isn’t light rail. Well, we need that too, but that’s not what this post is about.

What we really need is a riverfront. A real riverfront. One with people and boats and restaurants and bars. Like Cleveland and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and every other real city has. I don’t think it’s possible to get downtown to really rock until we have this.

We sort of have a riverfront now, and the new North Bank Park is a nice effort. The problem is that the area doesn’t have the right commercial venues to sustain people. It’s going to take food and music, and alcohol and a reason to get down to the water to make this happen.

And that means we need to politely ask the government that occupies most of Civic Center Drive to move up to Front Street. They can solve two problems and move into City Center.

Ideally, boats could navigate the waterway from Dublin to the basin by Miranova. That might take a lock or two, and lots of dredging. But dredging we can do. Another Waterfire we cannot. A good start would be to clear the river south from the confluence for boats that need 10 feet of draft.

The downtown riverfront from a satellite (courtesy Google).

Here is the river from North Bank Park.

Here is a view from near Miranova (credit to Columbus Parks and Rec).

Jazz and Rib Fest and the 4th of July are the only times the riverfront is put to good use.

Fun at the riverfront (credit to College of Wooster).

So, what can you do to help? An upcoming issue of Columbus Monthly has a feature detailing leading Columbus personalities’ thoughts on what Columbus needs. My twin brother Pete, will be pitching this idea in that issue. A flurry of letters to the Ed would probably float this idea to the surface.

If you squint at the picture above, you’ll see the Santa Maria-The replica of Columbus’ ship that was built in 1992 to so much fanfare. Its time to bring excitement to the riverfront again.

My ten-year high-school reunion will be coming up next year (yikes!). What I look forward to are the surprises. No, not who married whom or what late-bloomer is now beautiful or who has a baby. But rather, who is doing something no-one ever expected. Who has turned their life into something even they would never have imagined?

In a recent speech, about why America is the center of comp tech innovation, Paul Graham mentioned that America’s bad secondary schools are so bad that it forces people into delaying career decisions until college. The transcript makes this sound like an afterthought, but it struck me as an important point.

And a personal one. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do until my senior year of college, and I’m still learning what I’m good at (but I have some ideas). I think most young people are this way.

There must be an optimal time for choosing your life’s work (or at least how it will start). I suspect the right time is variable at the individual level and is complexly affected, but clearly the world would have too many astronauts if we force youth to pick too early, and too many actuaries if we pick too late.

Since a societal framework needs to be formed around these decisions, structuring career education at the right part of the bell curve for optimal choice seems critical.

And it’s logical that later in life is better. Immunity from early financial responsibility was practically a requirement for early scientific and artistic achievers and prolonged adolescence is a hallmark of advanced societies.

But I think that it’s misguided to credit America’s bad schools with comp tech excellence (that is how we started). I think we’d be better served if we instead figured out what the secondary years are good for teaching and used them for that.

Josh Kopelman has an excellent post about the 53,651 subscribers to the TechCrunch feed. Summary: too many of the Web 2.0 startups are targeting the 53K geekiest web nerds in the world; these people aren’t representative of the public, and getting Crunched doesn’t predict long-term success.

I’m not sure that targeting geeks is the problem-there are enough geeks to make lots of these companies rich-the issue is really that most new web services aren’t useful enough to cover the mental overhead that is required for using them. The name, the purpose, the username and password. The result is that one-time users are all these services ever really get-regardless of referrer. This really just isn’t worth using.

The Mountain View nerds have forgotten how relentlessly goal-oriented users are. What is ironic about 2.0 is that AJAX, standards, and open source all have the potential to help people use the web faster and easier. Instead, they are used as excuses to build stupid toys and to resurrect failed models that were put to death five years ago.

The first step towards making these insubstantial services usable would be integrating them with the established parts of user’s lives. Rather than finishing the REST API, let’s figure out how to make these applications work with Outlook.

Q: How can Microsoft get poor countries to actually buy Windows?

A: Get the telecoms to do it.

Introducing Microsoft® FlexGo™ - an innovative technology that makes it easier for people with modest incomes in emerging markets to buy a full-featured PC for their families.

If I were a telecom, I’d offer a similar plan with pay-as-you-go enforced through connectivity (i.e., no pay, no service). But I’d kill the upfront fee if you’ll take it with Ubuntu and Wine.

Wired on why the “PVC Clamshell” exists (or persists).

Easy-to-open containers (famously) worked for Dutch Boy and Sherwin Williams too.  Who will be the first to use this as an opportunity?

from Dan on the Net

When I click send, search the body of the text for words like “attach”, “attached”, “attachment” If any of these words are found, and I have not attached a file then popup a message saying “Did you want to attach something to this message?”

More about this cool project here.

fo.rtuito.us

The site is very simple, you sign up and are given a friend chosen randomly. Next, you have 4 days to get to know this person before you are asked to make a decision whether to keep them as your friend. Once you have made that choice, you are given another friend, chosen at random and the process starts all over.

I know, let’s create a site that takes everything that is bad about the internet (anonymity, poor filters, crappy search, no accountability) and magnify it with a dating site that deliberately eliminates the barely adequate safeguards we’ve spent the last decade producing. And then let’s give it a stupid Web 2.0 name that even our employees won’t be able to remember.

1000 Paitings

One thousand numbers = one thousand paintings. All beautifully painted on canvas (approx. 12 x 12 x 1.5). Each number is unique - the number and the demand define the price

The pricing takes perfect advantage of how these viral things work. I’ll be calculating how much this will make after lunch has settled.

Value = 1000 - number.
Initial discount: 90%.
Current discount: 60%.
The discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every 100 paintings sold.

being goofy (courtesy of JPM).  I don’t remember when this was.  Seems like a long time ago, but those glasses are a newish thing???

Me and my great friend David, a talented political up-and-comer in Washington were discussing his (great) thoughts on a new business today. His one hesitation: “but how do you actually do it?”

Those words are stand-ins for the many anxieties new entrepreneurs think about. How do I get money to start? How should I format my business plan? What is FICA? When I started my business, I was afraid I might get arrested for missing one of the endless reporting requirements or regulations. Did I have the right minimum wage poster on the wall?

It turns out that it just doesn’t matter. Today, I trust Mary, our great office manager to get the details right. And if she doesn’t, I know that the consequences for a small business are trivial compared to not thinking about the right things. And I’d bet that many great businesses never leave their would-be founder’s heads because the details are too overwhelming.

Don’t get nervous about the details. Starting a business is easy, but error prone. It’s problematic because doing too much busy work is tempting before you have a real business. Endless plans, getting funded, strategic partnerships, market segmentation, feature-driven development–customers would never pay you to do these–they create no real value. Spending too much time here is deadly. At this stage, you have more important things to get worried about. Focus on starting a business that gets you to the stage that you can think about important things like an understandable product and paying customers as early as possible. (I’ll do a post on the important things soon). So, without further ado, here are ten ways to get started on the right track.

1. Get six months of salary in the bank. And don’t take money from anyone.

2. Find a friend to join your company for equity. If you can’t find a friend to sign up, your idea stinks.

3. Pick a name and register it as an LLC with (usually) your Secretary of State. Do some Yahoo (better name-matching) searches to make sure you’re not stepping on anyone’s toes. Stepping on toes at this point means a huge company with the same name, or a medium-sized company with the same name and industry, or a small company with the same name, industry, and geographic location. Good names represent the image you want to project as a company. If you expect to do lots of internet business, names that aren’t in the dictionary are easy to get to the top of search engines. Don’t worry about stock restrictions on LLCs, filing in Delaware, etc. If you get big enough to have these problems, you’ll have people lining up to solve them.

4. Register your domain name and get email accounts for everyone. Don’t even think about doing business without yourname@yourcompany.com. Get a simple two page website up. What you do for customers and how they buy it from you.
5. Pay $750 to an attorney to write mail-merge your operating agreement. Make sure you consider how things are handled if a founder needs to leave the business.
6. Get $10K in credit card limit for every partner in the company. Then, commit not to spend more than 1/3rd of this without hand-wringing, cheek pinching, and second jobs taketh out at Micro Center. Never, ever mix personal and business spending. Ever.

7. Spend $1K on business cards (for everyone-you should buy business cards for everyone even when you are hiring urinal paddy changers at your 60 story downtown skyscraper), stationary, and envelopes.

8. Make sure everyone has good laptop computers, a printer, and a professional to call when your technology breaks. Computer problems are a major productivity killer, and are a morale black-hole. Develop a relationship and invest in good tech.

9. Decide who has responsibility for sales, who has responsibility for operations, and who is the buck-stops-here boss. A new company without a President is like a ship without a rudder. And without an engine too. Early on, it can be a good idea to have the person in charge of sales also be the President. This has the positive effect of focusing the organization on customers. Later, it can lead to service delivery problems, but that is the topic of another blog post.

10. Find your first customer. The first customer is critical. Good for finances, great for morale, and the true litmus test of a company. If you can’t find the first, how will you ever find the second? (a common misconception is that the first customer is hard to find. It is actually true that the first customer is sort of hard to find, the tenth customer really hard to find, and the 1,000th customer only findable if you have a real business). For more on these type of effects, see Geoffrey More and Crossing the Chasm.

Well, that’s all folks. Drop me a line if you think I missed anything. And I’ll be getting a post about the important things soon.

Fun at Chip’s expense.

Google is quietly testing cost per sale advertising (or cost per action (CPA) as they have broadly described it).

This will be a bad thing for users, and a good thing for big advertisers. Actually, it will be a really good thing for big marketers.

The secret sauce of Google’s Adwords has always been that they take perfect advantage of what John Battelle called the “database of intentions,” that wonderful harmony of user intent, willing sellers, and Google, smack dab in the middle of it all.

Of course, Adwords only works because users actually click them. And it took a long time for people to do that. I still know people who think those scary blue links on the right are for installing a virus on your computer. Google earned their click-through rate by showing only relevant ads. Sometimes, the results were better than organic search. People learned to trust them. This was largely possible beacase Google had lots of help from advertisers who didn’t want to show ads that didn’t result in sales.

(Clicks / Impression) vs ($ / Click)

The only problem is that Google isn’t shouldering the risk. Users are. They’re the ones who are going to be wasting their time. And to compound this whole mess, advertisers are actually incented to show the spamiest ads possible, because all they care about is maximizing purchases–they’ll do this by maximizing clicks. Because clicks won’t cost advertisers anything. Just like sending spam.

This is really bad news for consumers. Google is already losing their ability to filter spam. If they can’t tell it when its served from a bot army in Argentina, how will they tell it when Proctor and Gamble is paying for it?

The irony is that this will actually end badly for Google too. What happens when users unlearn to click those Adwords? Google won the search engine war by doing the right thing for users. They’ll lose it by forgetting how they got a seat at the table in the first place.

UPDATE:  We’ve filled this role several times, but are still looking for more great talent.

We’re looking for a couple great LAMP developers to join the team at Innova. Experience with large applications in a healthcare setting especially helpful. We’re looking for a DBA too.

How about us?
It’s really fun to work at Innova Partners. Great people, variety, and lots of challenging projects with different technologies.

We’re a small (10 employees), profitable business located near downtown Columbus, Ohio. We’re insanely focused on improving our client’s business processes through smart workflow design, and clear, focused user interfaces.

The best way to get hired is to show us your work. Your OSS projects, your personal site, whatever. Please drop Mary a line if you’re the perfect match: mattius at innova-partners dot com.

UPDATE:  We filled this role internally.

Innova Partners, a technology company in Columbus, Ohio is looking for a senior product manager to help bring our already successful “consulting-ware” software package to market as a commercially hosted product.

We’re offering a great compensation package and a significant equity position in the new product line to the person that can help us grow the product into the industry standard management software for worker’s comp and TPA businesses.

We’ll consider candidates with senior management or sales experience at an IME company, a TPA, the BWC, or a healthcare insurance company. Vision, deep knowledge of workers comp, and industry relationships are essential to success in this position.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain the product roadmap.
• Translate customer and market needs into product requirements.
• Work with developers to simplify and improve the product.
• Serve as the product evangelist, marketing, and sales department. As sales increase, recruit and develop the marketing and sales departments.
• Work with designers and writers to maintain the product website, marketing materials, and help documentation.
• Manage the support department.
• Develop outside partnerships to drive sales and industry awareness.
• Track and report on key business metrics and user behavior patterns to drive customer-centric product decisions.

Requirements

• Experience in delivering software products, ideally web-based services
• Strong analytical, technical, verbal and written communication skills
• BA/BS, MS preferred

Terms: Salaried Employee with benefits. Equity for the right candidate if market and financial targets are achieved.

Contact: mattias at innova-partners dot com or (614) 384-7450.

hat tip to MSIG.

Innova Partners, a boutique software development company in downtown Columbus, is seeking a visual communications expert.  The successful candidate will be an excellent writer with solid xhtml/css skills and a strong grasp of visual design, marketing, and business communications. Once hired, you’ll play a central role in marketing our new healthcare software product — this will be an exciting position with considerable leverage.

Innova offers excellent compensation, profit sharing, free lunch, and a positive work environment where technical prowess and creativity are highly valued.

We’re more interested in seeing your work than your resume, but we’ll review resumes too.  Please send correspondence to mattias at innova dot com.

I’m doing all of my writing over at my company’s blog, Loosely Typed.

Come see me over there.