Erich Stauffer

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  • Time to Pretend by MGMT

    I really like the song, Time to Pretend, by MGMT. It has an interesting sound and a playful beat, but when I read the lyrics online, I was a little disappointed in the content. When I heard the lyrics in my head, they sounded much different – so I decided to re-write some of it to be more optimistic, but still keep the same tone:

    I’m feeling rough, I’m feeling raw, I’m in the prime of my life.
    Let’s make a startup, make some money, have the time of our lives.
    We’ll write some code up, get some funding, and dance with the stars.
    We’ll make the software, and the website, and drive elegant cars.

    This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
    We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
    Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
    Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?

    …

    But there’s really nothing, nothing we can do
    Love can’t be forgotten, life can be the start up of you.

    The original lyrics are tainted with drug abuse and divorce while longing for a time when they used to spend time digging for worms in the sandbox at home. I remember picking cedar berries out of my friend’s sandbox, making highways, and rivers. It was a time to create with little fear of failing. The older you get, the harder life gets so why not fail early, fail often?

    I can see why MGMT may want to live recklessly and die young. It’s a cop out to the life intended for us. Life is hard, there is no doubt. But within those constraints, there is fun. Life can be a game that can be beaten. The fear in each of us is the fear of losing – so don’t lose. Choose to win. The only ones way to lose is to stop trying to win. So choose to win.

  • 10 Items or Less

    This is a review of the TBS TV Series, “10 Items or Less”, not to be confused with the movie that came out the same year (2006) starring Morgan Freeman, Paz Vega, and Jonah Hill.

    I like watching Netflix because of the ability to find and stream shows instantly. Today I discovered a show called “10 Items or Less” starring John Lehr as Leslie Poole.

    The series starts out with Poole as the new manager of “Green and Grains” grocery store who has taken over the store and it’s employees from his recently deceased father.

    While the first few episodes (okay seasons) had some continuity issues (they skipped ahead four years at one point, then back to one year in season 2, but the kid stayed the same age), it still has the power to keep you wondering if any of the characters will ever evolve. You want them to, you really do, but they do it soooo slowly.

    For example, you want Leslie, the manager to be a better manager – and he does get better, but still has his share of mistakes. You want the butcher, Todd, to be less sexist, and while he tries to be more professional at work, the ladies keep him exactly the way they want him. And you want the [manager], Amy Anderson, to warm up to Leslie, but for save some rare moments, she does not (or does she?).

    One thing I couldn’t shake was how much John Lehr looks like Jason Bateman in Arrested Development.

    And while it may be more of a coincidence that the movie of the same name centers around a grocery store and came out the same year, it may be more strange that, according to IMDB, the 10 Items or Less movie was the first film in motion picture history that was legally available on the Internet while the film was still in theaters, which makes it odd that it’s not available for streaming on Netflix (or Amazon Instant Video), but the television show is.

  • How to Effectively Deliver a Press Release

    This is a guest post by Leslie Bailey, a freelance writer in Indianapolis.

    As a blogger and freelance writer, I receive dozens and dozens of press releases a week. About 98% of those are deleted…and that’s on a good day.

    Despite what old-school public relations professionals might say, press releases are no longer the only way to get the attention of the media. Social media and modern marketing are far too strong of a driving force in this sector to ignore.

    That’s not to say however, that press releases are a lost cause – if you handle them correctly.

    Here are a few tips from my personal experience that will help you get the most out of your press release. Note: these tips may not apply in every situation; consider each case on an individual basis.

    The easiest way to do this is by checking of the ‘Five Ws’ – Who, What, Where, When, W…and I don’t mean within the copy of your press release.

    WHO

    If you’re targeting a specific audience – what’s that? You’re just sending out mass emails? Let’s start over.

    To get the most value out of a press release, consider reaching out to your subject in a personalized manner. No one wants to feel like they’re part of a cattle call. Unless a publicity email addresses me by name, I don’t read it.

    Blogger, Madam, “Hi there” or my favorite yesterday, “Hi lovey!,” don’t count. Find out the person’s name and address them by such (be sure to spell it correctly!)

    WHAT

    What does the person who you’re contacting cover? If you are trying to pitch the latest and greatest diaper, you should probably note that I don’t have children and have never written anything related to babies. Look at media contact’s previous or recent work to see what topics they usually write about.

    WHERE

    Where are you sending this press release? Make sure it’s the subjects preferred method of communication. I’ve had people contact me through Facebook, Twitter, and other various platforms to ask for my email address. If they’d take a few minutes, they’d see it’s listed very clearly in several places.

    WHEN

    Timing is everything. If your media blast is concerning something Christmas related, it’s as effective to send it in July, as it would be to send it on Christmas Eve. As a blogger, I like a six-week lead but when it comes to print publications, the time varies. For a newspaper story, I need about four-weeks notice while something pointed for magazine, two and a half months. Each publication is different though so be sure to consider the timing of your release.

    WHY

    This is key not only within your content but also when considering your recipient. Why does this person care what you have to say? Referring back to the matter of ‘what’, a food writer isn’t going to care about the latest in fall fashions just as a fashion writer doesn’t care about the best place to create a Fantasy Sports Team.

    IN CONCLUSION…

    You’ll notice that all of these suggestions take TIME. Sure, you’re a busy person and you’re trying to get a message out to the greatest number of people possible but if you can’t take a moment to find out someone’s name, why do they want to spend hours covering your news? They won’t.

    Do your research, make a friendly and personalized introduction and see how much further it takes you.

    You can follow Leslie @Lesalina.

  • Forbes Gets Jeff Bezos

    I’ve written on Amazon before and about CEOs I admire, but until I read Forbes’ April 2012 article on Jeff Bezos entitled Jeff Bezos Gets It, I didn’t realize how much I admired the man behind the company. Bezos seems to embody Steve Blank’s ideas of customer development by making the customer first in all business decisions.

    Out of Jeff Bezo’s Top Ten Maxims, a third of them center around the customer. Number 2 is “Obsess over customers,” number 5 is “Determine what your customers need and work backwards,” and number 9 is “Everyone has to be able to work in a call center [for humility and empathy for the customer]”.

    Credit: Forbes

    It’s not just Bezo’s customer-centric approach to business that has my admiration, but his culture of innovation and his data-intensive decision making that make me so fond of his way of doing business. Forbes’ writes, “Data reigns supreme at Amazon, particularly head-to-head tests of customers’ reactions to different features or site designs. Bezos calls it ‘a culture of metrics’.”

    Forbes’ continues, “For Bezos a data-driven customer focus lets him take risks to innovate, secure in the belief that he’s doing the right thing.” Bezos is quoted as saying, “We focus on what is going to be good for the customers. I think this aspect of our culture is rare.” Rare and profitable.

    I’ve joked that Amazon has two departments, one that creates ideas on how to make money and another that says, “Yes.” From Amazon Web Services to Lab 126 Amazon has continued to create new revenue streams beyond the giant retailer that it has become. As an Amazon Associate, I get to piggyback on that success.

    Forbes’ spends some time putting Bezos on a pedestal where Steve Jobs once stood, calling Bezos, “the corporate chief that others most want to meet, emulate and deify,” but in my mind I’d rather keep those two separate as Jobs tended to make products for customers, Bezos tends to make products because of them – and those are two completely different ways to run a business.

  • The Epic Generation: From the Garden to the City

    “You know I always wanted to pretend that I was an architect.” – George Costanza, Seinfeld

    Nathan Norris recently wrote an article entitled, “Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century” about ‘under 30’s’ moving into the cities and driving less – the new migration into urban spaces. Norris writes, “At the same time, television shifted from glorifying the surburban lifestyle in the 1960’s and 1970’s (e.g., Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch) to glorifying the urban lifestyle in the 1990’s (e.g., Seinfeld and Friends). These cultural changes have pushed Generation Y to look for more adventure than previous generations, and they are less fearful of cities than previous generations.”

    I forwarded it to a friend and he wrote, “Art (used loosely here) imitating life or vice versa?”

    I wrote that I’ve been watching the TEDtalks “Building Wonder” curated channel on Netflix, which is mostly about architecture and it’s seemed to correlate with conversations I’ve had with him (in the past and recently) about the desire to be part of a community like Bloomington, Broad Ripple, or Nora. We sort of had that community in high school, now that I think about it, with Benjamin’s Coffee House or even to a small extent at Heiskell’s Restaurant (at the height of our takeover). We also had it at church and at college and we also had it for a time in Daleville (before the breakup began). Community is what you make of it – but physical constraints help.

    This “art” reference he mentioned made me wonder if I haven’t been yearning after that ‘public living room’ that Friends had in that apartment or Jerry’s apartment. People came and went as they pleased. There were four locks on the door, but they were never locked. They also had that other space, the coffee shop down below – Seinfeld had it with the diner. In Daleville, we had La Hacienda and Starbucks. We knew the people working there and they new us. Remember when George found the rubber band in his soup and playfully sprang it back to the cook who left it there? I think we all long for that sort of community where we all know each other on that level.

    Another friend wrote in reply, “I think it has to be ‘art’ imitating life. It isn’t like Seinfeld or Friends glorified New York as the central scene where all things are happening – that had already been the prevailing public opinion since at least the 1920’s. Although, I don’t think it is “imitating” so much as it is a broadcast company’s calculated offering of what the public will find interesting or novel. Green Acres wasn’t about the country, it was about the voyeuristic experience of someone foolishly leaving the wonders of the big city for the country – adding in the tension of the couple having different perspectives.. Beverly Hillbillies was about the opposite – people who don’t. belong in the wonderful urban/suburban area and the comedic tension. Andy Griffith played on the mundane and simpleton of the small-town, where previously there wasn’t any television that was centered on a “watch the paint dry” town. By and large, I think TV producers expect there to be curiosity and reverence for NY and LA from outsiders and appreciation from those who live there. Other than a few shows who are using the difference in location as a position separator or as central to the theme – shows and movies have generally been based in NY/LA/Other large metro.”

    Here’s the list of TED Talks for those of you who don’t have Netflix:

    1 Bjarke Ingels: Three Warp-Speed Architecture Tales 18m

    2 Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral 16m

    3 William McDonough on Cradle to Cradle Design 19m

    4 Cameron Sinclair on Open-Source Architecture 23m

    5 Joshua Prince-Ramus on Seattle’s Library 19m

    6 Liz Diller Plays with Architecture 19m

    7 Alex Steffen: The Shareable Future of Cities 10m

    8 James H. Kunstler Dissects Suburbia 19m

    9 Kamal Meattle on How to Grow Fresh Air 4m

    10 Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2 15m

    11 Anupam Mishra: The Ancient Ingenuity of Water Harvesting 17m

    12 Mitchell Joachim: Don’t Build Your Home, Grow It! 2m

    13 Rachel Armstrong: Architecture That Repairs Itself? 7m

    14 Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a Theater That Remakes Itself 18m

    15 Magnus Larsson: Turning Dunes into Architecture 11m

    16 Michael Pawlyn: Using Nature’s Genius in Architecture 13m

    17 Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting Suburbia 19m

  • On Developing Our Professional Email Signature Product

    Recently, like Seth Godin suggested, we started looking for way to “redefine a service as a product”.

    We’ve found that custom HTML email signatures was a way to use our web design and email management skills to create  an introductory product that’s great for a wide variety of clients. Our typical clients are independent business owners or non-profits who can make their own marketing decisions, but now we have a product that can help franchisees or real estate agents who don’t or can’t have their own web site, but do have control over their email signature.

    Email signatures provide a way to offer increased interaction, coupons, calls to action, and integration with review sites, business directories, social media sites, and home pages. They can be inserted into many of the major web based email programs as well as traditional email clients. The images can be hosted on your web server or ours.

    We’ve considered branding for the email signatures can range from “mini-web sites at the end of your email” or “custom HTML email signatures”. When we do keyword research for doing our SEO, keyword terms like, “professional email signatures,” “email signatures for business”, and others come up so we might use those.

    On our home page, we currently have a huge image of the email signatures product with a giant button that says, “Learn More”. This is in response to feedback we got about our old page design which lacked a central call to action. In the future, we’d like to have that central image and text swap out in what’s called a “content slider”.

    This is a new product for us and we’re still doing customer development and looking for feedback. We’ve done many customer interviews and implemented a lot of what we heard in order to continue to iterate the product. The end product may change from where it is now, but so far, it’s shaping up to be something people really like.

  • Virtual Assistants

    When you’re a new or growing business, when you’re ready to add employees, it may be better to hire temporary employees or what are called “virtual assistants”. Virtual assistants are workers who work by the hour on things you would have had to do yourself.

    Depending on the firm, virtual assistants can help you with everything from checking your email and making appointments to web design or other web services. This is similar to the term, “long hallway”, which means a distributed company. I’ve provided a couple of different types here:

    American Virtual Assistants:

    eaHELP is the leader in sourcing busy professionals with high-quality American executive virtual assistants.

    Longer Days provides a single point of contact called a team lead that enables customers to accomplish a wide variety of work that would traditionally require a half a dozen employees.

    Overseas Virtual Assistants:

    GetFriday is your personal virtual assistant. GetFriday can undertake any task, business or personal, that does not require our physical presence.

    Brick Work India created a unique business solution, the virtual office, to cater to the specific needs of such companies and CXOs.

    Other Types of eWorkers:

    Elance allows you to post a job with a bid to get proposals from multiple freelance workers across the globe. Also consider Odesk, Guru and vWorker.

  • The Harvest: A Simple, Step by Step Strategy for Making $300 Per Week Trading the Foreign Exchange

    A simple, step by step strategy for making $300 per week trading the Forex.

    Most people believe that it is our natural right as human beings to benefit from our hard work. In days past, farmers would till the soil, sew the seed, wait for rain, weed and tend their crops and then late in the fall when the time was just right, harvest what was hopefully a bountiful crop.

    Believe it or not the Foreign Exchange, as with any market, can operate the same way. If we prepare correctly, sew properly, tend our crops and then harvest in a timely fashion, every week we can enjoy a small bounty of what has become an almost four trillion dollar a day currency market.

    Here’s what one reviewer had to say, “I am new to the Forex market and read eleven books on the subject over the past two months. This book is great!!! The advice, the content and the step by step instructions are clear and to the point. I did not apply the techniques to a live account yet but in my demo account I am 11-4 with a total profit 320 pips(10 trading days).
    As great as the book is the real value for me was the author. Cecil responded to my every email (3 or 4) within two hours.
    I cannot believe the book is only $0.99. Talk about an undervalued commodity!”

    Here’s what another reviewer had to say, “I am very pleased I bought this book. There is so much phoney material in Forex and you never know what you are going to get. This book is short but has real substance. The trading method Cecil Selkirk describes is easy to understand and truly helped me. His strategy is simple and straight forward, I was able to make exactly $300 the first week, just as promised. I recommend this book to anyone who is tired of all the hyperbole out there in the Forex world. Its true he does offer an indicator package for sale at the end of the book, but its only $3.00! And it includes three great indicators and an excel calculator for position sizing. When I wrote him a question about his strategy he wrote me back within 24 hours AND he sent me the indicator package for free. No up selling, he really is just an intelligent guy trying to help others. Really a great strategy and a great, easy to read book.”

  • Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude

    Mark Douglas uncovers the underlying reasons for lack of consistency and helps traders overcome the ingrained mental habits that cost them money. He takes on the myths of the market and exposes them one by one teaching traders to look beyond random outcomes, to understand the true realities of risk, and to be comfortable with the “probabilities” of market movement that governs all market speculation.

    Mark began coaching traders in 1982, and has continued to develop seminar and training programs on trading psychology for the investment industry, as well as individual traders. He has been a frequent speaker at seminars across the world, as well as in the U.S., teaching traders how to become consistently successful.

    If you are like most people, after your first few losing trades you set about to learn better market analysis. After your next string of losers you learned about risk management. But there’s still one more challenge to conquer&emdash;yourself.

    That is the major premise of this book. If it sounds like wishy-washy psycho-babble to you, I’ll only say that I would have agreed — four months ago, before I quit my 20-year technology career, obtained a Series/7 license and joined a professional day-trading firm. I now believe most people would lose money if you gave them 50/50 odds on whether or not it was going to rain tomorrow.

    In other words, successfully forecasting the market is not enough. Why not? Well, this book explains why not. It has to do with one’s sense of self-worth, one’s moral judgment of money, one’s work-ethic, one’s tendency to focus on good news while ignoring bad, and other things.

    “Zone” was recommended to a friend of mine by a professional floor trader who told him, “I wish I had read it before starting two years ago. Don’t place another trade until you do.” Well said. Does this apply to investors as well as traders? Oh, absolutely! If you have ever said to yourself, “I’m not selling that stock while it’s down, I’ll wait until I have a profit in it,” then for the love of money, read this book.

    Finally, read “Zone” before Douglas’ earlier work. If you still want more then read “Disciplined Trader” for a general review plus a deeper exploration into the author’s philosophical and meta-physical theories.