Take Some Time to Disconnect

Posted on by
Reply

On Monday, Lauren and I got back from our cruise in the Western Caribbean.  It was my first time cruising.   It was great and I could probably write an entire post about cruising.    Maybe I will.

My favorite part of the experience was being able to disconnect from the Internet for a week.  I didn’t have mobile reception and getting wifi was prohibitively expensive.  So I just went with out it, which was great.  I just sat by the pool, read books, and drank margaritas.

It can be easy for your life to get wrapped up in the online and you completely forget to live in the offline first.   That’s why I find it important to take these times to disconnect and just live, rather than worrying about tweeting, instagramming, and facebooking.

It’s amazing the amount of life you start to see when you put down your phone… or it’s amazing how much you miss out on when you’re always engrained in what’s happening on your phone more than what’s happening infront of you.

So… take a wee, day, or even an afternoon and liberate yourself from the Internet.

Ya Gotta Give First…

Posted on by
Reply

I love being part of the DC Technology community.  It’s so great to spend time with local tech entrepreneurs.   In all that time, one thing continually amazes me… so many don’t understand that if you want to get something out of a community, you have to give first.

To quote Gary Vaynerchuk, you have to give give give till your face falls off.

If you go into a relationship and you just start asking for favors, people are going to think that you’re a douchebag.

Before you ask for something, you first have to ask how you can help others?   Isn’t this super basic stuff?  Yet, I hear it all the time!

Find a need that you can serve, jump in, and fill it.

Joining HelloWallet as Marketing Manager

Posted on by
4

HelloWallet Front Office

Hey guys, I have some personal news. I’ve recently joined the DC-based online financial guidance startup HelloWallet as their new Marketing Manager. When I first met with the team a few months ago, I was blown away by what they were doing with not only providing top-notch tools for online financial tracking & management but also financial guidance.

Starting at the top with CEO Matt Fellowes and throughout the company, HelloWallet is employing top financial minds and have built personalized recommendations right into the online application, with the goal of maximizing your financial wellness. I’m excited by the opportunity to lead the effort in telling HelloWallet’s story.

Wanna learn more about HelloWallet?  Holla. Email me up. – justin@hellowallet.com

Oh and here’s an overview video for the product.

Also, would recommend watching this preso that our CEO Matt did at Ignite DC about “Our Future Path to Prosperity.”

Better Living Through Data

Posted on by
2

Back in the 1980s, American chemical company DuPont had a marketing slogan “better living through chemistry.”  Of course, it was then adapted to mean other not so nice things.

In today’s Internet age, I think we’re seeing the rise of better living through data.

Businesses are already pretty used to using data to improve how they operate.  It’s common for a business to hire a business intelligence analyst, who analyzes the data that your company creates to help you identify ways improve efficiency of sales or operations.  The online advertising world is seeing a data revolution.  With the wealth of data being produced online, advertisers can target their ads to the people that would benefit from seeing them.

But I’m not talking about businesses, I’m talking about the onset of a personal data revolution.  We’re seeing the start of using technology to better track, analyze, and improve various parts of your daily personal life.

Here’s a few apps that I’ve used or am fond of…

I’m a HUGE fan of the iPhone app RunKeeper. If I carry my iPhone with me when I go for a run, it’ll track how far and fast I ran automatically.  I can also take it with me to the gym and manually enter it.   They’ve also recently made it possible for third party systems to send in health data.  Everything is then stored in their master database.   Their website will then help me understand my progress achieving my health goals.

One app/gadget that I haven’t tried but want to is FitBit.  It’s a little gadget that you can attach to your clothes.  It’ll log your movement and sleeping patterns and visualize that data for you.  It can also pipe that data into RunKeeper database

Also in the health space, there are apps like WeightWatchers.  It assigns a point system to foods based on it’s nutritional facts.  You then subtract points from your daily allotment based on what you eat.  It helps you see what you eat and learn to keep things in better moderation.    It’s cool but I haven’t used it.  *sigh*  I should. I wish there was a way that you could do this automatically.  Can’t they stick a little computer in my stomach that’d auto-log whatever I eat.

More in the social media space, there’s Klout which I’ve actively been using lately.  I give it access to a number of my social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.)  It then assigns a Klout score to me based on how often I influence the people who follow me (clicks, re-shares, retweets.)   I can then start to figure out what I had done over certain periods of time to figure out how that effected my influence (or Klout score).  For example, when I went on my honeymoon, I didn’t post to my social networks and thus my Klout Score dropped.

Similarly, I use HootSuite as the tool to post links & updates to all the various social networks (Facebook & Twitter).  HootSuite will automatically generate a report to tell me which links were clicked, how often, and what social networks they resonated with.  Compared with all the links about the professional topics that I share, links about my wedding or honeymoon got 10x the number of clicks.

So… these apps are great!  They’re starting to give us data that allows us to wrap our heads around the activities that we do on a daily basis and how those activities affect of our lives.   The next step is helping us to better take that data and using it  to improve how we do stuff going forward.   For example, I should run/exercise different.   For social media, I need to tweet more about these type of stories because it’s what my audience cares about.

Do you use any of these tools?  What are other tools that you use to better understand the data that you produce in your life?   What do you think of the tools?  How could they improve?

Silicon Hill

Posted on by
1

Has been so fun to watch the DC tech community grow.  The excitement is palpable. Check out the article by Raymond Schillinger in the Huffington Post. He calls it Silicon Hill. :)

For far too long, the West Coast — primarily Silicon Valley — has held a monopoly on headline-grabbing tech entrepreneurship. The singular reign of the Valley, however, may soon be eroding, thanks to the efforts of a vibrant, young, and visionary coalition of technologists and investors in and around the nation’s capital.

The pace at which Washington, D.C. is evolving into a capital for reasons other than politics is astounding. My own Google Calendar is constantly being populated with new tech happy hours, networking events, developer conferences and incubator pitch sessions. Weeks without at least one major tech-related event are an endangered species.

Om Malik: I’m in the business of making my customers happy.

Posted on by
Reply

I’m a pretty religious listener of the Leo Laporte’s online show This Week in Tech and have been for a long time.

This Sunday, he had GigaOm founder Om Malik and All Things D‘s Editor Kara Swisher on.  These are two tech journalists that I have a tremendous amount of respect for.  They both write well thought out smart blogs.

Well, around 1 hour and 15 minutes into the show they get into this great discussion about new vs. old media and how it’s not about the medium for the content and it’s about the content itself.

Om gives a fantastic quote, which I thought was worth calling out and I think speaks a lot to the success that he’s seen. He says…

I’m in the business of making my customers happy.  My customers are my readers.  If they’re happy everything else will follow.

Right on Om. You pump out great content and thus I keep on reading.  It’s a good word for all of us.  We need to keep the main thing, our customers, the main thing.

Be Transparent When There’s a Problem…

Posted on by
Reply

So yesterday, I wrote about how I had a really bad experience getting post-dinner pie from a local pie shop.  The employees were scurrying around and seemed totally oblivious to the fact that Lauren and I hadn’t received pie yet.  It was super frustrating.

Well, I went to the website to email the shop and let them know about my experience and that it would greatly influence our interest in coming back to the shop.

So, the manager wrote back and mentioned that we got there right amidst the shift change.  It’s a process that isn’t a smooth as it should be and is what caused the massive delay while we were waiting in line.  She  said that they even had thought about closing the shop for 30 minutes during the shift change.  Additionally, the delay in us getting our pie was from the fuse blowing because of a new machine that they had in the back.  Their staff needed to attend to the issue right away.

If the folks at the pie shop would have been like, “Hey, we’re changing shifts right now.” or “Hey, we have a problem in the back. One of our new machines just blew a fuse.” We would have totally understood.  They just needed to be transparent about what’s going on.

Problems happen.  When something goes wrong at work, we’ll throw up a blog post or a tweet so that our users know that we recognize the problem and that we’re working to resolve it.    We’re transparent about what’s going on.   We apologize for what’s happened.  We may have to hand out the proverbial slice of free pie but usually we’re able to get things back to where they were with minimal damage to the trust we have between us and our customers.

When there’s a problem (and yes, there’ll be a problem), let folks know about it.  I think the first reaction is that folks will be shocked that you’re not perfect.  I think everyone realizes that problems happen.  Customers will understand.  Just own up to the problem.  Apologize for it.  Learn from it.  Rinse and repeat.  You’ll be better off for it.