Photography: Samikki
You can find them in every café that has a wireless connection. Hunched over their keyboards, today’s digital nomads have managed to turn every coffee bar into an office and every table with more than one chair into a meeting room. But while they might all be typing in similar places, café workers come in a number of different flavors. Here are the seven types of café worker you can expect to find in your local latte bar:
1. The Networker
Twitter always had a strange business plan. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have had any business plan or development plan, let alone revenue model at all. The service was created after a brainstorming session when Odeo workers Biz Stone, Even Williams and Jack Dorsey found themselves lacking passion about the service they working on. The infrastructure was built in two weeks and used initially as an internal messaging system before exploding at the 2007 SxSW festival.
Throughout Twitter’s growth since then, the policy has always been to build and watch what happens. The initial idea might have been Jack Dorsey’s but the way the service works in practice has been the result of users reinventing it, figuring out strategies and deciding the sorts of messages that help to build their communities, gather followers, and — if they’re commercial users — push their brand. From hashtag chats, in which twitterers can discuss a topic in real time, to Twitter’s giant suite of third party add-ons, much of the way that Twitter is used has been created by twitterers themselves. When an idea has come from within Twitter and delivered from the top down, such as lists, users have often reacted by questioning its purpose — and ignoring it. Twitter might well be the first genuinely crowdsourced social media site.
That makes introducing a revenue model all the more difficult. Unlike add-ons that allow for multiple account management, hashtag chatting and keyword alerts, developers aren’t going to create a system that allows Twitter to make money. Biz Stone and Evan Williams have to do that themselves — and hope that users like it.
Photography: kurzonis
When Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit for $1.75 billion in 2005, it felt as though the world really had changed. Here was a Chinese company that few people in America had heard of buying up an American icon of the twentieth century, a company that for many of the previous decades had epitomized the United States’ technological advantage. Now it would become part of a business whose biggest shareholder was the Chinese government. IBM would be working for the Chinese. Today, Lenovo is the largest seller of PCs in China with more than 28 percent of the market. Its sales for fiscal year 2008/2009 were almost $15 billion, and it’s the fourth largest seller of personal computers in the world. The sight of IBM notepads carrying the Lenovo brand name no longer seems unusual. And yet, when it comes to high tech, other Chinese manufacturers are largely invisible outside Asia. They’re also different, big and coming this way.
The high tech gap between China and the West may best be seen in gaming. European and American gamers have long been used to firing up their Japanese-made game consoles but the most popular games have tended to come from Western manufacturers. Activision, with its $1 billion Call of Duty franchise, started building games for Atari but it’s an American company majority-owned by French company Vivendi. Electronic Arts, founded by Trip Hawkins and based in Redwood City, is as American as John Madden’s favorite sport. Overall, the gaming industry in the US posted sales of over $19.7 billion in 2009.
Photography: Yutaka Tsutano
With more than half a million iPads sold within a week of launch and European rollout delayed to cope with the unexpectedly high demand, it seems as though the question of whether there’s space for a third type of product between the laptop and the mobile phone has been answered. People do want tablets in general, and they want iPads in particular. But the new gizmo hasn’t gone down so well with everyone. While the fanboys have been lining up to get their fingers on Apple’s screens, others have been looking to hit the new device out of the park. Some have done it literally but others have been pulling the shutters down on Apple’s tablet, banning people from using it. A number of bloggers and tech types too have called for a consumer boycott.
The most comprehensive ban on the iPad took place in Israel, a country known for its hi-tech industry where Intel’s chips are designed and ICQ pioneered instant messaging. After initially allowing people to bring the device into the country, advising them only to declare it at customs in order to pay VAT, Israel’s Ministry of Communications then confused everyone by announcing that iPads were completely prohibited and would be confiscated at entry. A number of devices, dutifully declared by their owners at Ben Gurion airport, have been seized and placed in storage until the owners remove them from the country. The customs authorities are even demanding storage fees of around $12 per day.
Ask a marketing guru how you can land more freelance clients and you’ll hear the same thing again and again: get referrals, build a website, pay for ads, do some networking, etc., etc. Like we aren’t doing all of that already. Some people though are acting a little smarter. They’re not just telling clients that they’re creative, they’re showing off their creativity with some out-of-the-box marketing ideas. They’re skipping past the conventional marketing strategies to create new channels, produce innovative ideas, and generate messages that prove their value. It’s the kind of thing that can quickly turn an empty schedule into a bursting calendar — and it’s fun too.
Here are five creative ways to land new clients that will have you wondering why you didn’t think of them yourself.
Photography: J. Star
Running a freelance business is like being continually unemployed. You might have a full schedule, you might have all the work you need right now, but you never know what tomorrow will bring and if you want to keep your career moving forward you need to bring in new clients all the time. That means being alert for interesting opportunities, persuading people to give you work, and starting new jobs on a regular basis. And like anyone starting a new job, you get the thrill of being chosen — and sometimes the horror of discovering you made a bad choice when you accepted the gig.
Just as some bosses are sweet and supportive while others are spiteful and slave-driving so some clients turn out to be less than the freelancer hoped. And just as it’s difficult to spot a bad job when you fill in the application form and even harder to leave once you’ve got your feet under the desk so it’s not always easy to spot a bad client before you take him or her on, then walk away once you’re counting the billable hours. There are though a few signs that a client is going to be more of a pain than a pleasure — and one great way of heading for the door.
Freelancing has to be the best job in the world – at least in the eyes of cubicle workers. There’s no commute, no single boss, no enforced schedule and no office gossip. You can wear what you want, work when you want and bring in the projects you want. You’re in total control of your career and your life. There’s no better way to work.
If only. Freelancing has its moments but it also has plenty of bad times, enough in fact to rival the worst aspects of a regular job.
There are the holidays and vacation times for one. Or rather, there aren’t any holidays or vacation times. While it’s true that freelancers are able – in theory – to take time off whenever they want and without asking for permission (or a doctor’s note) in the way that an office worker does, they do face a couple of restraints. Deadlines in particular tend to dictate work schedules tighter than even the most tight-fisted boss. Start missing milestones and those Easter breaks, planned days off, and even weekends and evenings start to look like useful hours to catch up and get the project back on track. While friends and family are tossing cans around the barbeque, freelancers are often sitting at the desk, slaving over a keyboard and wishing they had the kind of office that locks out workers during the breaks.
When Google launched Buzz in February 2010, it tried to take the easy route to critical mass by placing the social media service inside Gmail. The 176 million or so users who opened their email accounts to find their contact lists compromised might not have been too pleased but they shouldn’t have been too surprised. Gmail has always been packed with all sorts of extra goodies from video chat to SMS messaging, including many that few people are aware of. Here are five tips, tricks and techniques to help you get more out of Google’s free email service:
1. Kick out the Ads
Gmail might be free but it still rakes in giant piles of cash for Google. They make their dough by reading your messages (electronically, of course) then placing ads on the page that match the content. It’s not a terrible thing but it is a little intrusive and it does remind you that a robot is going through your email at the same time as you.
The biggest benefit of social media marketing isn’t instant sales, identifying your keenest buyers or even better customer service. You can pick up all of those on social media sites, but none of them is as powerful as the ability to build a close connection with your market. When you’re in touch with leads daily – through tweets or through Facebook discussions – your business will be on their mind when they’re ready to buy. But while social media can create relationships, those connections can be relatively loose. It doesn’t take much for someone to stop following a company’s tweets and once that’s happened, it doesn’t take long before that company is forgotten. It’s not just the number of connections that count in social media, it’s the depth of the engagement as well, and that’s something that even Twitter, with its brief posts, struggles to build. A number of leading social media types though have found a way of adding a uniquely deep level of engagement to their Twitter streams by teaming them with Ustream.
Formed in 2007, and now boasting 40 million monthly viewers, Ustream is a kind of live YouTube. Rather than recording videos then uploading them for others to view, users of Ustream can broadcast live, allowing anyone to watch them through the site. The videos are also recorded, making them available to be seen later by people who missed the original broadcast. It’s an approach that allows for spontaneity as well as all the excitement and unpredictability that’s a part of any live show. Groups as big as Black Eyed Peas and the Jonas Brothers are using Ustream to broadcast live to their fans while the American Music Awards used the service to beam stars live from the red carpet.
Photography: raneko
Designers like to say that there’s only one truly intuitive user interface: the nipple. Everything else has to be learned. Anyone who’s ever had to teach a confused newborn how to eat however, knows even that isn’t true. The challenge for any designer then is to produce buttons, knobs, menus and signs that allow users to apply functions with the minimum of fuss. Some, like MySpace, got it horribly wrong with ugly modules and confusing functionality, a trick that Facebook tries to copy with every redesign. Occasionally though, a company gets it exactly right, not only allowing users to get what they want (almost) instinctively but also setting a new standard for others to follow. Here are five of the best:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page owe a lot to the education system. Stanford University wasn’t just the place where they met, it was also the place where Google was born. The site started as a research project for their doctoral theses and the search engine’s first address was google.stanford.edu. It’s certainly possible to argue that that debt has been repaid. When Google went public in 2004, the university was holding more than 7,500 Class A shares and over 1.65 million Class B shares, valued then at $179.5 million. A quick sale of some of those shares brought in $15.6 million, further venture capital investments in the company are said to have earned the university an additional $200 million, and Stanford will continue to earn royalties from Google until 2011. That school of learning, at least, has little to complain about.
But Google’s founders haven’t stopped at paying back their alma mater. Since 2006, the company has also been making its suite of apps available to all educational institutions for free. Holding everything on its own servers, Google lets universities and schools use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Video on the school’s own domain.
It’s not entirely pain-free. The Quick Start guide describes a six-week process of goal-setting, implementation and roll-out, but that may have more to do with the size of education institutions rather than the complexity of the apps. And it may also reflect the size of the benefits for those institutions. London’s Westminster University, which began using the system in 2008, for example, has reported savings of £1 million and a reduction in time spent on systems and user support. Google’s apps are simple enough for students to use without having to pick up the phone to find out how to create an email account.
Image: blip .
It would be great if a product’s success was all about the idea. Come up with the right concept and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like as long as it does the job. But the opposite is usually true. A product that looks appealing can often sell more than one that does the job better. An apple will squish a hunger flatter than a candy bar will, for example, but it’s the Hersheys that are next to the supermarket cash desks, not the fruit stands. A candy designer knows how to put temptation on the packet; an apple grower, not so much. If look-and-feel are so important for the success of a product then, every entrepreneur with a smart idea needs to know at least a little about creating products that don’t just work well but which look attractive too.
That starts with understanding constraints. Video game developer Dino Dini has identified two kinds of constraints that dictate a product’s design: non-negotiable constraints are the product’s essential functions – a dating site, for example, has to be able to hold data, display profiles and allow members to communicate; negotiable constraints are the optional extras around which the designer can get creative. The site’s colors, for example, the way that profiles are displayed and even the decision to include video chat or instant messaging are all negotiable constraints. The site has to allow members to get in touch but how they do it and what they’re looking at while they do it are negotiable.
Photography: Steve Wampler
When it comes to listing a product’s unique sales points, there’s always one point that’s sharper than all the others. It doesn’t matter how many features the product has, how many problems it solves or how much it will change the user’s life, if the market believes the product is “cool” it will fly off the shelves. So what makes a product cool, can coolness be created and what can a developer do to add that all-important ingredient to its offerings?
Design certainly helps. Apple wasn’t the first company to place digital music on portable players but Jonathan Ive’s clean design, with its plain white face and silver back, made the company’s music player as much a fashion accessory as an electronic gadget. Being seen with an iPod in the device’s early days marked a user as someone who was up with the latest fashions. Even if you couldn’t hear the tunes they were listening to — beyond the irritating thump of a bass delivered second-hand — you knew that an iPod user’s white earphones marked them out as someone who was serious about their music.
Photography: franz88
He’s got the kind of career success the rest of us can only dream of. A record sixteen Grand Slam titles. Twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semi-final appearances. A world ranking of 1. And generally acclaimed as the greatest tennis player who ever picked up a racket, perhaps even the greatest sportsman ever. Roger Federer’s success is down to his ability to whack a ball across a court faster and more accurately than anyone has ever done before, but success at anything is never down to just the technical skills required for that particular field. Lots of competitors will have those abilities too. Being the best also means having the right mentality, the right preparation and the right attitude to make the most of the talents you were born with. So what can Roger Federer teach us about achieving perfection?
Recognize Your Potential for Perfection
The launch is the most important moment in the life of any product. It’s the moment when the entrepreneur gets his or her first notion of whether the idea is going to fly. After all the months and years of development, after all the dreams of striking it rich and drowning in cash, the product is available and customers are starting to buy. The money is coming in at last. But while a launch marks day one in the life of the product, it’s actually just one more day in the life of the product’s development – and in its marketing too. The success of the launch might depend on the quality of the item itself, but it depends no less on the anticipation built up before the big day.
That anticipation is a key element in any sales strategy. The route to a purchase usually passes through awareness and recognition before it reaches a desire strong enough to lead someone to part with their cash. The market has to know the product is going to exist before it can decide that it wants it.
Apple Leaks
Search engine optimization is now an essential part of marketing. It might not be as fun as producing creative ad ideas. It might not be as exciting as running competitions or coming up with new promotions. But when the result can be a steady flow of free leads and a website with a high ranking, all of that content creation and link-building pays in spades. So search engine experts spend hours flirting for just a touch of Google love, even as they’re having their head turned by Bing while still wondering whether Yahoo! has anything to offer.
Focusing on those big search engines makes sense. According to HitWise, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask together took 98.84 percent of all Web searches in 2009. While the proportion of searches shared between them might change a little, especially as Bing continues to eat up Yahoo’s users, the big engines’ hold over the search market has changed little. In 2006, Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask accounted for 98.34 percent of searches, still leaving little more than one percent for other players. But those figures might be a touch misleading. They don’t, for example, take into account the number of searches made through Google’s Custom Search Engines, user-made directories that focus on a small subset of sites and reached not through Google’s home page but through search boxes on specialist Web pages. While these are likely to make up only a tiny proportion of Google’s total searches, they can provide some highly targeted marketing.
As an employee, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can have the effect of reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.
Increase Productivity
Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.
Photography: Scott Feldstein
Cubicle walls might not have been pretty but they’ve always been good for productivity. Not seeing your neighbor might have freed you up to take a snooze, fire up the solitaire or surf to the sports pages, but it also meant less gossip, fewer temptations to chat, and the fear that your boss might peer over the wall and catch you in the act. So what happens when you give the office a miss and swap the cubicle for a coffee shop? What can you do to ensure that working in a social environment won’t mean all sociability and no work?
It’s a question that’s become increasingly important as cafes recognize the power of wifi to pull in regular customers. A survey in 2006 found that about a fifth of the US workforce spent at least some time working outside a traditional office, and estimated that the rate was growing by about 10 percent a year. With hi-tech firms feeling the squeeze in the recession and even skilled geeks picking up pink slips and “consultancy” business cards, it’s no surprise that so many café tables are now packed with Macs.
