Paul Jacobson

I ordered a new batch of Moo minicards a couple months ago to replace the last of the cards I gave out. I was pretty excited about them because I was using two awesome sunflower photos I found on Robert Scoble’s photostream a while ago. I don’t know where the images are in his photostream but I love them. They are the best images of sunflowers I have come across and since I have adopted the sunflower motif as part of what passes for my corporate identity, they are perfect for me.

Anyway, my minicards still haven’t arrived about 2 or 3 months later, nor has the replacement set Moo kindly sent to me when I reported the absent initial set. I have pretty much given up on them and taken this as confirmation that despite the post office’s assurances that theft has been drastically reduced, they are still a bunch of thieves who are now into identity theft using my cards.

None of this has persuaded me to give up on ever possessing Moo cards again. They are very cool and I quickly decided to order a set of the new business cards Moo prints. This time around I wasn’t going to place my trust in our post office so I decided to go all out and ordered 2 packs of 50 cards to be shipped to me by DHL. I place the order this last Sunday evening and received them today. Here is a crappy photo of a set of very fine cards in an awesome card holder:

I used a combination of sunflower images I have in iPhoto (including those awesome photos Scoble took – his are the gorgeous ones with the deep blue sky in the background) and photos I took when I was given a tour of the Constitutional Court a while ago. My photo above doesn’t really do the cards much justice but you get the idea. These cards represent a complete set and I have 10 sets in my 2 packs. I am very happy with them and they are well worth the premium I paid to get them here reliably.

I am giving these fine specimens out to my clients as mementos and souvenirs and all you need to do to get one of these gorgeous items is to give me a call and be my client … Heck, you could just bump into me and ask for one and you can have one too … I just want to hand these babies out now!

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Mike thinks we need to give local business portal, MyGenius, another look. Despite the fact that MyGenius is how I first connected with Mike, my preference at the moment is to find a convenient way to delete my account on MyGenius or just deal with the mail I get from time to time from the service. I am sure a good number of people benefit greatly from MyGenius but it just doesn’t rev my engine all that much.

I don’t remember how I came across MyGenius but I thought it would be worth a try. I have been a member of a pretty successful business network called Business Warriors for quite some time now and I have had good results from that service despite it being based on a very old style forum (sometimes those old ideas and platforms work well). What made a big difference in Business Warriors wasn’t so much the forum discussions, it was the simplicity and the personal contact with other members.

MyGenius has a really cool looking interface compared to Business Warriors and appears to have so much more functionality. What I noticed early on is how closed the environment is. There isn’t (or wasn’t the last time I took a look) an opportunity to plug my external blog and other content into my MyGenius profile. All my MyGenius related content must be created within and is stored within MyGenius.

Mike made an interesting comment about MyGenius:

I recently did a show on CNBC Africa about the power of social networking for entrepreneurs and the producers of the show used MyGenius as a case study, not LinkedIn. Why? It’s accessible and easy to understand for the 2.0-uninitiated. What we Web 2.0 enthusiasts sometimes see as being current, sexy and improtant may seem totally of the wall and inaccessible to the layman. I liken this to the fashion industry. All fashion shows I see on TV seem excessive and weird to me. I don’t get it at all and would feel like completely out at such an event. It’s the same with the sites we use and build. We assume ‘normal’ Web users see things like we do – are drawn to the same things we are. This is simply not the case, hence why MyGenius is getting users that LinkedIn simply ain’t.

A cursory look at MyGenius reveals a different story. MyGenius’ appeal is its fancy functionality. It is loaded with an array of pseudo-Web 2.0 functionality (although there is an apparent misunderstanding of some basic Web 2.0 elements – what is supposed to be a blog is really a kind of message board).

MyGenius tries to leverage off the social media revolution that has been sweeping the local Web. What you get, though, is a pretty busy interface that is closer to a pre-Web 2.0 site than a functional and effective social media powered website. Of course it is a little inaccurate to talk about whether a site is a Web 2.0 site or not. Web 2.0 is about sharing and connecting, not to mention a ground up approach to business interaction on the Web. MyGenius does do some of this despite its message based model with its clubs, meeting co-ordination and basic blogs. Despite all this functionality all the site succeeds at from my perspective is that it is a really busy site with not a lot of depth. MyGenius doesn’t do it for me. That is why I haven’t been paying it all that much attention lately and why I don’t intend spending all that much time on the site.

I am pretty excited about exploring LinkedIn further and I already connect to my business contacts on Plaxo Pulse. I don’t need another social networking site for business that doesn’t bring anything really innovative to the party.

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There was a brief discussion the other day on Twitter about LinkedIn and who uses it. I’ve been using it more and more lately, mainly to find out more about people I am dealing with (most of the people I deal with lately seem to be on LinkedIn in varying degrees) and to connect to people I work with.

I’ve started thinking about upgrading my account from a free personal account to a paid business account. The business accounts offer quite a bit more than the personal account. My question to myself is whether I am using LinkedIn enough to justify the $19.95 per month (or even the $199.50 per year). What I would really like to see is a post or discussion about the value of a business account and what difference it makes to a user. Do I need to be a power user to benefit from a business account? Is the correct question even whether I am using it enough to justify the upgrade? Should it be more about upgrading and reaping the rewards?

Are you using LinkedIn? What do you think? I think I am going to post this question on LinkedIn and see what people there think too.

Update:

I found this video on the LinkedIn blog which I am watching at the moment. This comes on the heels of news about LinkedIn’s $1bn valuation:

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linkedin, premium, business account, upgrade

I thought I would do a post about my office and the various tools I use to do the work I do for anyone who is interested in this stuff. Over the last month or so my office space has transformed being fairly paper dependent and cumbersome to a potentially and largely paperless office. Although I would love to see my office become totally paperless, the way the people I deal with work means that this is probably not going to happen anytime soon so my goal is to reduce the amount of paper I use as much as possible.

My setup about a month and a half ago included a black MacBook (2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 160GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM), a Samsung ML-2010 printer and a Samsung SCX-4720F multi-function printer). I bought the multi-function printer when I started my practice and, at the time, I was using a Windows PC which supports all the functions of the multi-function. When I migrated to my first Mac, a PowerBook G4, in late 2005 I discovered that the only thing I could do with the multi-function if it was connected to a Mac is print to it. The fax function was handled on the machine itself so there weren’t any issues there but I couldn’t scan to my Mac. That particular device (which I believe is no longer being sold) is strictly PC and Linux compatible (although I couldn’t work out how to get Ubuntu to support it).

The core piece of equipment in my office is my black MacBook.

This is the hub and essential tool for all my computer based activities. This isn’t the right place to talk about all the benefits of the Mac operating system and its latest iteration, Leopard, in particular. Suffice to say it leaves Windows in the dust and has as a possible next best option Ubuntu Linux which I used while my MacBook was in for repair and I was waiting for the new one.

Another important tool is 37 Signals’ Basecamp which I have been using as a client extranet and project workspace for some time now. Quite a lot of people use Basecamp and for good reason. It has a great interface and is really easy to use. I subscribe to the $49 Plus option which gives me 10GB of storage space, SSL security and enough projects to manage all my active files and more. I recommend Basecamp for anyone wanting to collaborate on projects and have considered doing it online.

I soon bought the ML-2010 (which is Mac compatible) so I could print directly from my Mac and kept the multi-function connected to the original PC for scanning jobs. I used the multi-function to send faxes and occasionally make copies of documents although I realised that I had better quality reproductions if I scanned the documents first and then printed copies as opposed to making straight photocopies. Incoming faxes come to me via Digifax which I have been using for a couple years now. It is a pretty simple fax to email solution.

The challenges with this setup were largely to due with the incompatibility of the multi-function with my PowerBook and then my MacBook. I had to get up from my desk and go to the PC to scan a document and then save the scan to a shared folder which I would then access from my Mac to retrieve the file. I sometimes found that the scanned files didn’t jive too well with Preview and I sometimes had to work some file format voodoo to sort out the scans. I also had to print documents to be faxed, head over to the multi-function at the PC desk and fax the documents manually. This isn’t an unusual workflow but given my desire to be able to handle faxes entirely digitally, it wasn’t a step in the right direction.

The first step I took towards a new workflow was inspired, in part, by Jason Calacanis who often spoke about how his employees at Mahalo have at least 2 displays at their work stations and often have 3. The reason for this is that this sort of setup improves productivity. I had been thinking along the lines of a second display for a little while already because it would save me having to constantly flip between applications when I work with multiple documents on my Mac. I have been scanning documents and working with them digitally for a little while so this became a problem I wanted to solve so I bought an Acer 22″ LCD monitor (mine had a silver trim) to accompany my Mac. This has already improved my productivity because I can comfortably place two documents side by side on the LCD monitor and work off my MacBook. This saves me a lot of window switching and frustration. I can refer directly to the documents and items I am dealing with without interrupting my flow every few minutes to switch windows.

The LCD is also great for media so I often move iTunes to the LCD and watch videos on the LCD. Another handy use for the LCD is to move Skype, IM and Twhirl onto the LCD so I can keep working on my MacBook and keep an eye on any incoming messages.

My next three purchases were inspired largely by Grant Griffiths, the home office lawyer and guru on mobile legal workers. I have been chatting to Grant for a while now and he has often told me about his setup which includes a scanner called a ScanSnap and a nifty piece of software called PageSender. ScanSnap scanners are really well made sheet fed scanners than can scan straight to PDF. There are versions for the Mac and the PC and Grant told me about how the ScanSnap has become such an invaluable part of his office that he just couldn’t see himself going without one. I had grown pretty frustrated with my scanning workflow using the multi-function through the PC and really wanted a Mac solution (I don’t see the PC being around for much longer). So I saved up and bought a ScanSnap S500M (it looks like the S510M which apparently wasn’t available here). This device is such a cool device I agree with Grant completely that it has become indispensible to my office workflows. For one thing it is really fast. The pages basically just feed through as if I am cycling paper through the machine and I get a double sided colour scan. I can customise the image resolution to suit my needs as well as specifying output folders, automatic file naming and output formats. What really makes this purchase worthwhile is that the scanner comes with Adobe Acrobat (I got version 7 with the ScanSnap for my Mac). This is worth a few thousand rands already. Using Acrobat you have more options for manipulating your PDFs than Preview allows for (although Preview in Leopard is a huge improvement over the Tiger version). I am already considering upgrading Acrobat to version 8 Pro to have the benefit of the additional functionality.

PageSender is a great fax application produced by Smile on my Mac which also produces gems like TextExpander which I use to automate a number of text-based tasks. The MacBook doesn’t ship with a modem so I went out and bought an external fax modem to go with PageSender. Between the ScanSnap and the PageSender/modem solution, I no longer needed the multi-function for the two main tasks I used it for, namely faxing and scanning. The only thing I can’t do with the ScanSnap is scan items that won’t feed through and which I would have used a flatbed scanner for. This isn’t a big issue for me because the ScanSnap will feed just about anything from an A4 page to a boarding pass.

My MacBook’s recent (complete and catastrophic) hard drive failure reminded me about the tremendous importance of good backups and big enough backup drives. Time Machine on Leopard was instrumental in preserving my sanity (it is a good reason to upgrade to Leopard). I wound up buying a new MacBook because I thought it would take a lot longer for the hard drive on my “old” MacBook to be replaced (it was still under warranty) and the new MacBook quickly picked up my Time Machine backup on my LaCie external hard drive and restored just about everything I thought I had lost. I even discovered that I had managed to backup my iTunes and iPhoto libraries! What I found, once I had my new MacBook up and running (it took me more time to reinstall all my apps than it did to restore the backup) I found that my external drive was too small to serve as the Time Machine backup for the new MacBook with its bigger hard drive. I set out to buy a second external drive and bought a Western Digital My Book 750GB USB drive which looks a lot like the one in the photo below:

Along the way I learned that you really should make sure the drive you want to buy is formatted for your machine. I first went with another WD drive that only seemed to be suited for a Windows machine and because it was an ethernet drive without a USB option, I couldn’t access the drive on my Mac and reformat it so I returned it.

By the time I bought this new external drive I had received my old MacBook back (I’ve said it before, C3 in Randburg is probably the best Apple dealer I have come across in terms of price, service and expertise – I won’t use anyone else for anything more substantial than a cable adaptor) and it turned out to be a relatively easy process to re-partition the new drive for the two MacBooks (my wife is using my old one and is thrilled) and share the drive via my USB port on my MacBook. I was advised to partition the drive and create a partition for each Mac that is going to access the drive. Each partition then shows up as a separate drive on my desktop and in Finder. I set my partition on the drive as my new Time Machine backup drive for everything on my Mac and the old LaCie drive has become a secondary backup drive for media and key documents. Time Machine will backup your entire profile by default and this means that when you restore a complete backup you get your user accounts, settings and all your files and folders back pretty easily. It certainly takes the edge off a drive failure and makes the cost of a bigger drive well worth it (not that external drives are that expensive these days). At the end of all this I have around 900GB of storage space, primarily for backups.

Not only has my desk changed a lot in the last month but my workflows have changed quite a bit too. I am donating the multi-function to Hospice and, instead, I now have the following solutions for my needs:

• Basecamp for project collaboration
• 22″ LCD screen for additional screen real-estate
• ScanSnap to handle scanning (including scanning incoming paper documents for paperless archival and faxing)
• PageSender and the external modem for outgoing faxes
• Digifax for incoming faxes via email
• Two external hard drives for complete Time Machine and redundant backups

One important need which I am not filling yet is some sort of power backup for when loadshedding returns and to cater for general power failures. At the moment this isn’t a pressing need but as Merlin Mann put it, you usually don’t realise you need more toilet paper when you are standing in the aisle at your local Woolies/Pick ‘n Pay/Spar.

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I love my MacBook and would like to say that I couldn’t see myself ever using anything other than a Mac but there is still a little doubt about such a statement.  As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, my MacBook’s hard drive crashed a week or so ago so badly that the data is irrecoverable (all 155 GB of it) and my only real hope to avoid disaster is to access my backup of my core documents from my external drive through Time Machine.  It also helps that I can recover much of my iTunes library from my iPod and my mail is all accessed via IMAP using Google Apps.

So when the final prognosis came back on my ailing MacBook I was told it would basically take about 2 to 3 weeks for a new hard drive to arrive and be installed.  2 to 3 weeks!?!?  Holy moley, that seems to me to be a long time to wait for a hard drive.  As I understand it these components need to be ordered from The Core Group which is the local Apple distributor and the gatekeeper of all things Apple.  The problem with this is that local Apple retailers/suppliers are dependent on this company for their stocks and it can take ages to receive anything.

Because of the delay I went and ordered a new MacBook which Core apparently had in stock.  I was told it would arrive either by Friday or Monday and once my preferred retailer, C3, confirmed my payment via EFT, I could pick up my spanking new MacBook and start recovering my data and get back to work using my productivity toolbox.  It now turns out I will have to wait another day or two before I can collect the MacBook and start my recovery and it struck me that a Mac is probably not the ideal solution for a business because of these sorts of delays.  What if I couldn’t afford to get a new MacBook while the “old” one is being repaired (actually, I can’t really afford one and had to make a plan to get back to work)?  I would be stuck and losing money daily.  While Macs are awesome machines and in my ideal world I would outfit my whole office with Macs, when they eventually go down (and they do … eventually), you had better have a solid backup plan (both meanings intended) or you may as well close up shop and go home for the rest of the month.  It isn’t just hardware supplies that take forever.  Last year I ordered the Leopard upgrade DVD and if I remember correctly it took about 2 months to get the DVD (I maintain these sorts of things should be handled by download).

It shouldn’t take more than a couple days to order, receive and test a new hard drive.  It shouldn’t take a week to get a new machine.  It certainly shouldn’t take 2 months to upgrade software.  These sorts of delays can make it difficult to switch to a Mac because the loss of revenue that would occur while waiting for a new part would far exceed the cost of the repair/replacement and could justify simply getting off the Mac bandwagon altogether.

I was chatting to my wife about this and how I probably wouldn’t recommend a total Mac solution for a business in SA and she pointed out that if more people in SA used Macs there would probably be bigger stock levels and reduced delivery times.  Even if this was true, it is a Catch 22 situation because I don’t see more businesses moving to Mac without faster response times.

(I emailed C3 to ask them why my order has been delayed further and I had a meaningful and positive response within 15 minutes to say the delay was on the supplier’s side.  If only the supplier responded as quickly and as helpfully as the fantastic people at C3)

I guess this is just another example of the dangers of having a monopoly which has a small and captive audience – there is no incentive to speed up delivery times and delivery better quality services.

ITWeb has quoted me in an article titled “Facebook can get you fired” which looks at how your activities on sites like Facebook can create problems for you back at the office. The article also includes quotes from Deshanta, Cerebra’s content manager so be sure to read the article.

I have just been thinking that a similar principle applies if you are the employer or entrepreneur. Your customers are also active on the Web so your online presence could easily impact on your relationships with your customers (and prematurely end new relationships with prospective customers). At the same time, your activities on the social web could serve as a really useful way to build and strengthen relationships.

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facebook, work-life balance, getting fired, work, risks

I just read a post on Jason Calacanis’ blog about working at a startup and how families fit into the picture and I posted this comment. When I finished the comment I realised it would make a decent post too, so here it is:

I left a corporate law firm largely because it had a “check your family at the door” policy. I didn’t have a child at the time, he only came along about 2 years later, but even then it was important that I have some down time to unwind.

I think that anyone who wants to be part of a startup has to accept that it won’t be a 9 to 5 job (although 37signals is doing some innovative stuff with their employees: http://tinylink.co.za/d58c8b) and that nutty working hours and habits are often involved. A lawyer I work with and who works 6 days a week, often 16 or more hours a day, once told me that work-life balance is relative. It doesn’t always mean a 9 to 5 job, Monday to Friday. I think the challenge is to find your own kind of balance amidst the chaos of a startup work life.

Although my son is only 4 months old, I can already see how having him makes it so important to focus on work and also make time to spend with him and my wife. Heck, even our 3 puppies need some attention (playing with dogs really helps stress levels too). My solution is to structure my working hours partly around my son’s feeds so I am up at 4am to work, feed him and get back to work. If I am working out and about I try to finish the day’s work by the time I get home so I can focus on my family at the end of the day.

It isn’t easy trying to balance all these considerations but it can be done.

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being a dad, family, startup, work-life balance, balance