that then I know it's been processed, and will be "actionned" eventually when it needs to. The freedom I feel when I have done this right, not more than 60min, when I strickly stick to review/manage, and not do or think, is tremendous. I hit the weekend light as a feather.

So why if I think it's so important, and the results are so good on my stress level, do I only get to do my weekly review one week out of three? I keep on booking myself meetings or call during the time I have set aside for my weekly review. It's easy to book there because when I don't have access to my agenda, I know I don't have anything else booked during that time.

I need to get better at getting the review done weekly, it will help me spend better weekends with the family, and help me do my job better. This time I reserve for the review, has to become non negotiable.

Anyhow try it out, let me know. For references on Review, I'm a big fan of GTD as you know already!

ottawa marketing campaign - 82000reasons.com

OCRI is launching a campaign to show off the benefits of doing business in Ottawa. It's about celebrating our own successes which I fully endorse, we need to do more of this. It's called 82000reasons. We can add our own videos just like we can add content, very web 2.0, let's go add your stuff, remember it's the era of the audience is in charge! You can find a very good Macadamian profile right here.

Ottawa is a great innovation place, we have great entrepreneurs, and to the last count we would be about 82000 people in the high tech business, that's a lot of good things going for the area. Let the world know about it! Find the press release of the launch here.

Time management

A great quote from Robin Sharma - "Every time you say yes to something unimportant, you say no to something that is important". What a great way to put that if you don't prioritize right you will not get there. I need to be a little more brutal about my time management. Time is a finite resource and I'm spending mine as if I had a limitless supply. I will have to remember that quote to help me make the right decisions when I get pulled into a meeting or I make a phone call assuming I know what is important!!!

Knowing what is important means I have spent a decent amount of time understanding where I want to be and what it will take to get there. That's another one that is no picnic.

Macadamian in the Global Services 100 Companies!

From the congratulations-to-the-whole-team-dep - Macadamian made it on the Global Services - The 2008 Global Services 100 Companies this year. As Matt mentioned - A few years back we set ourselves the objectives to be among the top firms in the world, this year's selection shows we're making our way there, and this is a good thing(tm) as Martha would say(Martha Stewart, and don't ask why I know).

Rove at DEMO

Our very own Rove at Demo - watch them here! This must be nerve racking as well, but Rob and Paul pulled it off...

Outsourcing Humour Part III

Here is another take at a common misunderstanding in outsourcing!