Foursquare meals a day ...

I’ve used Foursquare for over a week now and I’ve read several articles about why it’s going to be the next big thing but I have to confess that I still don’t get it. I can, however, see how it works for small groups of very social people who find a thrill in being able to know which club or restaurant their friends are hanging out at. It works equally well if you want to join or avoid them! I’m not one of these people.


There must be way more of these people that I had imagined since Foursquare now boasts over two million users. Impressive, yes - but feeble in comparison to facebook’s half a billion throng. Other than the one individual who introduced me to it and my sister-in-law’s sympathy ‘friending’, I don’t see any other friends, acquaintances or colleagues giving it a try. For someone with 702 LinkedIn connections, 156 facebook friends, a bunch of blog and Twitter followers – things don’t look too good for Foursquare in my cyber portfolio.


But in spite of Marc Andreessen’s backing, I still think the only viable Foursquare model is one that requires less activity to participate. I’m already at the mall, so why do I have to go on my phone, start up Foursquare, find the mall and check in? I should be able to preset the app on my phone to do certain ‘frictionless’ things based on my location – which it seems to know already. But that’s a very slippery slope to travel!

The incentive to participate is also weak. Who cares about a cheesy badge or two? If I’m going to let a business know that I’m in its vicinity, I want discounts! I want rewards! It’s why I take the time to always add my frequent flier number to my airline reservations – even if I know that it’s unlikely that I’ll ever meet even the minimum requirements for a flight reward. The least I will get is an offer for a magazine or two in return for Air Nippon wiping out those 3,956 miles that have been hanging out there for eons.


In the years to come, I believe that location-based services (LBS) will play a much more substantial role in our lives. I'm just not convinced that Foursquare and its imitators provide a clear path to the mainstream. We’re in the 1995 Classmates.com days of social networking, but there’s some light at the end of the tunnel - The Wall Street Journal and a few other newspapers have already added the Foursquare button to allow people, when reading a restaurant review or other cultural coverage on WSJ.com, to click a button to add the venue(s) mentioned in the article to a ‘Foursquare to-do list’, along with a tip written by a WSJ editor and a link back to the original article. This to-do list idea has got to have a place in the future of LBS.


So even though I’m not yet a true believer, I have no desire be a detractor and will continue to check in from time to time in the hope that someone will offer me the deal of the century.

Hey - Four Eyes!

This four-eyed guy appears in an aptly entitled book by Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514), a native of Nuremberg.

The book is called the Nuremberg Chronicle and is probably the most sophisticated printed book published before the year 1500 because of its use of different graphic layouts that integrate text and image in more varied ways than anything that had previously been attempted. You can check it out here.

Some marketing dude at Acer must believe that there are a bunch more four-eyed consumers out there, since today they unveiled the Iconia at a press conference in New York. It features two - yes two! - 14" touch-screens protected by ultra-tough "Gorilla Glass". The device can be used like a traditional laptop, with the second screen doubling as a virtual keyboard, or it can double as a tablet-style computer.

It runs the Windows 7 operating system and goes on sale in the UK on Jan 8 for £1,499 - about $2,350. With a minimum of 4GB of memory and up to 750GB hard drive space it's one mighty tablet PC! The device features palm sensors to detect the position of the user’s hands, and automatically launch a virtual keyboard when needed.

The success of the iPad (and even Samsung's Galaxy) has prompted scores of consumer electronics manufacturers to launch their own rival devices. This one takes it to the next level!

Twitter: A Whole Lot of Tweeting Going On

When LSB Designs (gratuitous plug here) started putting our new website together a couple of weeks back, they suggested that I should include links to the major social networks. I've always been an active participant on LinkedIn and facebook, so that wasn't a problem. My previous experience with Twitter had been creating an account in 2007 and then wondering what to do with it. It was several years later when I learned that Jack Dorsey invented Twitter on a notepad while sitting on a children's slide in a park:

Dorsey's Blueprint for an SMS-based Social Network

I tweeted what I thought to be a couple of clever but mundane comments and realized that, without followers, my words were falling on the deaf ears of cyberspace. So, like Digg and Squidoo before it, I was the proud owner of another set of dust-gathering login credentials to a website of whose purpose I was unsure. Perhaps I'm just too anti-social to appreciate these things?

Even now - when over 65 million tweets are posted each day - I still have a feeling of embarrassment whenever I look at Twitter .... as if I'm some sort of tawdry voyeur peeking into the personal lives of others. In spite of this, I set up a new Twitter account; inked a quid pro quo 'follower' deal with a couple of my more erudite pals; and proceeded to visit a few of my favorite business websites to see what they were tweeting. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found!

The business-vs-social use of Twitter suddenly became apparent to me. I had always struggled with the concept that anyone could write anything of substance in 140 words or less - even @alberteistein has trouble making himself clear with such a small blackboard. The following picture epitomizes what I previously thought of Twitter:


With Twitter, it's not what you write but what you link. I've always taken pride in my browser bookmarks - consummately organized and frequently updated. Now, there are millions of webnuts out there scouring the Internet and effectively doing my browsing for me. I just read their tweets; click on their links and retain/discard the content accordingly. The RT (Re-Tweet) feature allows me to pass on this same information to my (slowly) growing list of followers.

No more blushing when I open Twitter on my Blackberry. My next project - figure out what the heck foursquare does!

SEO your SaaS SOA

'A consultant is someone who takes a subject you understand and makes it sound confusing.'

I tried to find someone to whom to attribute this saying - but came up empty! It is, however, a frequent public perception of management consultants, who are often portrayed as being highly paid to spew forth words like “pushback” and “paradigm”; like “sniff test” and “takeaway”. And that's before they baffle you with a series of acronyms that belong on a Jeopardy! category, not in an introductory meeting. This list could well contain gems like SaaS, SOA, PIOUTA, MECE and CAGR.

The British understanding of 'takeaway'.

The American understanding of 'pushback'.

Smart consulting groups won't baffle you with gobbledygook, but if you (the client) want to talk about Data Center Virtualization or Smart-sourcing - they should be willing and able to see beyond the conversation and add value to the outcome!

ISBLANK is your friend

To avoid those pesky (and meaningless) error messages like #VALUE!, I would always use the LEN function to figure out if there was something in a cell before I applied a formula to it.

It looked like this:

=IF(LEN(A1)>0,"Something is there","Nothing is there")

One day - as is the case sometimes with Excel - this approach wouldn't work for me in a particular worksheet. No matter how I tried, cells without values were being reported as having them!

Then I stumbled on ISBLANK. A simple function that does what I always wanted - to check whether something is in a cell. In retrospect, it seems somewhat obtuse to determine if something exists by checking how long it is.

=IF(ISBLANK(A1),"Nothing is there","Something is there")

How simple is that?