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Turn your iPhone into a Digital Wallet

I just counted. I have 21 plastic cards in my wallet... credit cards, ID cards, membership cards, you name it. And there are four barcode tags dangling from my car keys.

Being a geek, I keep all the relevant numbers encrypted in my Palm Treo (using SplashID... I really hope they're doing an iPhone version!), but rattling off a ten-digit number doesn't do much good when the clerk at Barnes and Noble wants to see your card.

In preparing for the switch to an iPhone this weekend, I started thinking. Why not carry images of all those cards instead?

Here's the video of the result:
[Read more...]

Travel Lessons Learned

This was written as part of my earlier post on our South Africa trip, but that was getting over-long, so I decided to split it out. Trying to record some "lessons learned" about travel preparation for long trips, with an emphasis on digital photography.

Laptop

Yeah, bring it. It's heavy and awkward and fragile, but I was able to download pictures to disk every night, and about every third night I burned DVDs of the trip's photos for safety. (We wound up taking 3200 pictures. Ain't digital grand?) We were able to upload selections to our photo site so that people back home could be jealous in real-time. And it was nice to dip into the flood of email occasionally, just to remind myself that things can get done without me.

(Note: Test-drive the brand of DVDs you pack! I had brought a supply of blanks that apparently my MacBook Pro can't initialize... so we had to find a local electronics store to sell us some. Not a challenge in urban areas, but it would have been a real problem out in the bush!)

Power Adapters

"Universal" power adapters aren't. And "world" kits of plug adapters are apparently for a world that doesn't include South Africa. SA uses a bizarrely huge plug (bigger than England's!) that's not compatible with anything else on the planet. So the bag of adapters I brought was useless weight.

Camera

A lot of people have asked "What did you use to take those pictures?" I think I have hit the current sweet spot among cameras. I used to be a 35mm SLR guy... carrying the big square bag, the lenses, the tripod, you name it. And, often, I'd look at the sheer weight and bulk of what I needed to take good pictures, and I'd say to heck with it... and leave it all behind.

Then, when digital happened, I went through about six cameras, and found myself swinging too far the other way, in favor of the tiny little deck-of-card-sized cameras that fit in your shirt pocket. The advantage: it's always with you. The disadvantage: I don't care how many megapixels it has, it's not going to take great pictures.

On this trip, I thought very hard about bringing a DSLR... and decided not to, purely on logistical grounds. Instead, I brought my Canon A710is (and Cissa brought my old Canon S230).

I think the A710 took some pretty darn good photographs, despite its small size. On my oversize Optech strap, I could keep it slung across my body for security, but stuck in a hip pocket for convenience. So I can't drop it, a pickpocket can't steal it, and there's nothing bouncing around and banging into things like a DSLR. It's a camera small enough to always be with you, but powerful enough to capture a wide variety of shots with surprisingly good quality.

The mix of features is just about right. No interchangeable lenses, so you're stuck with the 6x optical zoom, but with image stabilization, that works reasonably well. (Digital zoom is worthless; that's what cropping is for.) I used the exposure control a lot on sunny days, and occasionally played with aperture priority when I was trying to tighten a depth of field. And manual focus let me shoot through train windows without blurring. From the factory, it doesn't do exposure bracketing, but CHDK fixes that.

I also grabbed a Gorillapod that I kept stuck in another pocket. That came in handy for self-portraits, for the occasional low-light shot, and for experimenting with timelapse photography. (For an example of timelapse, play this video of sunrise over Table Mountain, here. That was shot with the intervalometer option that Canon disabled, but CHDK re-enables. Hacking your camera's firmware is fun!)

Based on our experiences (comparing the same shot taken at the same time with our two cameras), I'm going to hand the A710 to Cissa, and buy its successor, the A720 for myself. Anybody want to buy a used S230?

Camera Management

Since I collected photos from other travellers on our trip, I wound up managing photographs from five cameras, with five different filenaming schema, and seven different system clocks. (Seven? Yes... I changed my camera and Cissa's to South African time. But at different times on the first day, so there was some period of overlap. And the three cameras I didn't control were on three different time zones... one was a full day off!)

iPhoto on the Mac doesn't stutter when handling thousands of photographs... but it's really happiest when it can sort according to the EXIF timestamp written inside the JPEG file. The varying system clocks made this chaos, and I had to make multiple trips to the "Adjust Date and Time" menu. If I were doing this again, I'd ask everyone to snap one easily identifiable photograph at the same time to use that as a baseline for synchronizing the timestamps later.

Batteries

Using the deck-of-cards cameras with their vendor-specific battery packs, you're always worried about battery life. One of the advantages of the A710/A720 is that is uses standard AA batteries. Rechargeables are cheaper in the long run, but it's nice to know that you can always grab a pair of batteries at a convenience store (or, in a pinch, out of anything nearby that runs on AAs!). I took a supply of rechargeable AAs and a 110-240V charger. I recharged every night, and always had two spare pair stuck in a pocket. Using CHDK, I always had an onscreen display of remaining battery life. Never any reason to worry.

Clothing

We're not the kind of people to travel with just two shirts, and always wash one out in the sink at night. Sorry, that's not our style. But bringing two weeks' worth of clean clothes would have been ridiculous.

Yes, the hotel laundry service is expensive. Do it anyhow. We had the Victoria and Albert Hotel do a week of laundry for us, and it greatly cut down on packing volume.

Small Bags

The disadvantage of a trip like this (as compared to a cruise, for example) is packing and unpacking. In two weeks, we spent nights in seven different hotels plus a train. We took two large suitcases and two smaller bags (as well as the laptop case, which is irreducible). Whenever possible, we'd repack the small bags so that we wouldn't need access to the large suitcases at the next stop. This turned out to be especially important on the Blue Train, where there wasn't room to open the large suitcases!

Wheels

I used to laugh at people with wheels on their suitcases. Now I pity people without them.

A Year of Blogging

Yeah, a self-referential blog post about... blogging. Yeah, I hate them, too.

But, hey, it was a year ago today that Jeff Haynie (with a nudge from Lance Weatherby and a few others) nudged me into starting this blog.

I'm not the most prolific of bloggers (although MarsEdit helps immeasurably; highly recommended!), but I get a lot of positive comments... occasionally from people I don't even know! So I'll keep going as long as people see value in it.

As noted earlier, I've moved the Georgia Tech-specific posts to our new GT VentureLab blog.

Suggestions are always welcome, either via email or through the Skribit box to your right.

Spelling Counts

So I'm reviewing business plans this morning, and I'm struck one more time by the number of typos and inconsistencies that I find.

When I teach my classes on entrepreneurship, I always have at least one student protest my statement that "Spelling counts." Especially when they're not native English speakers. "It doesn't affect the meaning! And it certainly doesn't affect my ability as an entrepreneur!"

Sorry, folks, but spelling does count. Not because correct spelling is a virtue in and of itself -- William Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name, when he wasn't busy taking credit for the Earl of Oxford's plays -- but because of what it says about the person sending me the document. Usually the CEO.

If you send me a document that says "Our plan estimates there costs to be..." or "the product and it's derivatives," you are telling me that (1) you don't have good attention to detail, or (2) you're in a hurry, and (3) you don't know when to ask for help. None of those make me want to invest in you.

Ditto for other errors and inconsistencies. If your executive summary says you're raising $1.3 million, but page 17 says you're raising $1.5 million, I'm not going to care which number is right -- I'm going to care that they're different. If your month-old printed plan lists four founders, but your new PowerPoint presentation lists three, I'm going to wonder what happened to the fourth person... and he or she is guaranteed to be my first reference call!

(All of these errors are from real business plans. And note that running spellcheck wouldn't catch any of them!)

When you're sending out a business plan for investment, you're supposed to be putting your best foot forward. Remember when your mother said "You only get one chance to make a first impression"? She was right. If my first impression of you is a document with errors in it, that colors my opinion of you and your company. If you're not going to sweat the details here, what are you going to do when negotiating a sales contract, or an employment agreement, or preparing a presentation for a key client?

Also, you want me to be concentrating on the substance of your plan, not the appearance. Stumbling over inconsistencies (like flipping back to compare two numbers that ought to match, but don't) take me out of the "flow" and make me think about the document, not the content. Not a good idea.

Nobody says that you, yourself, have to be a champion editor and proofreader. That may not be your strength (especially those non-native English speakers mentioned above). What I am saying is that, if it's not your strength, get help! One of the key skills of a successful CEO is being able to recruit talent... this is your first test. Ask your spouse. Ask your friends. Ask your professional contacts. If all else fails, pay someone. But by the time you commit your plan to print (or PDF), it should be a compelling narrative of your vision for your company... not a minefield of distracting errors.

Email Bankruptcy

I don't want this to become an Instapundit-type blog where you look over my shoulder and see what I'm reading on the Web today. (Hey, I met the Instapundit this weekend! Glenn, thanks for coming to ISDC!)

That being said, sometimes I won't be able to resist. Like this link to 43folders on "email bankruptcy"... deleting everything and starting over.

Good quote:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a... pebble!”