iPhone home screen land grab

I don't know why I so jealously select what apps will be on my iPhone4 home screen, but I do.  Some of the apps are legacy from when I got my original iPhone but most have evolved to the ones I either use most often or want to have quick access to.

Out of my 16 flexible home screen apps, three are photo related, three are social, one news, one sports, one retail, with the remaining basic reference apps.

I definitely use my iPhone as my primary camera and image capture device.  I seldom remove my old Canon Digital ELPH from my backpack unless I really want to have more flexibility, which is rare.  The Blurb Mobile app has been great for capturing short stories, including video and audio.

On the social side, Facebook's place of status is legacy--I seldom use Facebook.  Twitter is my primary method of communication to my business contacts and my feed is connected to my LinkedIn status, so I don't use the LI app either.  When I'm on the road I use the AIM app to keep the folks in the office close at hand.

When I have a few minutes to browse, I usually start with the NYTimes app, then on to ESPN, and finally to Google News via Safari.

I've gotten quite used to the all-Apple ecosystem, and our corporate Zimbra server is always synced with my apple Contacts, Calendar, Maps, and Mail.  Switching settings is something I do quite a bit, I use the world clock to make sure I'm aligned with my partners worldwide, and in Seattle or San Francisco keeping an eye on weather is always important.

I have tons of other apps that I use often that are relegated to back pages.  Moving something to my home page is a big deal, so when Blurb Mobile was released I had to move Alaska Airlines to a new "airlines" folder.  I'm still thinking what to move up once I dispatch Facebook to the nether regions.

I'm interested in what apps you have on your iPhone home screen. Send a screen grab and I'll do a follow up post later with some of the responses.

A commitment, not a license

I spent an hour or so at the Washington State Department of Licensing last week getting my driver's license renewed.  It's a task we all sort of dread, but I have to give my State credit--even while cutting back the number of staffed licensing offices due to budget they have increased the things we can do on-line, even renewing some licenses.  Mine was not one that could be done from the comfort of my computer however.

After taking a required vision test and getting a new mug shot, the agent gave me my temporary license and told me if should receive my permanent license in about two weeks.  That was fine--I don't have any travel scheduled until later in June, which was why I wanted to get my renewal done.  But in Saturday's mail my shiny new license was delivered.

Now I should be happy about that, and I am.  But it really made me think about where we've gone with customer service.  "Under-promise and over-deliver" has been a tactic that has served me well over the years, but I'm afraid it has been abused to become a license for inefficiency.

Good customer experience is a commitment by the giver to the receiver.  "Did I solve your problem today?"  "Is there anything else I can help you with while you are on the line?"  It's a promise to value your time and your business.  But the laziness that has been created by companies and agencies purposely padding times to assure meeting a service goal has taken my old mantra to a place it was never meant to be.

I'm sure you hear about it all of the time.  In Washington State it often shows up in government.  A new bridge construction project is awarded to a contractor, who pads the time it will take to complete and then negotiates a bonus for finishing early.  A weekend road closure turns into a one-day project and the State announces "we've finished early!".

If you work in an e-commerce company you may see it in bloated engineering man hours for the project you are sponsoring.  Or in inflated heads needed for Customer Support to meet the response commitment SLA.  This concept not only costs you money, but it limits how much can get on your product roadmap and allows your competitors who work efficiently to out-perform you.

The fear of failure often drives the padding of delivery times, whether it be for software or services.  And the permission to fail that can offset this downward spiral has to come from the top.  I'm not blaming the folks on the front lines as the main culprits here.  As is often in what separates good companies from mediocre, it's the culture that is created by senior management.

"Under-promise and over-deliver" is a commitment to excellence.  It's saying that I will work hard to exceed your expectations.  But it's not a license to become a society where everyone gets a trophy and there are no real winners.  And it's not an excuse for inefficiency.

Loyalty matters

"Loyalty is what we call it when someone refuses a momentarily better option."  Seth Godin


Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte LLP, was asked in last Sunday's NY Times if he could ask interviewees only a few questions what would they be?  Barry said he would ask "what are the values that are most important to you?" and "How have you demonstrated those values in the past two years?".  Both great questions I think.  Reading this, I thought not only how I would hope those that I interviewed to join the Blurb team would answer but how would I answer this myself.

There are a multitude of values that are positive, but in my mind the one that encapsulates them all is loyalty.  A loyal person is honest.  They are compassionate to those they are loyal to.  They are faithful and fair.  They speak with candor and truth.

We hear a lot about loyal customers, and that is the loyalty that Seth Godin discusses in his blog post quoted above.  But there is also loyalty to each other in business, with your co-workers, bosses, or vendor/partners.

Especially in a rough economy, folks will almost always take a loss to get new business away from others. They know that the hard work has already been done and the cost of goods and services likely includes some re-coup of sunk discovery and development costs.  But taking those "momentarily better options" may very well be the worst thing you can do for your company.

Good business is about a mutual benefit.  And unless you are a huge company with vast resources you need trusted and loyal connections throughout your supply chain to keep you successful.

Staying loyal may not always make you the most popular person with the Finance folks, but in the long run  I've found it pays dividends.  Make loyalty part of your personal brand and you'll be amazed with how it will continue to pay you back.

Update on Indigo ink permanence

I have a guest post at the Blurberati Blog that is an update of my post last year on the permanence of pages printed on HP Indigo presses.  Might want to take a look!

How I learned to love ink on paper (and the people who print)

From my earliest memories I really loved photography. My mother worked in the local photo lab after WWII so we always had lots of photos and I clearly remember those first color snaps that revolutionized consumer photography at the time.  After high school I first majored in Fine Art with a photography emphasis, but I quickly realized that my mentor, the late Wayne Brannock, had already taught me more about photography then I would ever learn from the artsy folks at Missouri State.  So I changed my major and packed my camera bags for the University of Missouri.  My relationship and love for silver halide lasted through the 80's and 90's, through the advent of digital photography and the fall of Kodak.

My photography always had a commercial bent, be it my time shooting for Columbia Records or working my way though school shooting weddings and portraits on weekends.  But during my time at Corbis, I realized the real action was not in the commercial or professional realm at all, but on the consumer side.

It's still amazing to me the transformation that happened in the late 90's.  Digital color printing had already made it's mark, primarily with "good enough" color on devices like the Canon CLC500.  But digital photography was getting ready to further blur the lines between photographs and offset-style printing.

In 2000 it became clear to me that this transition was the future of how consumers will purchase physical media.  I joined a company that was using wide format ink jet to print maps and historical documents from the Library of Congress but soon became a consultant to the originator of the consumer hard-bound photo book.

Now, thinking about what I really love about what Blurb is doing, I'm really happy that I've been able to maintain relationships with the folks that actually get things done in our business--the print service providers, or PSPs.  Much like my days working in professional photo laboratories, most of these are closely held, often family-owned businesses.  And like photography in the 90's, they are dealing with changes at often lightning speeds, not knowing where the next threat to their existence might come from.  These are the people that write the checks to buy the heavy iron that makes the product you see everyday in an economy that is often  less than friendly.

Blurb has indeed helped to democratize publishing.  But without the people on the front lines what we built would have been but another business presentation for a start-up that couldn't get going.  I'm personally grateful for all of the friends I've made along the way as I transitioned from photo to print, and I see a very bright future for all of us.

Of space and film...memories of a trip to NASA

I was watching a NASA documentary this week and it reminded me of a very fun time 15 years ago when Corbis had the opportunity to access to the original film from the space program up to that time.  The collection, which included film that was taken on the moon, had ever been digitized.  Much of it is very fragile, and to that point any publication was done via color dupes. In fact, due to weight restrictions on the Apollo flights, film was manufactured without any base coating.  This can give you an idea of how conscious NASA was about every single ounce of payload and it left them with film rolls that are more like cellophane than cellulose.

NASA photos are by definition public domain--we as a people own them.  So the deal we made with NASA was that we would use our expertise in scanning, color correction, and archiving as a service and Corbis would be allowed to include the images in our digital collection.  In return we would provide NASA with full-resolution imagery of everything we captured.  Those images are available today at the NASA GRIN site, including the high-res versions.

One of the first steps taken on the Moon, this is an image of Buzz Aldrin's bootprint from the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969.  AS11-40-5877

At that time, most all film scanning was done on a drum or flatbed scanner.  In this case neither would work as the 70mm film from the Hasselblad backs was in long rolls and couldn't be cut, and maintaining the integrity of the archive was of utmost importance. 

A reel of 70mm original flight film from the first five Apollo missions, Apollo 8 through 13, is prepared for scanning at the Corbis scanning laboratory at the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas. © Roger Resssmeyer/Corbis

Working with world-renowned space and science photographer, Corbis colleague Roger Ressmeyer, Charlie Sliwoski, Corbis Imaging Lab manager at our Seattle headquarters, and the NASA photo team,  a roll-to-roll process using the  Leica DSW200 was developed to handle the job.  Astronaut Jay Apt worked with Roger and Charlie to tweak the color from these frames that had already begun to shift in some cases.  The result was public access to images that had not seen the light of day for nearly 30 years, first viewed in the book Orbit.

Non-NASA employees were not authorized to handle the film directly, and given the sensitive nature of these priceless assets, we built a close bond with the Johnson Space Center team.  The project was considered secret, and in one of the funniest stories from the trip there was a rumor that "Bill Gates' company was funding a project to look for extraterrestrials in the NASA film archives".  And this was from NASA employees.

During the time I was in Houston, The Columbia Space Shuttle mission STS-75 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  It was really a privilege to be at Mission Control during the launch and for a few days during the mission.  Surely the days of capturing imagery on film is past and worrying about the weight of anything photographic besides the capture device is a memory but we all do owe a debt of gratitude to the folks that manned the photo lab in Houston and protected a great piece of our history for generations to come.

Want to see more NASA shots?  Take a look at this book in the Blurb Bookstore.

Images from NASA by Axel Puhrer, PuhrerDigital | Make Your Own Book

Steidl and POD in the same post? Outrageous!?!

If you work at a company like Blurb you really need to love books.  Not just reading them but knowing about them, about the authors, and, if you are like many of us, understanding how they are built. Because of that last point I really enjoyed the NY Times piece in this Sunday's Style Magazine on Gerhard Steidl.  The world of fine art bookmaking is fabulous and Steidl is at the pinnacle of his art.

But is there any real comparison to the painstaking hand work that represents what comes out of Göttingen and what can be expected from a print on demand publisher like Blurb?  A lot more than you think.

First off, when we started Blurb our goal was to find a sweet spot with high-end, "bookstore quality" books and a price point that allowed our customers to sell their books for a profit.  Early on that meant getting our first printing partners to buy into a whole new model of how 4-color books should be priced.  Since then the technology has advanced a bit, allowing us to build more and more process automation into our workflow which allows us to continually improve quality while keeping our prices among the most economical in the marketplace.

Some of the improvements since we first went to market in 2007 are an ever-expanding line of products that include hardcover with dust jacket or custom-printed "ImageWrap" as well as soft cover books; an all-HP Indigo global network tuned to GRACol standards, assuring consistant quality worldwide wherever books are printed; a broadening line of standard and premium papers; and, very soon, new pro-directed options.  Add to that our new standard end sheet that will be moving from white to a thicker medium-grey paper and, in our world, POD does not mean low-grade.

We are constantly looking for ways to improve our products.  Over the past month we have held sessions with design movers and shakers in Berlin, hobnobbed with some of the best photographers in the world at the Palm Springs Photo Festival, and ran various focus groups as we plan our next options.  Our new BookSmart software just released has many upgrades that come directly from the requests of our customers. And we've got some new, native digital products on their way that will reinvent the genre.  We're pretty excited.

As I get ready to head off to New York for the Publishing Business Conference, I'm reminded of how the book business has changed.  But reading the story about how Steidl goes about his craft, it's nice to see some things--like quality--are constant in the minds of those who love books.