Those moving walkways you see in airports do a great job of making short distances even shorter. Important when you’re racing to catch your flight. 

Notice how the shops are always at the ends of the walkways, not in the middle. Shopkeepers know that when you’re on the walkway it’s hard to get off, hard to wander into their shop. 

What might a bicycle-friendly cafe look like?

• Indoor parking for bicycles so you don’t need to lock them up?

• Seats next to each of the parking spots?

• Built-in locks on every parking stall to speed up the locking process?

• To-go cups that fit in your bike water bottle holder?

• To-go containers that perfectly fit a pannier or backpack without the risk of leaking

• A self-serve water-bottle filler?

• Compressed air for refilling tires effortlessly?

• A soft floor so that bikers can wear their bike shoes without destroying the floor?

• Locate this cafe on the inbound side of the street so that bicyclists don’t need to cross the street on their way to downtown?

• Online ordering that you can do from home so that the cafe has your order ready when you get there?

• Localized-ordering from your phone so that as you get close the cafe starts making your regular choice?

• Wide doors that are always open (or automatic doors for colder places) to make it easy to walk inside with your bike?

• Tuneups available while you eat?

• Exercise-friendly food options that don’t sit heavy in your stomach?

Someone should build this cafe. It sounds awesome.

Media Studies majors will tell you that the medium (like television, or a book, or a song) shapes the message. It is impossible to separate the message and observe it in the abstract.

The mode of transportation works in the same way. Consider the strip mall, optimized for cars. The Japanese city, organized around the train stations. And the university campus, designed for pedestrians. 

For transportation, the message is the community.

The west span of the Bay Bridge connects San Francisco and Yerba Bunea Island. The bridge has two decks stacked on top of each other, and all of the cars on the bottom only get a view of the bridge above and the road ahead. 

Which way should traffic on the upper deck go? It’s an arbitrary decision. Or maybe not? In this case traffic flows into the city on the upper deck, so you get majestic sweeping views of the San Francisco skyline. This simple decision suggests that the city is more important than the island.

One way to think about cities is as places where you are always surrounded by strangers. Walk down a given block and most people you’ve never met before. The pedestrian crossing the street in front of your car, your bus driver, and the person you find on craigslist for your empty room are likely to be people you’ve never met before.

The question, then, is not “How do we build for a tight knit community?”

The question is “How do we build for strangers?”

Just about anything happens faster when it’s a priority. An actual priority, like how you treat your day job. You probably go to work first before watching TV. Go to work before taking a vacation, and go to work before going out on a date.

This applies to side projects just as much as it applies to your job. 

A thought exercise. Is your side project more important than your job? Does the time you spend on it reflect that?

Did you know that Squarespace offers cheap one-page websites called Cover Pages? In addition to being useful by themselves, Cover Pages are also a way for Squarespace to develop a customer even before they need a full website. When that customer later needs the rest of their website, Squarespace already has permission to host it and has proven their worth.

“Wow, that’s useful advice” rarely translates into practicing said advice. Often we don’t have an immediate opportunity to practice, and then we forget. 

Boomerang is an experiment that helps you internalize and remember advice. Send it something worth remembering and it will remind you sometime in the future.

You’re free from the need to choose when, or how, or where. Free from the stress of needing to remember to check your notebook sometime later. That’s part of the beauty. Taken out of context, the idea just might transform into something better. 

Try it out by sending an email to remember@boomerang-me.appspotmail.com. Maybe just send “Try using Boomerang again.”

Find out more at https://boomerang-me.appspot.com/.

A while back I posted about how files are dead. If you’re like me you store your code in GitHub and don’t have a complete backup of it anywhere. What if GitHub goes offline? I’ve started using  backhub.co for automatic GitHub backups. But as far as I can tell they don’t yet have the ability to download, only to restore to GitHub. I’ve written them, hopefully it’s something they’re working on.

Reversible decisions are questions like picking the logo, whether or not music should auto-play, how to describe the product. Decide these in the same meeting they are raised. 

Irreversible decisions include who to take funding from, which supplier to sign the contract with, who to hire. Take your time with these.

One reason startups seem to move with such blinding speed is because they don’t need three layers of approval for reversible decisions.

Seth Godin  recently posted about word of mouth and why people don’t give referrals. According to Seth, one of the questions people ask themselves is:  

• Does it look like I’m getting some sort of kickback or special treatment in exchange? Is that a good thing?

A followup question is, what sort of special treatment is seen as good? Here are some examples where the primary purpose is the special treatment, and the referral isn’t really seen as a referral. 

• A blogger who frequently gives away fantastic advice who has an amazon affiliate link and buying products helps fund his hosting costs.

• Girl Scouts selling cookies. 

• A friend asking for help building the perfect playlist for tonight (the referral is the music service)

Well more precisely, keeping and managing files locally is dead. In case you missed yesterday’s post, I’m going through the contents of my backup drive from college. What surprises me is how in just four years we’ve gone from carrying everything around on our laptops and phones to simply using the cloud. 

• 200 gigabytes of photos all stored and accessed online

• 100 gigabytes of ripped DVDs replaced by Netflix and online rentals. And Chromecast.

• 30 gigabytes of music replaced by a subscription

• My source code lives in GitHub

• My documents and presentations are all Google Docs

• My virtual machines are all remote

Anyone growing up today won’t have any notion of files. They’re just not important any more.

When I was 18 I had my first hard drive crash. I lost 6 months of photos, and since then I’ve been a backups believer. Or so I thought. 

In college, Time Machine continuously backed up my MacBook. Moving out to San Francisco I got a new laptop for work and everything else gathered dust. At some point I gave away the college laptop. But a few weeks ago I needed to update some custom software I had written for Ace Mini Storage and realized that the source was only on that backup drive. Oops.

I’m now working my way through the drive, uploading everything I care about. I use  Spanning Backup (highly recommended) on my Google Drive for an extra layer of protection. I’m properly backed up again, for now.

Let’s say you run a small business. You sell widgets online for the low price of $2000 a widget. You purchase Google search ads for the keyword “widgets” to drive traffic to your site. These work well, costing $5 per click which seems high but is actually cost effective because 1 in 10 people who click on your ad end up purchasing a widget. You have a budget of $1000/month for ads. Can you A/B test your ad landing page effectively? 

Luckily you know of Evan and his awesome A/B tools. Using his Sample Size calculator you figure out that if you want to detect an improvement of 50% you need 6 months of data to test two different landing pages. And if you want to detect an improvement of just 10% you need almost 6 years of data. 

Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run experiments. But you should be aware that with outcomes that have a small chance of happening you need either a really big improvement or lots of data to be able to detect it with confidence.

If this interests you I highly recommend reading some of his A/B testing articles.

• Hat hair isn’t a problem if you always wear a hat

• Your phone battery lasts forever when you’re plugged into an outlet

• You don’t need wifi on your commute if you live 3 minutes from work

• A bike is infinitely faster than a car when the roads are too narrow to drive

If you change the rules you can often make a hard problem disappear. 

If the market leader won’t talk to you, try the runner up. The second place player usually has a very clear goal–get to first place–and they will be considerably more open to taking a chance with you. 

This works especially well when the second place player is small compared to number one but still big in absolute terms. You still get an important partnership, and by helping them grow you also grow yourself. 

My flatmate works for Carbon3D, which just left stealth mode yesterday. 3D printing has always been a fascination, but when I tried to dabble my feet and print a complicated blue french horn for a halloween costume, I saw firsthand how slow and finicky the current generation of consumer printers is. 3 days of trial and error later I had a cruddy tiny french horn. Carbon3D aims to reduce this to minutes instead of days, and they appear to have succeeded.

Charging different prices for the same good or service can hurt your credibility. Loyal customers don’t like it when you give new customers a discount. But if you are instead able to charge loyal customers less the sentiment can be different. 

The Golden Gate Ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco charges $10, but only $6.50 if you use a Clipper card (Clipper is the transit card for the bay area). This has the effect of charging tourists more than frequent travelers. Most see it as a discount, but really it’s about extracting more value from tourists who are going to buy the ticket even at a much higher price.

• Are you a foodie, or someone who enjoys food?

• Do you embody the climber ethos, or just do it for exercise?

• An academic, or simply a student?

If you want to be known for something, it’s important to know yourself first.

Sunday saw a nasty storm pass through Philadelphia. The pristine early-morning snowfall was deceptive, giving way to sleet and ice throughout the afternoon and evening. As you might expect, buses were completely off schedule, and walking was sure to get you soaked if not bruised. After waiting for our bus for 20 minutes, we hailed a cab and hopped in. Unprompted, the driver immediately started ranting on Uber, and literally didn’t stop until we got out.

He had two specific concerns:

• he isn’t able to adjust his rates to charge more in times of high demand

• he pays $700/month for insurance while the Uber drivers pay $50

I’ll focus on the first. Unhappy about Uber drivers earning 4 times as much on snowy evenings, Taxi drivers are planning to strike in Philadelphia. But this strike is destined to accelerate the adoption of Uber, encouraging stranded travelers to try Uber for the first time when they discover that the public transportation network is woefully inadequate. If Uber is smart, they will respond by training more drivers, and discounting rides during the strike. 

Assuming Uber doesn’t succumb to ridiculous surge prices this might be a major turning point for Philly’s adoption of ridesharing.