Business « A Meaningful Life

On holidays? 7 Reasons to Stay Technology Connected:

January 6, 2009 by Marc --- Categories: Business, Life, Tech

I have had a few discussions with tech savvy customers about avoiding tech during your holiday break. This topic is clearly a divided camp.

Classica Umbrella

Personally I can switch off from tech for about a week but that is about as long as I can handle going dark (as Geeks call it).

Here’s 7 reasons supporting an argument for staying connected:

1. You’re the tech guy/gal
You can’t avoid tech anyway because someone is going to get a geeky present for Christmas and you are going to have to get it working for them on their outdated Windows Me PC.

2. You just love it, it’s like a hobby anyway.
If tech is your passion in life then taking a break from it may not be a great holiday for you. Be careful not to confuse Passion with addiction. Addiction is more of a love-hate relationship to something while passion is pure love-love. Passion makes people very happy.

3. Your customers might not like it.
I confess to have at least one unhappy customer (that I know off) this Christmas because they couldn’t personally reach me. I make myself far more available to customers than most people in my position. I make no excuse, I needed a break. It’s a personal choice and there is a personal brand cost attached.

4. You could break your flow (your work mojo).
Flow is that space you get in where you can operate really quickly and effectively almost without thought. Martial arts experts, artists, writers, coders are typical environments where flow can be achieved. Stopping breaks your flow and it can be hard to regain it without a lot of Red Bulls and caffeine (in my industry at least).

5. Avoiding the e-mail buildup.
When I take holidays I find that the buildup of e-mail is overwhelming on return. You could adopt an email bankruptcy method to deal with this (I don’t have the guts to do it). If the size of your email inbox generally matches the size of your peptic ulcer then maybe it’s a good thing to keep the inbox small.

6. Avoiding "behind anxiety" can keep you happy.
When I take holidays I find that the buildup of work-flow, thinking and decision making that needs to be done is huge. While you think about your work constantly then you aren’t really on holidays. You’re not present. Your little voice in your head is busy chatting to yourself about what you are really committed to mentally. Keeping digitally connected, if only for half an hour per day can release that mind energy into e-mail, your blog and the like.

7. Work and play are the same thing to you.
Why does your life need to be separated into groupings like work, play, tech, art, family etc. Can’t they just be collapsed into one if you can manage it. I personally love the web, blogging, digital photography and to me they all cross over to my personal life. My digital life enhances my personal life. I regard technology being a part of me and my existence, not separate to it.

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Smart Company - Australia’s top web 2.0 entrepreneurs

October 28, 2008 by Marc --- Categories: Business, Tech

Grant Young and I made Smart Companies list today of Australia’s top web 2.0 entrepreneurs. I’m chuffed to be there and Grant who started Saasu with me would probably agree that we look up to our peers mentioned in the article so it feels a bit weird being there.

Top Web 2.0 Teams would be the article I’d love to see. I wish they had mentioned Jusa who was instrumental in the last 5 years to get us to where we are today. He’s the young brains behind our now quite old company. He’s created the engineered application that Saasu has become. There is always more behind the success than the cliché entrepreneur. Our team who built Saasu which also included Kas, Pete, Emma, Dympna, Nik, John and Will all caused the success.

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Government Guarantee is Not a Low Deposit Rate Certainty For Banks

October 21, 2008 by Marc --- Categories: Business, Money

Ironically, now that Federal Reserves are busy guaranteeing bank deposits they have created a whole new set of problems in the competition for capital.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that banks should borrow money at the same rate the government does if it’s now the same risk. It’s not that simple. Fussy money (money sensitive enough to deposit rates that it gets moved) is leaving the banks who are reducing their deposit rates to find a new home paying a higher rate of return. That money sometimes just changes bank or asset class within a country but it can also change countries which opens up a whole bunch of foreign exchange activity. So banks need to pay a higher deposit rate than the Government does to attract investment, despite having a Government Guarantee.

If banks lower their deposit rates because they have a government guarantee they risk losing funding. At the same time the margin they make between lending and borrowing increases. This quandary of protecting liquidity versus improved margins is a whole new ‘how low can you go’ game in the banking sector for deposit rates.

We know in business that small increases in prices cause much larger increases in profit. The impact on your P&L is magnified due to the change in your margins (the difference between where you buy and sell your goods). The same magnifier applies to bank margins but also in a far more leveraged way because they usually have around $10 of assets for every $100 of loans and deposits. Even a small 0.10% change in deposit rates (cost of funds) has large implications for profit or lower mortgage rates (in lieu of profit).

Thus an ethical dilemma exists for banks to keep the margin or pass it on. Should banks be forced to pass on any gain from the government guarantee to their borrowers or are market forces best placed to do this?

Many uncertainty that surrounds how long with the guarantee will exist and how many deposits it covers manifests itself in higher deposit rates despite the guarantee.

Personally I’m against the government guarantee, why give banks more help than they need. Why risk seeing capital shift offshore looking for higher rates of return. Why not step in at the ninth hour and save the odd bank that looks like collapsing but only if all other avenues have been explored. This would be better than handing out free money to a sector who have made more than enough over the last 10 years to muscle them through a recession.

Money will always flow toward the best rate for a common risk and liquidity profile in markets. So a government guarantee does not imply you should only earn the same rate from a bank that the government would pay to borrow money. If anyone from a bank tells you otherwise then it’s misleading.

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iPhone Drawcard Applications

August 1, 2008 by Marc --- Categories: Business

Apple Signage on David Jones Sydney CBD There are many business models emerging amongst iPhone developers. Many remind me of Google using Search (the drawcard) to pump their Adwords product (the money engine).

Since learning that business model lesson back in the late 90’s I’ve always thought about what I call drawcards, and specifically in the tech space, drawcard applications. Browser widgets are another good example.

Some iPhone developers will sell their apps, some will provide them free and monetise the user base down the track and the smart ones in my opinion will create drawcard applications to their existing businesses. They might even build them and sell them to other businesses who can apply them like thick sweet icing to their existing applications used by large customer bases.

Remember the Milk did the drawcard thing just that recently with their iPhone personal task management app which incidentally won Apples Design Award for the best iPhone app of 2008.

Google, Flickr and many others believe in building free drawcard applications and widgets for their paid ‘PRO’ service offerings. Even Remember the Milk did this, you need to be a paying customer to use their iPhone app. So the issue for those who don’t sell of the back of other business revenue streams is that you have an immediate disadvantage.

Those iPhone developers that survive as a stand alone will do so because they have managed to build a problem killer that outspreads competing applications quickly and unequivocally.

As an aside…

You have to amazed by Apple brand being a drawcard in it’s own right. Just look at the CBD David Jones wall of Apple Branding I snapped this morning on the way into the Saasu.com offices. Incidentally I took the photo with my Blackberry and uploaded it directly into my Flickr account with an app Flickr provides that is free. So the strategy works on me as a consumer. You can see my pics at flickr.com/photos/marclehmann/

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Sydney Apple Shop Opening

June 20, 2008 by Marc --- Categories: Business

It was a spectacle with followers no different to sport or rock-star crowd pull. It’s simply about passion for something. That’s just how humans are. There’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

I posted on SydneyNorg a citizen journalism website (love that concept) about the opening in a bit more detail. I met up Bronwen Clune the creator of PerthNorg and SydneyNorg at drinks with Ross Dawson of Future Exploration Network last night.

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