Tole's Take

Here's an idea in GPS for a smart entrepreneur

2008-07-03T16:49:40-07:00

It's time has come - a manufacturer finally created a voice-themed GPS device, this one using KITT from the 80's Knight Rider TV show.

>>It was bound to happen sooner or later: Generation X nostalgia and modern technology have come together in the “Knight Rider” Global Positioning System from Mio Technology.

The Knight Rider GPS (www.knightridergps.com) takes both its sound and style from the 1980s television show about a computerized talking 1982 Pontiac Firebird named KITT. William Daniels, the actor who was the voice of the sleek black car, narrates the unit’s driving directions. The device, which sports a black exterior and flashing red lights, can be personalized to use one of 300 common names in the greetings and random phrases it utters.<<

Who's going to be the first smart entrepreneur to apply the mobile world paradigm of downloadable ringtones to GPS voices?

There's bound to be a market for everything from Shrek's voice and expressions ("You are dumber than a donkey! I said turn left!") to Yoda directions ("Left you will go, young padwan. There is no try, just do").

More entrepreneurial types will of course recognize the potential for, ahem, adult-themed directions as voiced by their favorite screen stars ("Oh you are a bad boy, I said to turn left ...").

Lifehack: 3 Tips to be More Efficient with Email

2008-07-01T18:45:05-07:00

One of my resolutions this year was to be more efficient at work, and that involved taking a step back and looking at my entire work picture in a completely different light. I've done this before, and each time I've found it is essential to take everything apart from the ground up in order to be effective.

It turned out that email was the single biggest detriment to my productivity, by a huge margin.

Email led to inefficiency (breaking my concentration when a new message appeared), incomplete work product (dashing off quick notes that, upon later review, led to an unnecessary number of responses to clarify the initial message), and a general feeling of unease throughout the day (checking frequently while waiting for a reply to appear).

So, here are 3 tips I've been using to be more efficient with email. I'm happy to report that they really do work if you are willing to employ them and not slip back into your old habits at crunch time:

1. Turn off email. Schedule 3-4 times per day to check your inbox, and stick to it religiously. The rest of the time, shut it down so it is not there as a distraction to your wandering eye. I check email at 6am, 10am, 3pm, and 9pm, and pound out all the emails I need to send or reply to in under 45 minutes per session.

2. Write short emails. I make all my emails 3 sentences or less; it forces me to think hard about what I want to say in the least amount of words. Anything longer? Pick up the phone and call the person.

3. BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front. Take a page from military correspondence, which has to be short, sweet and to the point. It's a key part of #2 above - say what you want to say right up front. Your audience will appreciate your emails and you will get much better (and faster) responses.

What's a good email template look like?
[First sentence: what you want to happen as a result of the email]
[Second sentence: the issue at hand]
[Third sentence: the deadline for completion]

Example:
"Dear Sue:

I need to know if the widget project will be completed by Friday.

Our biggest customer, Mega-corporation Inc., has a tight deadline for their integration of our widget. Please let me know by 4pm today if we are on schedule or if we are in jeopardy of missing the Friday deliverable so I can let them know. Thanks."

Incidentally, I find it is extremely helpful to your readers to have a paragraph break separating the first, and most important, point from the other two sentences. Most email readers are time-starved and overtaxed, so the joy of seeing a simple, one-line email request usually leads to an immediate response - voila, you have made your email more efficient!

Thoughts on the Landis case, now that it's finally over

2008-07-01T08:35:02-07:00

The Floyd Landis affair is finally over, now that the CAS has ruled against him and effectively stripped him of his 2006 Tour de France title for using performance-enhancing drugs.

There were a lot of red herrings thrown up throughout this case. In the last couple of years, I've done plenty of reading and listening to podcasts during long rides and runs and have always tried to cut through the BS and clutter to what is really going on in sport these days. Some thoughts:

- Labs are not biased, and are not out to get any particular athlete. Listen to Dr. Michael Ashendon explain it.

- Our initial reaction is nearly always with the athlete, whom we have just spent the better part of 3 weeks watching on TV. We are athletes ourselves, and positive in nature, so seemingly-heroic comebacks feed into our desire to believe in the good side of sports.

- The athletes themselves feed on this "need to believe" with their public pronouncements about their impeccable character/ethics/background. Remember Tyler Hamilton's dog who passed away? Landis's straight-laced Amish upbringing? Listen to reporter Mark Zeigler if you want the BS-free scoop from someone who has covered drugs in sports since 1988 and has been taken in by all the boy scout-type athletes who later turned out to have a dark side.

- The athletes' side of the story is the only one the public hears while the case is prepared for trial. Defense lawyers do their best to sway the court of public opinion and can talk freely to the press (unlike the prosecution), which serves to distort the picture of what really occurred and paint the athlete in a more sympathetic light. This is exacerbated by (or exacerbates) the public's "need to believe."

- Do I think cycling is the dirtiest sport out there? Hell, no - they just test more. There isn't a single drug test in the major US sports immediately after a game, unlike in cycling; the only "testing" is a handful of offseason tests, not the 24/7 unannounced on-demand testing anywhere in the world to which cyclists must submit. Plus, without any sort of testing for HGH it is hard to take mainstream sports seriously - take a look at videos of football, baseball and basketball players from 20 years ago as compared to today's players. Advances in nutrition and weightlifting can't explain everything.

Cycling has a long road to recovery if it wants to regain its good name in the public eye, and this will likely take a generation or more. While the questions raised about the effectiveness of current EPO tests makes you wonder if we are in for more of the same this year, the "need to believe" in me says that the public anti-doping stances adopted by Slipstream-Chipotle and Team High Road are a step in the right direction, as are the recent team sponsorship announcements by Garmin (now Garmin-Chipotle), Columbia Sportswear (replacing the High Road name) and Saxo Bank (taking over for CSC at year's end).

How to lose weight: the first 20 pounds are the hardest

2008-02-21T18:45:21-08:00

I lost 20 lbs. last year, and you can too. How? I'll lay out a series of topics below that I'll cover in future posts, but there are a few overriding principles that you'll have to get your head around to make this happen:

No "diets". A diet has a start date and an end date. You have to look at the structure of your overall life, and your nutrition in particular, in order to make lasting, meaningful changes.
Take the long view. You didn't get to this point overnight, and you won't get out of it overnight either.
Be realistic. Your initial plan will undoubtedly be overly optimistic in what you can achieve. Make your plan and then scale it back by 25% to make it achievable.
Make time to exercise. Look at your daily calendar. It's likely filled with lots of meetings, appointments, and other scheduled events; treat exercise just like any other recurring event and put it down in your schedule ahead of time.
Set goals that are defined, measurable (to assess progress), and have a date attached to them. The last is key to sharpening your focus -- it's been said that "goals are dreams with a deadline".

I lost the weight through diet (going back to basic dietary principles and re-assessing my nutrition from the ground up) and exercise (I got back into triathlon training after a six-year layoff and renewed my love of long-distance running). It's really quite simple, and you'll see that as a theme in the topics we'll cover in future posts:

How to re-assess your nutrition
Getting into endurance sports
How to run
How to recover from long workouts
Tips to make the long workouts more manageable

Hope you find this helpful; it's an ongoing process, but incredibly rewarding!

If you love the sport of cycling, you should be rooting for Team Slipstream-Chipotle

2008-02-10T16:19:33-08:00

Jonathan Vaughters, the director sportif of Team Slipstream-Chipotle (team links here and here), was interviewed recently on The Competitors Radio by Bob Babbitt and Paul Huddle, and you can find the podcast here. If you haven't heard their weekly podcasts, you are missing out on a ton of knowledge (and laughter) about endurance sports that make all those long runs & rides less boring and more entertaining.

Vaughters gives the most open and honest appraisal I've ever heard of the predicament that professional cycling has gotten itself into, and his team's approach to taking the first steps to solve it. It involves thousands of drug tests, an open-door policy for any media outlet that wants access to such results, and, most importantly, sponsors who share his vision that race results are not the ultimate prize. The last reason is critical since this is what has bedeviled cycling for the last decade -- by simultaneously demanding top results from riders in order to stay employed but turning a blind eye towards what those riders were forced to resort to just to stay competitive, cycling teams created and fostered the drug culture which is only just starting to loosen with the coming of age of the young generation (witness rising American star Taylor Phinney's sticker on his top tube: "Dopers suck").

Here are the podcast notes:

Jonathan Vaughters was a professional cyclist who basically quit his sport young, at the age of 30, partly because he was frustrated by the rampant drug use. Now Vaughters is running the Slipstream Cycling Team and accountability is the name of the game. His team will administer 1200 drug tests to their athletes this year alone and the media will be invited to training camps so that they can see that Team Slipstream is clean. He is out to change the culture of the sport of cycling by hopefully proving that you can be competitive and drug free at the same time. Vaughters was incredibly open and honest in this conversation.

Highly recommended listening. If you are a cycling fan who loves this beautiful sport, you should be rooting for their team to experience success in the Grand Tours. While you're at it, throw a little love to the sponsors who make it all possible; a list of the oh-so-tasty Chipotle restaurants in your area can be found here.

The fracturing holy trinity of the Republican party

2008-02-09T10:34:33-08:00

The Republican party has historically had 3 archetypes in its presidential candidates: the social conservative preacher, the fiscal conservative Wall Streeter, and the national defense conservative hawk. Ronald Reagan was the only candidate in the last 35 years to unite all three wings, which is why every new candidate seeks to cloak themselves in his mantle.

Most GOP candidates in the last 3 decades, though, have represented 2 of the 3 wings. The current President Bush is an example; his 2000 campaign featured his background as a born-again Christian (the preacher) and a fiscal conservative who had run the state of Texas and promoted tax cuts to spur growth (the Wall Streeter). To shore up what he lacked in the national defense wing, he brought former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney onto the ticket to give him street cred with the military hawks. Their administration has strayed far and wide from these initial campaign principles, but that is another story ...

Turning to the 2008 campaign, there are ominous signs ahead for the GOP since this "holy trinity" of the 3 wings has splintered badly, and no candidate unites even 2 of the 3 wings. Prior to Mitt Romney's exit this week from the race, here is how things stood:

John McCain commands the national defense wing, but he is despised by the social conservatives (for some socially liberal stands and his past comments about the religious right being agents of intolerance) and by the Wall Streeters (given his self-described lack of knowledge about economics)
Mike Huckabee has become the standard-bearer for the social conservatives (and in fact he is a preacher), which kept this wing from any thoughts it may have had of coalescing around either Romney or Fred Thompson. Outside of this wing, he has zero credibility with the other two wings.
Mitt Romney was the choice of the Wall Streeters, with his long and successful career in the private sector. But his campaign struggled to rally the social conservatives to his cause, and he made ham-handed attempts to mollify the military hawks (doubling the size of Guantanamo? electing a Democrat would be a surrender to terror?).

As the presumptive nominee, the big problem for McCain is that the vote against him in nearly all the Super Tuesday states far outweighed the vote for him -- it wasn't like he had one main rival who was siphoning votes, he had two. It's unlikely that he will be able to pacify the Wall Street crowd (see his reception of cheers and jeers at the CPAC this week), so in order to unite at least one of the other wings to his cause, he will have to tack dramatically to the right and risk losing his strength with independents.

Conceivably, he could pick Huckabee as a running mate to shore up this support. But that seems increasingly unlikely; Huckabee is the youngest candidate in the GOP field, and his surprisingly strong showing in this year's campaign has given him a new level of name recognition on the national stage as the undisputed leader of the social conservative movement. He may very well decide to cultivate support in one of the other two wings to craft a presidential run in 2012. Romney is likely thinking the same thing, broadening his support beyond fiscal conservatives into one (or even both) of the other wings.

The prediction here is that McCain won't be able to rally enough conservatives to his his side to prevail, and Huckabee and Romney fight it out for the nomination in 2012. After all, the GOP is a party of primogeniture and the candidate who came in second last time often gets the nod the next time around (see, e.g., Reagan's losing efforts in the primaries of 1968 and 1976 before finally prevailing in 1980).

Question on "the vegan paradox": do hard-core vegan mothers breastfeed their babies?

2008-02-06T20:55:21-08:00

It was a completely random question that came up in conversation today. Is breastmilk an animal product, and therefore not suitable for vegans (hard-core ones, e.g., them + baby), or is it acceptable -- are humans a different sort of "animal" in this context?

Not looking for any hate mail, just thought it was a something to ponder ... Kind of reminded us of the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek fame. Here's a sample of one of the many funny, yet rather strident responses to this topic on Yahoo! Answers:

Breastmilk is vegan because it's completely consensual and there was no exploitation involved. Similarly, other bodily secretions (hint hint) of humans are also vegan if consensually given.

Cows' milk is for calves, not humans. However, in farms cows are treated as nothing more than milking machines. They are constantly kept pregnant and their calves are taken away at birth and if male, are slaughtered in a matter of weeks for veal. There's a saying that goes "Every glass of milk has a little bit of veal in it".

Humans are the only animal that drinks the milk of another animal... and past infancy too. It's funny that a lot of adults think drinking human breastmilk is completely gross but it's acceptable to drink the milk of another animal. I never really understood that cognitive dissonance.

Veganism opposes all animal exploitation. It is not about purity as many omnivores like to think, it is about resisting exploitation and commodification of sentient beings.

The Great Game of Search: Why Microsoft + Yahoo will work

2008-02-04T18:44:30-08:00

There has been endless amounts of ink shed on this already. That said, I'll offer a few words from the perspective of someone who was on the frontlines of this battle for a long time (I was with Yahoo! for 5 years, and handled business development for the search team when things were booming).

Search is the new Great Game, as Chris Sherman termed it a few years ago. The term was originally coined by Rudyard Kipling and refers to the struggle for empire in Central Asia between Great Britain and Russia, with a host of proxy states and battles in between. If you want a riveting account of how the Great Game played out, and how it's impact is still being felt in the global economy and security situation, read Peter Hopkirk's book (link at left), which is even better than a work of fiction.

So why will Microsoft + Yahoo work? First, to paraphrase James Carville: it's the economics, stupid. As BusinessWeek aptly puts it, "More than $400 billion in global advertising is looking to make sense of online media, and no garage-based startup, no matter how visionary, can meet such high-volume needs. For the foreseeable future, it will be the reigning behemoth of the PC operating system vs. the emergent giant of the online world, competing for online consumers with resources of gargantuan proportions." A combined Microsoft-Yahoo will still be #2 in this market, but even #2 can make a lot of money in the near term.

Second, there's been a lot of talk about the culture clash involved in putting together a Redmond software company and a Silicon Valley Internet outfit, see, e.g., Fake Steve Jobs' take on it. This issue is way overblown. People forget that when Yahoo! bought Overture in 2003, who were Overture's two largest distribution partners? Yahoo! and Microsoft. And guess what? Microsoft was happy enough with the relationship to re-up for another two years, so (at least on the search side) the two corporate cultures have worked quite well together in the recent past and forged a bond over their shared dislike/fear/concern about Google. Sure, there may be some culture clash in other business units but ultimately this deal comes down to search and advertising, so those are the two groups that matter most.

Finally, while some talent will undoubtedly bail out, I've spoken to enough talented engineers on the Yahoo! Search team who have spent the last 5-7 years trying to out-Google Google (some as far back as Inktomi and AltaVista), and they don't want it all to have been in vain, e.g., throw in the towel and simply outsource search to Google. Their view is, if Microsoft really wants to win in search and has the deep pockets and corporate commitment to do so, they are willing to redouble their efforts to try and beat the Mountain View boys.

Enjoy the Great Game in the meantime!

Giants win the Super Bowl -- another NY football upset!

2008-02-03T22:07:55-08:00

Wow, talk about an upset of epic proportions -- this has to rank up there with Broadway Joe Namath (at left) predicting that the Jets would beat the Colts in 1969 and then going out and doing it.

Great work by Eli Manning and the gang, especially as a testament to the value of perseverance and never giving up on oneself. Belichick storming off the field like a prima donna before the game was even over -- now that showed an incredible lack of class, but par for the course by the Spygate mastermind!

How much more fit is "Ultramarathon man" Dean Karnazes than you?

2008-01-31T16:55:25-08:00

This one blew me away when I heard it on an archived Competitor Radio podcast (which I listened to while running, appropriately enough). When Dean Karnazes, author of Ultramarathon Man and all-around ultraendurance guru, was training for the North Face Endurance 50 (running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days, which he completed in one piece), he worked with Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong's coach, to fine-tune his training.

In addition to using 100-mile ultramarathons like The Western States Endurance Run as mere training runs (!), Dean and Chris established a benchmark that let them know when he was ready for the Endurance 50:

>> Complete a sub-four hour marathon with an average heart rate of 110.

Read that last part again -- an average heart rate of 110! Most people hit that getting off the couch; try running even a mile at that HR and you'll know what I mean.

Wow. Double wow.