Slowly Dipping My Toes Into A Startup

Over the last year and half there has been a nagging voice in my head that I should 'start something,' but the issue is I never know what. I have toyed with a few ideas, one being a start-up with the idea of you being able to produce your own custom argyle patterns. The best part of this start-up was that we got a name thanks to my friend Pat, called Ourgyle. Clever, eh? However, it hit a big hurdle when we realized the game of clothing production is not an easy task and the idea was placed on the shelf.

Fast forward a few months - I make the move to Chicago where I have nearly daily access to Nate, and the ideas start flowing. Well to be fair, the beer started flowing first, which should of been our first warning that subsequent ideas should be explored with caution. Anyways, over a few beers we decide that we want to pursue creating a beer site and we cleverly named it Brewmance. The goal of the site is to enhance your drinking experience, knowledge, and discovery of new beers.

We asked some incredibly talented developers, Peter and Kevin, to join our efforts and they graciously joined. Over the last 5 months we have hashed out many ideas and the coders have put together some amazing first passes at our product. We are getting close to launching in an alpha mode soon so if you want invite, let me know.

This project has been solely an after work thing for 4 guys who are devoted to their careers so personally I have had difficulty prioritizing it. The bitch of it is, I have something that is beer related, which I love, a potential start-up, and yet I'm still not seizing the opportunity properly. I'm struggling with hitting that extra gear that some people seem to have and it's really bugging me. Is it that I'm not cut out for that kind of drive or is there something holding me back?

I get asked occasionally to have more passionate posts, or as some put it, display the 'inner-deem' more often. This is my first attempt at that and my request back is what do you do when things are going well, but you want to reach that next level?

Google Voice FTW!

I have been lucky enough to have access to Google Voice, previously GrandCentral, for quite some time now. However, I haven't always been impressed and actually stopped using it for 6 months. With the launch of the Mobile Apps I decided to give it another try and install it on my Android device. So far I have really enjoyed it and the ability to manage SMS from the web as well as your phone has been a nice feature for me.

The real reason for this post though is to sing the praises of conference calling on the fly. Many of you know that I just recently got engaged to Lauren and with this has come endless phone calls with multiple people trying to nail down a date. Previously we were calling her parents, calling each other back, and so on. Then today I decided to try using Google Voice conference calling and it worked brilliantly! Here is how it works:

1. You have one person call you on your Google Voice number
2. Have the other person call you on your Google Voice number as well
3. When you switch over to the second call Google Voice will give you an option to conference them in. You simply push 5 on your phone and you have a conference call.

I love it!

Questions for the readers:

• What Google Voice features are you loving?
• Haven't switched to Google Voice yet, why not?

My Thoughts on Running Effective Meetings

After having a discussion at work about how to run an effective meeting and reading a NYT piece on meetings, I started to give the topic some thought. Regardless if you work for a big corporation, are in school, or work at a small start-up, meetings are going to be a fact of life. Just like email unfortunately is. So since we have to deal with meetings let's at least take the time to understand how to make them worth our time.

There are two type of people that come to a meeting, the meeting owner and the meeting attendees. It's important to understand which you are because it will drastically determine what you do before, during, and after the meeting.

Meeting Owner

Before:

• Send out a clear objective of the meeting so that everyone is clear what the purpose of the meeting is
• Send out questions and reference material to allow attendees to begin to form their thoughts
• Invite the right people 
• All the logistical things like rooms, projectors, VC equipment, etc

During:

• Assign someone to take notes if you aren't going to, making sure they keep track of action items
• Introduce everyone if it's the first time people are meeting to help set context
• Set the agenda from the beginning of the meeting
• Play time keeper. Make sure you cover what you set out to cover
• Do your best to include everyone in the meeting
• Take the last few minutes of the meeting to do a recap and cover what action items came up

After:

• Send out notes from the meeting making sure to highlight action items
• Clearly state if the meting met it's objective or if another meeting will need to occur

It is my opinion that the person who calls the meeting is on the hook for it going smoothly. Their preparation and attitude towards the meeting will go along way in making it successful. Next time you are in a great meeting compliment the person who ran it!

Meeting Attendee

Before:

• Make sure that you review the objective of the meeting and be sure it makes sense for you to attend. Value your time, not all meetings need you so make sure you prioritize.
• Read any relevant material before the meeting
• Jot down some notes about things you want to say. It will make you sound much more articulate when you decide to speak up

During:

• Don't talk to much. I recently red the traffic light rule for talking which I think is wonderful. "During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green: your listener is probably paying attention. During the second 30 seconds, your light is yellow -- your listener may be starting to wish you'd finish. After the one-minute mark, your light is red: Yes, there are rare times you should "run a red light:" when your listener is obviously fully engaged in your missive."
• Take personal notes

After:

• Follow through on any action items that you owned
• Give feedback on how the meeting went to the person who called it

There is nothing here that is more than advanced common sense, but even my elementary attempt at outlining how to run effective meetings is neglected daily. Instead of complaining about bad meetings, start doing the little things to make them more effective.

Questions:

• What would you add to the list of things the Meeting Owner should do?
  
• What would you add to the list of things the Meeting Attendee should do?
  
• Do you disagree with anything here?
• Do you have general comments?

Seperating Faceebook and Twitter

Over the last 6 months I have had my Twitter updates (tweets) linked to facebook so that when I updated Twitter it would automatically update my status. I have enjoyed this for the most part because I have gotten some decent discussions going on through facebook because of tweets. However, I find that I hesitate to tweet because I don't want to spam news feeds and the crowd that are friends with me on facebook is drastically different than those on Twitter. 

After a lot of thought I have decided to no longer have my Twitter and facebook accounts linked. What does this mean? If you enjoyed or hated my facebook statuses they will no longer be there; cry or rejoice. I'm assuming most of you won't care or actually be happy about this, but some of you might actually find value in some of my updates. Therefore, I wanted to give a quick overview of Twitter. That way you can sign up for a Twitter account and still see all  of my the tweets.

What is Twitter?

One of the best answers I have heard is that Twitter is a ball of clay. You really do make it into whatever you want it to be. At it's highest level it's a service that allows users to post messages that are no longer than 140 characters in length, similar to SMS. From there you can begin to follow people that tweet about things that interest you. For example, if you are Detroit Pistons fan you can follow @DETPistons or if you love Starbucks you could follow @Starbucks. So I can hear you now, 'what the hell is the @ sign?' This is used to reference or direct a comment at someone. For example, if I wanted to respond to my friends Tom's latest Tweet publicly I would write '@tomshea nice find! I really liked that article.'

How do I sign up?

Go here  and create an account. From there you can start by following me  :)

Here is a nice 2 minute overview of Twitter.

Let me know if you have questions and hopefully I will see you on Twitter soon.

My Version of a VLookUp Tutorial

So today I was given 2 lists and I needed to find out what they had in common and what there differences were. The basic gist of VLOOKUP is that it will take a value and look through a huge table to see if it closely or exactly matches any values in the table.

So how do you do it?

Let's take a simple example; we are going to see how many of our favorite foods are actually fruits. So in column 1 we will have a list of fruits and in column 2 we will have a list of our favorite foods. 

We need to know right the function to take the value in column B and search column A to see if it exists. Remember this is a simple example just to get the concept down, I promise this comes in handy when you have a huge dataset. When you pull up the help center article in Excel for the function this is what they give you "VLOOKUP(lookup_value,table_array,col_index_num,range_lookup)" A bit daunting in my opinion!

Breaking it down we know that VLOOKUP is the name of the function. 

• 'Lookup_valule'  is what our first parameter is going to be that we want to take and see if it exists in our list. In the first row it would be 'pizza.'
  
• 'table_array' this is the master list you are trying to compare against. In our case it is fruits.
• 'col_index_num' says if I find the value that I'm looking for, what column should I return data from. This number is much more useful if you are searching a table that has multiple columns. For example, names of people and their age, we might be looking for their name, but want to return column 2, their age. In our case we are just going to put 1, which states if you find a match, return the fruits name
• 'range_lookup' this can be true or false. This is a bit convoluted, but if you put 'TRUE' it will look for partial matches. If you put 'FALSE' it will require an exact match. In our case we want to put 'FALSE'

Based on all of that the formula that I would put into column C row 2 would be =VLOOKUP(B2, $A$2:$A$7, 1, FALSE). The result you should see is '#NA' which means that it could not find 'pizza' in the list of fruits. Next step is to drag or copy the formula down to column 6 so it is next to each of your favorite fruits. It should look something like this.

The only other thing that you may not be familiar with is the '$' that I used in the formula. This is a way to anchor your formula so when you drag it down it doesn't automatically adjust the values. We didn't use it for B2 because we wanted it to change to C2, D2, etc. However, we wanted the range of fruits to stay the same.

Once you have the data I usually copy and do a paste special to choose just the values and manipulate however I need to. This is by no means the fastest or most eloquent way to do this type of thing, but I thought I would share it since I spent a good deal of time working on this today.

Audibe - 2 Thumbs Up

After finishing my first Audible book, The Hot Kid, and starting my second, Devil in The White City, I must say I'm a huge fan. If you want to try it out I would recommend using the promo code www.audible.com/twit2. This will give you 2 free books when you sign up for the platinum plan, which kicks in after a 2 week free trial. I will admit it is a bit expensive, $22/month for 2 credits, which usually equals 2 books. I think I will pay for a few months, get some books in the collection, pause the service until I get caught up, then renew if I miss it.

My iPod Touch has allowed me to consume so much more media; TWIT and Diggnation weekly along with an audio book in just the last few weeks. What tricks do you have to consume more media?

My October Media

I apologize I didn't get my regular Sunday post out this week. I do plan on writing a post very soon about how I see sites like Facebook and LinkedIn being used by my generation. In the meantime I thought I'd share with you what's been keeping me entertained. 

...What music I've been listening to: Ra Ra Riot's The Rhumb Line

...What Aubible books are on the IPod: The Hot Kid by Elmore Leondard

...What Aubible books are on the IPod: Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

...What book is on the nightstand: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

...A politica piece that moved me: The Choice from the New Yorker

Hope everyone had a great week and keep the awesome comments coming. 

Tips and Thoughts On Email

I know most people out there hate email and find it to be incredibly annoying and a waste of time, but the fact of the matter is we all have to deal with it in some way on a daily basis. That is why I believe you should take the time to learn some of the nuances that can allow you to better manage email and leverage it as a communication medium. A lot of the information that I have picked up came from being in a fraternity that was driven by email and then working at Google where I have around 150 emails a day flowing into my inbox. I have put together some tips and comments on email that I thought I'd share here. None of these tips are rocket science, if anything, advanced common sense at best.

Managing Email:

• Practice Inbox Zero. If you actually take one piece of advice that I give, please take this one! Inbox Zero is an art of keeping your inbox clean by processing email into different categories. I use four categories: Action, Read, Waiting, and Archive. Watch the video by Merlin Mann to get a better idea of the system, if you're short on time hit up 14:57 - 24:50.
• Learn the keyboard shortcuts of your email program. For Gmail there are incredibly powerful keyboard shortcuts that can save you an incredible amount of time. You can get the entire list here.
• Create Labels/Folders depending on your mail client. If you're using Gmail using labels allows you to better search and retrieve email later on. For example, you can do a search for "label:travel nwa" and it will pull up any email that has the label of "travel" and contains "nwa" in the email. Since Gmail alphabetizes your labels, you can do things like adding a '_' to bring the important labels to the top and adding a 'z-' to send less important labels to the bottom.
• Use filters or some sort of routing rules to manage the flow of email. 

Communicating Through Email:

• Write clear subject lines that indicate the desired purpose of the email. If you are specifically asking for action to be taken include something like "Contact For Michigan IT Needed." This seems like a no brainer, but people continue to write terrible subject lines or skip it all together. So put yourself in the shoes of the reader and write a subject line that will indicate the desired affect of the email.
• Triple check that you have attached any files that you reference in the email. Also, consider what format you are sending it in, if it is Office 2007 does everyone have a program that can open that format? 
• Make sure that you convert any and all links into click-able links. If you reference a website and copy and paste it into the email make sure you use the program to tell it that's a web link. This will allow the person reading your email to just click the link rather than having to copy and past it into a new tab.
• Specifically state what you want the reader to do in the beginning of the email. If you're writing out some thoughts and just want someone to read them, state that in the beginning of the email. That way the reader has context as to why they are reading your email and can be thinking about what they need to do once they have finished reading it. 
• Proofread! Make sure you double check your email for major spelling and grammatical errors. This is definitely something I'm terrible at and am always trying to get better at.
• Use a signature that makes sense. I personally don't believe in using signatures, but if you need to use one make sure that it is concise and depicts the information that is relevant. I've seen so many 8 line signatures that are so obnoxious. Why do you need to give someone your email in your signature when you are emailing them? Why not spice it up a bit, include a link to your blog, FriendFeed profile, etc.
• Don't send emails angry! If you find yourself pounding out a passionate email, save it as a draft and re-read it a few hours later and make sure that you're being professional and the email is appropriate. You rarely will regret not sending the email immediately, but there is a much better chance you will regret sending a passionate email. 
• Don't Email. Instead consider shooting the person an IM or a phone call.

What other email tips would you add? Are there any that you disagree with me on?

Running Your Own Mint

Over a year ago I wrote a post about how I had been using Yodlee to keep track of all of the different financial accounts I was maintaining. At the same time Mint.com was coming onto the scene as a new player. But with a limited number of supported accounts and unproven track record, I kept with Yodlee. However, a lot has changed since last June. First of all, Mint won the TechCrunch40 best company last September. So with some more experience under their belt and a large list of supported financial institutions, I decided to switch from Yodlee to Mint. 

So why exactly should you care about this? Bottom line is must of us do a poor job keeping track of all of our different bank accounts and Mint is a great way to automate this process, get insight into your spending, and help yourself become more financially responsible.

Getting started is easy, just head over to Mint to create your new account. From there you are able to add your accounts to the dashboard and they will begin to download recent transactions. This is the part people might hesitate on, do I really want to share my bank account login? Obviously privacy has been one of the biggest opponents to Mint's success and I believe they have handled it well. You can check out their privacy and security policy if you would like.

As the transactions begin to roll into your Mint account the system will do it's best to apply a category to the transaction, but you have the option to edit or add a new one. This is great because you can start to see how much you spend on, say, dining out in a month. This is very helpful to see where your money is going and decide if there are some changes that you should make to your spending habits. 

The other thing I use Mint for regularly is balancing my checking, saving, and credit card balances. The goal is to keep as much as I can in my high yield saving account, but have enough in my checking account to pay off my credit card bill. So instead of visiting all three sites on a daily basis I can use Mint to get a quick overview of all three balances and decide if action is needed.

Let others know what you do to track your finances in the comments.

How To Get Started With Google Reader

I have tried to push many of my friends onto frindfeed, but with no success. However, lately I have told a few people about Google Reader and have had much better success in getting  adopotion. So I thought I would put a quick guide to getting started with Google Reader.

Before we get started on setting up your Reader account, lets talk about what Reader is and why it makes sense for most of us. Google Reader is a website that pulls in 'feeds' that you specify so that you can read a variety of material without leaving one page. It also keeps track of what you have and haven't read so you don't miss any big news. There are some nice social features built in; sharing, emailing, and sharing with notes. The biggest advantage of Reader is the sheer speed at which you can consume a mass amount of media because of the layout and Gmail like keyboard shortcuts.

Getting Started

1. Login to your Google Reader account by visiting www.google.com/reader
2. Click 'Add subscription' and type in a website you read often, such as StuffWhitePeopleLike.com
3. Rinse and Repeat. Keep adding sites that you visit frequently
4. Setup folders to manage your feed list so you can prioritize what you read
5. Edit your sharing settings to start to share articles with your friends

Once you have started using Google Reader you will notice that there will be a section called "Friends shared items." These are any of your Gmail contacts that are sharing items through Google Reader. This is a very nice social feature that fits nicely into the Reader interface and allows you see what your friends are reading. If you are interested in sharing items that you don't read in Reader, the 'bookmarklet' is a great feature to do this.

If you have any problems, make sure to follow the links or check out the Reader Help Center. 

Have any other tips for people that are getting started with Reader, share them in the comments. 

If you aren't using Reader, why aren't you and what would need to be changed for you to start using it?