Paul Edmondson’s blog on ideas
I headed out the door to see if Frank wanted to play some basketball. I didn’t make it far. He was on my neighbor Jerry’s porch with a glass of wine and cigar. I joined them for a few hours under the heat light and stayed out late enough to see the neighborhood raccoon make his Monday night trip to the garbage.
It’s been several months, maybe a year since I’ve played hoops. Tonight Frank and I are hitting the gym. I wonder if I can still dunk. We’ll see.
Robin and I are doing a ski lease in Lake Tahoe this winter. Lila will be three, which means she can ski. I’m so fired up since this will be the first time in nearly eight years that we can ski. Robin hung up her board last season and will ski with Georgia this year. Hopefully, Julia and Lila will get comfortable on ski’s. Last year, Lila was too young to ski, so I took her dog sledding. In preparation for this winter, Robin and I just picked up some custom ski boots. I’m super pumped for the Winter! Better get some good snow this year.
A new family just moved into the hood and we were assigned as the host family from the local elementary. I didn’t know this, but my wife let me know when they invited us for dinner last night. They prepared a delicious prime rib steak, salad and corn. My wife brought brownies and ice cream. It reminded me of when we first moved to Burlingame and didn’t know anyone and how many friends we have made since we moved to a culdesac behind the elementary school. I think there are close to 20 kids on our block. We do quite a bit of BBQ on the block. One neighbor is a pro and we have a few amateurs that are progressing. Sydney, the new neighbor, mentioned he just picked up a few bbq books. I think he and his family will fit in nicely. I wonder how long it is until he’s grilling on a Kamado, with the thermapen with home made bbq sauce.
I set up a new apple wireless router and set up dhcp for the WAN access, but I couldn’t get the new wireless router to pick up an IP address from my comcast modem. It’s a modem for cable internet. I unplugged the modem and tried resetting it, but I still couldn’t get the dang router to pick up an IP address. Finally, I removed the battery from the cable modem, unplugged everything, and then replugged the modem in first and then the new apple wireless router and it finally worked. The battery power must preserved some hardware settings that wont work with the new wireless until they are cleared from the modem. It took way longer than it should have, but now I have great wireless coverage at home.
You ever get annoyed with wifi fees in hotels and airplanes? Part of the reason they charge for wifi access is that wifi has cannibalized highly profitable revenue streams. For example, porn on demand offered by hotels has taken a huge hit as hotel visitors stream it for free from online sources.
On a recent flight, I tried streaming a netflix on demand movie instead of paying for a movie from the inflight system. The Gogo wifi on my Virgin America flight didn’t have the bandwith to stream the movie well, but as bandwidth inflight improves, on demand movies from the airline will dramatically decrease. To make up for these lost revenues, locations that offer wifi will have to earn more from wifi than they do today.
There are two parts to premium inventory. Content (brand) and placement of ads in the content. Without both, its not premium.
However, the best performing inventory isn’t nessecarily on premium content. In fact, advertisers that want better engagement and better performance should seek out advertising where their ads are better than the content. Their in luck since there is a lot of mediocre content online.
We’ve all probably heard that “It’s better to be lucky than good.” For startups, the question is how do you create that “Luck”. Lot’s of very smart people and teams have gloriously failed when it comes to creating companies, while less talented teams have found luck by hitting a market just right, or getting a few things that happen to really matter to customers.
There isn’t a magic trick to creating luck, but here are a few of my thoughts. Try many things and see what works. In an effort to do many things, you might get lucky and find that thing that really changes your business. When you do find that lucky thing that works, do as much as you can of it. Sometimes one lucky thing can take you a long way. Other times you’ll need to hit a couple gold veins.
But here is something to think about. Mediocrity and luck could be an excellent recipe for rapid growth. As an example, Twitter wasn’t very good when it started, but it was lucky.
However, as a business matures and an industry becomes more competitive, you probably need to be really good to survive.
My uncle Tom was a senior executive at Chevron. Before he died, he told me a story about a board meeting where the CEO said there would be massive layoffs. His question was how do we know that we won’t end up with a smaller and less efficient business? When the ad market slowwwwed down, and things got tough, many people went smaller with their online businesses. Which I think was the right call. But. Things are changing. Now may be a good time to look at increasing your size in sales and product development to generate more revenue and achieve more scale. That’s what we are doing at HubPages. During the downturn, we hunkered down, but still grew our audience in a significant fashion. Now we are looking to become a larger and more efficient company.
I’m offering a $5K referral fee to anyone that refers me a Director of Media Sales or refers software engineers. send resumes to paul <at> yieldbuild.com.
I’m in my hotel room and my ATT cell phone doesn’t have coverage, but I noticed I had wifi coverage. So here is the case for Google Voice and Skype. I found a script a while back to use my mobile phone as a modem for my computer. My computer is connected via bluetooth to my mobile phone. My mobile phone is connected to an ATT wifi hotspot. My computer is accessing the internet from my phone. Bluetooth data rates aren’t great, but it looks like I’m getting about 70K - 100K transfer speeds. That’s enough bandwidth to use Skype on my computer. I’ve done about three calls today and it’s working fine. If I were dependent upon ATT mobile coverage, I’d have to leave my hotel room. The other good part is I don’t have to pay for hotel room internet since ATT includes the wifi service with my plan.
This year we saw a whopping increase in our insurance premiums. It turns out our employees are using more health benefits for our small group than what was projected.It got me thinking to see if there is a way to create a healthier work force. It turns out that there is. People that exercise use less health benefits. But, one of the side effects of exercise, besides a healthier workforce, is that some studies show that employees are 20% more productive when they exercise.If we reduced our work day from eight hours to 6.4 hours, required one and a quarter hours of exercise, would we save money with reduced healthcare costs, and get the same work done? Something about the math feels funny, but we might have happier employees. It’s an idea where I like the concept.
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