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One of the overlooked features of Android 2.1 was text input by voice. Now on this wasn’t totally new, because there were other 3rd party apps that had the same basic functionality. I was surprised at now good this built in app was though. I figured I would have to go word by word instead of speaking full sentences. However, the first 3 phrases I tried worked out exactly right. It’s definitely not perfect, especially for writing out a blog post like this, but there are a lot of useful applications for this.

Sending a text message, Tweet, or quick response to an email are all perfect for voice text. I will probably start using this quite a bit for pieces of messages here and there. Google has done a great job with their voice algorithms, and I’m interested to see how this develops.

When it comes to getting projects done and making progress at work there are two main components – planning and execution.  At big corporations these two functions are almost entirely separated.  The corporate brass in the C-Suite are the ones that set the targets for the year, and provide some direction on how to get there.  The organizational structure allows for the Vice Presidents and Directors to spend their time planning and seeking out new opportunities without having to roll their sleeves up and do the work that it takes to get there.  Everyone underneath them is charged with completing the set of tasks that are handed down.

Now, the corporate workers don’t have to worry about responsibility for these plans.  They are simply responsible for their piece of the plan handed down by their boss.  They’re likely a specialist in the piece of the plan that they’re responsible for so it’s simply a matter of executing on the tasks that they know how to do.

This is the system that makes corporations effective, and it also makes indivdual jobs fairly easy.  Managers plan and make sure their workers are getting things done, and workers simple complete the tasks that are handed down to them.

Now, what’s difficult to do is to create your own plan and follow through on all the necessary tasks to get it done.  It’s even harder when the project doesn’t directly affect your well-being or something that you absolutely have to get done.  It’s really hard to take the initiative to plan for exactly what you want, and then have the ability to follow through on everything it takes to get there.  By no means should you try to do every single task yourself because there are some things that can be done much better by a specialist.  For example, if you’re starting your own law practice it’s probably not a good idea to build your own website (unless you’re a web designer by hobby) because it’s not something you can do well.  However, it’s probably not effective to outsource everything because if that’s the case, what value are you actually providing.  Think about legendary entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.  Sure they were great leaders, but they also got their hands dirty on the software code (in Gates’ case) and the physical manufacturing of their products (in Jobs’ case).  Gates and Jobs built great companies because they had the rare ability to plan and execute flawlessly at the same time.

On a personal level I don’t think I’ve mastered the ability to plan and execute well at the same time.  I’m pretty effective when it comes to planning out everything I need to do to achieve my goals.  I’m also very good at completing any tasks that I’m responsible for at work or that I absolutely need to get done.  Where’s its difficult to execute is on the plans tasks that I’ve set for myself that are without any tangible consequences.  I’ll be working to improve on this, and I’m open to any suggestions on how to make that happen.

This afternoon I was looking for an easy way for my sister and I to share photos.  It’s always a pain to try to email a set of pictures because email clients can only handle so much data in a single message.  Sites like Flickr and Facebook are great for photo albums, but sometimes you don’t want to make everything public.

I’ve become a pretty big fan of Dropbox as I’ve used it to collaborate on a new e-book and to sync files easily between my computer at home and at work.  I’ve also used Box.net in the past on school projects, and I know they’ve improved the product quite a bit with tons of 3rd party integration.  However, I didn’t want my sister to have to sign-in with my username and password or have to download an application on her computer.  I just wanted to send her a URL and allow her to click on an “Add File” button so she could upload the photos.

Enter Drop.io.  It fit the criteria of exactly what I was looking for.  It’s drop-dead simple.  All you really have to do is click on the “Create a Drop” button and without any kind of sign-up or download you have your URL that anyone can access to upload or download files.  You can create a custom URL like Drop.io/onlinemarketing or you can leave it at the random letters that Drop.io generates.  Then I simple sent the URL to my sister in an email and all she has to do is click on the “Add a File” button to upload all of her images straight from her computer.

If you run into the problem of trying to send files back and forth with a friend or even a group of people keep Drop.io in mind because it might make things a lot easier.

Lately I’ve been watching a few of the past episodes of Undercover Boss on CBS.  I was particularly interested in the show last night because GSI Commerce is one of the major competitors of the company I work for.  I don’t watch many shows on TV, but I think this one is pretty interesting.  If you haven’t seen it, the concept is that the CEO of a major corporation goes “undercover” for a week in a variety of roles at his own company to get a better perspective on how things really work in the field.

So for this past episode on GSI Commerce CEO Michael Rubin packed boxes in a truck, took angry calls from customers in the call center, and picked items from a warehouse.  Now I know the show dramatizes things a little bit for the sake of the TV audience, but it’s interesting to me how bad the CEO’s are are at some of the jobs they have to do.  Both Rubin of GSi and Coby Brooks of Hooters were essentially “fired” from their part-time positions for not being up to par at jobs in their own companies’ stores.  Sometimes you get to thinking that because someone is the CEO or some other high level position that they’re infinitely smart and could figure out how to do any job well.  From their performance on the show it’s clear this isn’t the case.

There were people in the warehouse that could do their job of packing boxes or picking products at lightning speed.  They found creative ways to get things done that were not part of the traditional training.  I took my car in to get a brake inspection today.  The technician explained all my problems and what needed to be done to fix them very clearly.  I would have had absolutely no idea what to do myself.  I’ve realized how important it is to become amazingly good at the one thing you do because that’s when you become invaluable.  Certain people are cut out for certain jobs, and if you can’t become one of the best at what you do then it probably is not what you should be doing.

I’ve also been reading Seth Godin’s book Linchpin, and he discusses a lot of the same principles.  He contends that there’s a big difference between work and art.  Work is simply following instructions and completing the checklist your boss gives you.  Art is when you create something new and valuable out of your own intuition.  There is always someone able to do the work cheaper, faster, or better than you can.  Art is what makes you invaluable.

Luckily, I’ve been pretty free on this opening weekend of March Madness.  I’ve gotten to watch Northern Iowa’s big upset of Kansas and most of the other games throughout the weekend.  I’ve switched to my computer several times when there was a close game going on outside of the one that CBS was showing in my area.

I’m pretty excited though, that next year I may be able to watch March madness live on my phone.  I know he quality won’t be perfect, but having that option available on my phone (over 3G network) will be pretty awesome.  I know there are other options available right now (if you’ve been watching the tournament you can’t miss the commercials with everyone in exotic locations yelling when their team wins at the buzzer) but this would now be possible directly from within your mobile brower using Adobe’s Flash 10.1 for mobile.  Flash on phones has always been a source of frustration because mobile broswers have never been able to handle it.  A large percentage of online video, including YouTube (altough YouTube videos are encoded in 2 separate formats to allow the iPhone and Android phones to view the other format that doesn’t include Flash) are shown through Flash.

This kind of functionality makes me question Apple’s strategy of refusing to support Flash.  Without Flash, the iPad can’t access Hulu video and other video that’s common on so many other sites.  How can you expect the iPad to replace your laptop when it can’t access such a huge portion of the web?  I realize HTML5 is supposed to start allowing video to be embedded directly within the HTML of a page without any additional encoding like Flash.  But that’s an entirely different format that you have to count on content producers to migrate towards.  It just doesn’t happen that easily.  That’s a big reason why I have on real interest in getting and iPad, and why I thought Wired’s cover story this month on the iPad and the future of tablets was pretty weak.  All it offered was some philosophical fluff from prominent tech figures without any real substance.

Recently I found a couple of fascinating blog posts on how to mashup data from anywhere on the web with Google spreadsheets and Yahoo pipes.  To see the exact steps on how to do this please refer to those 2 articles.  It’s explained there much better than what I can recreate, but I wanted to get into the possibilities of what you can do with these kinds of tools.

You’re probably at least somewhat familiar with Google Docs.  If not you can check out a few of my previous posts on Using Google Docs for Wedding Invitations or Using Google Docs at Work.  One of the great things about Google Docs is that it lives online, whereas an Excel document is static and saved on your local computer.  With Google Docs you can specify a specific URL to take data from, and your spreadsheet will update whenever that web page is updated.  The function you use is the “importHTML” function in Google Docs.

So let’s say you want to do some data analysis for your fantasy football league.  You want to see what players on your team are underperforming and see if there are any replacement players that you’d like to trade for.  ESPN.com has all the stats you would need available on their site.  Once you find a page that has the exact data you want you can use the “importHTML” function to throw it into a Google spreadsheet.  Now you can run any custom formulas in your spreadsheet to see how different players are performing to the standards you set.  Every week that page on ESPN.com is going to be updated with new data.  Instead of having to download that again (like you would in Excel) your data will automatically update in your spreadsheet.

Yahoo Pipes is a web application that might not be as well known.  It’s essentially a tool that allows you to take information from any web service, slice it any way you want if you have the technical know-how, and then create custom RSS or XML feeds that can be used with other services.  One of the applications that is quite useful is taking location data from a website and putting that into a map on Google maps.

So, say you have a list of cities on a concert tour, and you’d like to see these laid out visually on a map.  One option would be to use a service like BatchGeo if you have all of the address data already formatted nicely in a spreadsheet.  However, what if that data is stored on a Wikipedia page.  Here’s how you could create the map.

1. Use the “importHTML” function to pull data from that table into a Google spreadsheet.

2. Use Yahoo Pipes to pull the data from your spreadsheet into the KML format that is needed for Google Maps.  Within the Yahoo Pipes interface you can sort by date so that you can number the concert stops according to the dates they occur.

3. Export the data in the KML format and paste the new URL into Google Maps.  The tour locations will be displayed with date labels on your new map.

There are a lot of cool applications that I can see with this type functionality.

• Create maps of sales targets for a business to give to their sales associates to use when they’re out in the field

• Manage your fantasy team with custom metrics that you build in a spreadsheet

• Track all your interactions on social networks and pull them into a spreadsheet to use as a CRM database so you can set reminders on when to contact someone again

I’m excited to play around with these tools and see what else is possible.

I have a pretty big interest in education.  My fiance, Marie, is a 6th grade english teacher, and my mom is a 4th grade teacher so fairly prevalent in my family.  Clearly, the US education system could use some work.  The data shows that the US is falling behind many other developed countries in standardized testing scores.  Something needs to be done and there are a lot of differing opinions on what the best solution is.

Now I’m not an educator personally so I can’t speak from experience, nor do I have any real data to back up my point.  I do believe though that the education world would be wise to pick up on some of the major social media trends right now and incorporate games into the classroom.

Take Foursquare, Gowalla, and Farmville into consideration – 3 services that are all the rage in social media right now.  They are all games that involve rewards, interaction, and engagement.  Aren’t interaction and engagement 2 of the most important ingredients to improving a classroom.  If students are actively involved in their learning and striving to reach specific goals they have a much better chance of learning the material than if it’s simply lectured in a boring manner.

One concept that I definitely think deserves some major attention is that of IU Telecommunications Professor and professional game designer Lee Sheldon.  He has formatted his class like a “massively multi-player game” (like World of Warcraft) and assignments do not receive grades, but rather “experience points.”  There are different types of assignments that are either done solo, with a partner that the students choose, or with a “guild” chosen by the professor.  This allows for students to work in different formats so that everyone has a chance to work in their preferred setting at some point.  The students are motivated to be engaged because they can gain experience points at unexpected times.  Check out Edward Castronova’s blog for an excellent overview of “Sheldon’s Syllabus” and using games in the classroom curriculum.

Are K-12 teachers experimenting with this type of game learning?  I definitely think they should be.

In just a little more than a month I’ll be moving into my new house.  I’ve been thinking quite a bit about whether or not we’ll pay for a cable TV subscription.  Here is my current TV consumption:

• Sportscenter (Cable)
• Basketball and football games and other major sporting events (Mostly on Network TV and ESPN which is Cable)
• The Office (Network TV)

I will occasionally watch another program if I’m flipping through channels during dinner or something like that, but nothing that I would mind missing.  I’ve decided that I’d like to cut down on the amount of sports I watch because there are really only a handful of games in each major sport that matter throughout the year so watching Sportscenter on an almost everyday basis probably is not necessary.  However, not being able to watch the College Basketball National Championship game when my Tar Heels are playing would be pretty discouraging.

With March Madness starting today I’m amazed at the high quality, yet fast and responsive video that CBSsports.com is able to deliver on all of the tournament games.  I know Hulu and other sites have great video and ESPN has video on demand that you can pay for, but the value that CBS provides by streaming every single game online is unprecendented.  The NCAA tournament is perfect for internet consumption because it allows you to switch between multiple games at once at your own discretion.  You don’t have to let the TV network decide what game is best for your area to watch because you’re in control.  It’s clear that this type of video streaming is entirely possible, and it makes me wonder why ESPN or other networks don’t provide more of their content this way. My thought was that more of this kid of content would become available online and I could catch most of the shows that I wanted online.  The hurdle clearly comes down to money and the fact that monetization online is much more difficult.

I got a tip on Twitter that I should check out some of Mark Cuban’s thought on this issue.  He’s pretty knowledgeable in this area considering he founded Broadcast.com and had a big part in HD TV.  It turns out that he has several blog posts on TV content on his blog that were extremely informative.  I’d suggest you read what we has to say (rather than my quick summary) in these posts – Don’t Waste the Internet on TV – Protect the Future of the Internet and Senator Al Franken is Requesting User Caps on Internet Bandwidth?

Basically, Cuban is saying that there are a lot of bandwidth costs that go along with putting more and more video on the internet.  It’s not a simple question of whether networks can generate ad revenue off of the content, but the physical infrastructure of the networks of internet service providers would have to be significantly upgraded if everyone just started watching all of their regular TV content online.  Then monthly internet subscription rates would have to increase considerably, and then there’s not really much of an advantage of watching TV on your computer anymore.  Cuban is fairly pessimistic about TV content online because the internet is simply not designed to handle it well.

To switch gears for a minute, I’m also taking into consideration the words of wisdom on watching TV from marketing guru Seth Godin.  His recent post on TV was pretty eye-opening.  Seth argues that there are an infinite number of things that you could be spending your time on that’s better than TV.  Some of his ideas were:

• Write a daily blog
• Start an online community about your favorite passion
• Go to meetups in your town
• Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
• Produce small films and publish them online
• Read a book or two every evening
• Play a game of Scrabble with your family

I had trouble trimming this list down because all of Godin’s ideas are superb, and clearly all much better than watching 3 hours of TV.  By giving up TV I’d be freeing up my time for more of the things that I’d really like to be doing, but sometimes end up on the backburner because I don’t always have enough time.  Seth’s ideas are pretty inspiring because he says the things you know are 100% true, but sometimes you can’t quite motivate yourself to do them.

Ultimately, I think I’m going to wait on getting a cable subscription at least for a little while when I move into my new house.  Internet is non-negotiable so that will definitely be installed soon (although I can get by for a few days with just my Droid).  If we realize we really want TV then we’ll go ahead with it, but it’s not going to be a given.

What do you think?  Could you do without a cable subscription?

If you’ve read many of my previous posts you probably already know I’m a big fan of Google Docs. I’ve written about being hooked on Google Docs and also using Google Docs for wedding invitations.  I’ve also been trying to push Google Docs at work so that our marketing team can collaborate on spreadsheets without having to do the extra work of copy and pasting them all back together.

We’re trying to get a direct mail piece out to some of our prospects, and we needed to refine our list of potential customers.  We have leads from quite a few different sources, and not all of them have complete information.  Some might be missing an email address, others a city and state, and some might be missing annual revenue which we need to qualify them as a prospect.  We exported all of this information from Salesforce and got it into an Excel document so we could clearly see where the missing pieces were.  To get this completed as quickly as possible I thought the best solution would be to open up a Google spreadsheet so the 5 of us on the marketing team could all work on it at the same time.  We couldn’t do that with Excel because we would need to first break the spreadsheet down into 5 equal parts, send it out to each person via email, and then copy and paste their information into a master sheet once they completed it.  With Google Docs everything can happen at once and there’s no need to have separate versions of the spreadsheet.

I’d love to get a chance to try out applications like SmartSheet that distribute repetitive tasks like list management to services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and they’re completed for you through crowdsourcing.  Anyone using the Mechanical Turk can complete tasks for a set price.  Using a spreadsheet with incomplete leads as an example, you could put the document on Smartsheet and agree to pay 10 cents per completed record and very likely find someone that’s willing and able to complete it.

As I was browsing through information on the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas I came across two new services that I think have a lot of potential.  I think consumers will be able to get a lot of use out of these apps because they’re designed to be extremely simple to use.

Buildor

Buildor is a web-based site builder, but instead of focusing on creating websites from scratch (like, say Weebly) it allows you to pull an existing web page from anywhere on the web and edit it just like you would a Word document or Photoshop file.



So you can see the interface from this screenshot, but the way it works is that Buildor grabs the HTML of a page from the page source that you can see when you click that option in your browser.  Now it has a saved copy of your site displayed on your application and you can make changes to images, text, layout, etc.  Then you can take that saved version of your HTML and upload it back into your site.  This is a pretty simple way for non-technical people to edit their website.

PlaceThings

I’m even more excited about the new social mapping application Placethings.  This new app allows you to apply any kind of media (text, audio, video, etc) onto a particular point on a map.  You can create interactive trips or document a vacation that you’re already on.

I see two awesome applications of this technology.  One is to plan a trip for someone else.  So you could create a scavenger hunt with different clues throughout the map, or plan an agenda for someone in a new location that’s unfamiliar with the local hotspots.  The other way to use it would be to document a trip that you’re currently on.  So you can take photos and video of the different stops on your cruise or vacation and then save them to your map to show all your friends when you get back.  I hope these guys can get an Android app out because I would definitely be willing to pay to use this on my Droid.  I think the iPhone app is already out and they will soon be rolling out a web version.