Jed Cohen

After updating my blog yesterday, I discovered that my website had at some point in the last month been subject to a WordPress redirect exploit. After a few hours last night (really this morning) where the entire site was offline, I was able to bring it back up and purge the affected files. My thanks to the folks at (mt) Media Temple, who published this knowledge base article on how to resolve this issue. And also for providing a fresh perspective after a few hours of late night research and even fewer hours of sleep.

I was also able to correct a potential spam issue related to a rouge php file that appeared in my WordPress install some time ago. My apologies if you’ve been affected as a result either of these attacks – I certainly never meant for this to happen. Open source projects like WordPress have enabled millions of people to publish their own voice online. But security issues like this remind me that the Internet is still relatively young; I think it’s obvious that we still have some steps to take to make it a safer place to both publish and browse.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Square before. It’s the newest venture from Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders of Twitter. The idea behind Square is pretty simple. Download an app for your mobile phone, and you can charge credit cards just about anywhere, with the only charge being a per-transaction fee. Square can also send you a tiny little credit card reader (for free), which reduces the transaction fee as it lowers the chance of fraud.

Pretty cool, right? Square’s been up and running for just about six months, but only recently became able to fulfill requests for readers en masse. The end result of Square is in a sense the democratization of credit card payments; anyone can use their credit card to pay for just about anything anywhere, with little to no hassle.

This is actually pretty similar to a system that’s been in use for a few years in Kenya called M-PESA (the m stands for mobile and pesa is Swahili for money). M-PESA allows individuals to transfer money and mobile phone minutes from one user to another, with little to no interaction with a traditional bank. As a result, financial transactions become location independent and easy to accomplish, since the system can piggyback upon existing mobile networks.

Using mobile phones as a payment device isn’t all that new though. In the U.S. they’ve been used to purchase ringtones and the like for some time, and they’ve acted as complete mobile payment solutions abroad for years. But what’s great about Square is that it could potentially open up the purchasing power of the U.S. consumer credit system to everyone – from independent artists to tiny companies to international charities.

Brings new meaning to the phrase “accepted everywhere,” doesn’t it?

I started blogging one year ago last Monday.  I am sadly a few days late in marking the occasion, but since I actually thought it was today, I hope you’ll forgive me.

A few personal facts about the past year:

• I graduated from college and now work full time.  I suppose this makes me a “grown up,” but I’m still not to sure what this means.
• I completed two separate virtual internships in my spare time – one for CAREEREALISM and another for Squidoo.  As a result, I was interviewed for a WSJ article (my PR class came in handy!).
• I went to the 2009 New Yorker Summit and the first 140 Characters Conference in NYC and had a blast at both.

A few facts about this blog:

• I’ve published 51 posts and have 21 drafts (most of the drafts will probably never see the light of day, but they’re there).
• Google Analytics tells me the following:

• My three most popular posts (in order) are “Google’s Own Area Code?,” “The Role of Propaganda in Modern Democracy (aka My Colloquium),” and “Social Media Fatigue.”

And a few goals for the next year of blogging:

• Post more uniformly.  As you can see above, I averaged almost one post a week for the entire year.  I think that’s pretty good, but I know that there are some months where I posted a ton and some where I did not.  So I’m going to try to spread out my posting more.
• Write some posts from this list of seed ideas I posted a while back.  I’ve got some in draft form, but I’d like to finish a good number of them and get them posted.  Right as soon as I remember what they all mean.
• Incorporate more things I find across the web.  I have both a Posterous and a Tumblr, which are two super simple posting sites.  I’d like to start using one of them more.  I was pushing my Posterous posts to this blog (all three of them), but I didn’t quite like the implementation.  So I need to work on that too.
• I might also update the design and branding for this.  I’m pretty happy with the current design, but I may start looking for something new.  And I’m not sure I want to stick with “Jed Cohen’s blog” anymore.

So I guess I should get to work.  See you around as this thing heads into its second year!

I just finished reading this post from Seth Godin about how businesses can play with their margin to afford promotions.  Godin writes about a fictional pizzeria:

The marginal profit of one more pizza is high. You’ve already paid for the rent, the oven, the sign, the ad in the Yellow Pages, the hourly wage, the uniforms, all of it. Whether you sell that last pizza of the day or not, all those costs are fixed. So, if your ingredients cost $2, your gross margin is $8…

If someone offers to run a coupon…[offering] a large pizza for $2, is it worth it for you to run it? That’s 80% off! Surely, this is too expensive. You can’t afford 80% off.

On the margin, of course you can. You got a new customer for free. Unless your store is at capacity, with people waiting in line, one more pizza sold at cost is a great way to build your business…

Let’s break down the economics a bit (not that it’s terribly complicated).  There are two general kinds of costs, fixed and variable.  Fixed costs are what Godin lists above – rent, oven, employees.  There’s really nothing that can be done to lower them.  Variable costs change depending upon a few different factors.  If we continue with the pizza example, then the more pizzas you sell, the more tomatoes you need to buy.  You might need more gas for the oven.  And so on.  Also, a rise in variable costs doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with sales; by purchasing more, you might be able to obtain the same quality goods for less via wholesale.

Godin is in a way proposing a variable margin, a reverse of variable costs.  The idea is that the more you voluntarily (and temporarily) lower your margin, the more you sell – if not now, then in the future.  The key really is repeat customers, which means a product that is at least somewhat impermanent (think clothes or music, not houses or cars).  By providing potential customers with a reason to initially consume your product, you create the chance for them to become loyal to your brand.  The next time they purchase from you, your margin has been restored.

Of course this is nothing new.  It’s why we have sales, coupons, “special one time offer only” and “buy now while supplies last.”  What I think is new (or at least refreshing) is the approach.  A variable margin means a focus on future profit instead of immediate gain.  It means building trust before building sales.  And it means understanding that loosing unrealized gains now (discounting your product) is often preferable to loosing everything tomorrow (when nobody purchases from you).

You might not have to be as extreme as Godin suggests.  You might not gain more customers from discounting 80% off over 50% off.  We could probably throw together an experiment to see.  But either way, it’s still worth trying, right?

flickr. from rpongsaj.

I have two Twitter accounts.  I have two Twitter accounts because on Twitter there is no distinction between public and private.  So if I want to restrict something to just my friends, I can’t.  It’s all or nothing.  I know that chances are you don’t really truly care what I tweet about.  But considering how easy it is to dig up information about someone, I think it’s prudent that I reserve a portion of my online presence for just those who know me in real life. Of course the primary difference between my two accounts may just be whether or not I share what I ate for lunch, but I think that’s okay.

For Twitter, the privacy feature is simple.  Off or on?  Public or private?  Open or closed.  Facebook, on the other hand, isn’t so simple.  I have complete flexibility in terms of who can see what content and if they can comment on it.  I can lock down as much of my profile as I want, or I can let anyone with an internet connection take a look.  It’s up to me (and you).

Privacy on Facebook is complex.  Then again Facebook itself is complex (at least when compared to Twitter), so this makes sense.  As a result, Facebook has a tool that lets you look at your profile as if you were someone else:

Privacy has to be at the core of any internet service.  Users need to feel protected otherwise they probably aren’t going to want to participate.  They may not always recognize how protected they are (consider the modern day urban legend of embarrassing pictures on Facebook costing someone their job).  But that sense of security and trust remains important, even if it’s only in the minds of the users – although it should be forefront in the minds of the service providers as well.  We don’t even have to go very far back for examples.  The Google Buzz launch.  Facebook’s own recent changes to privacy settings.  Concerns about Foursquare leading to robbery.

But as social sharing services grow more and more complex, do privacy controls need to be scaled to match?  If Twitter decides to add more features, will they have move away from the private/public dichotomy and make things more complicated?  And what happens when another social platform rises up to join Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in what will then be the “big four” of the social networking space (insert your location based service of preference here)?

Obviously I don’t know.  Maybe there’s a third model for privacy on social media, one we haven’t even considered yet.  I guess I’ll be dual-tweeting till that happens.  What about you? How do you deal with the different privacy settings across the social platforms you use?

Let’s call this the start of a semi-regular series.  In each of these entries, I’ll take a look at some product that I interact with and point out a few ways I would improve it.  Almost like I was a product manager at the company.  Except I’m not so as always these entires represent only my opinion and not the opinion of anyone I’m associated with.

I’m going to assume you know what Netflix is.  If you don’t, I’d recommend checking out their website and then coming back to finish this post.

I’m going to break Netflix down into the two services they offer – rental DVDs via mail and streaming movies via the internet.  We can’t really change the DVDs via the mail that much.  You could get more disks at once for the same money.  Netflix could stock more disks or build more distribution facilities, but those wouldn’t really translate into benefits for consumers (since disks are delivered next day anyway).  Or they could open physical stores, but we’ve seen that and it hasn’t exactly been working so well.

But we can improve the streaming experience.  And we can do it in a few ways.

Shift control away from the computer.

In order to stream Netflix content to your television, you’ll need an Xbox 360, PS 3, Wii, Roku, Boxee Box, or some other kind of streaming device.  But most of the time watching movies on your TV doesn’t actually start there – it starts on your computer.  This is where you add content to your “instant queue,” which is the main pipeline of content from Netflix to your device.

But what if you’re not at your computer?  What if you’re at your TV and you want to watch something that’s not in your instant queue?  Then you need to get up, walk to your computer, search for what you’re looking for, and add it to your queue.  Not exactly ideal.  So let’s add the ability to modify your instant queue from your device.

Yes, this presents problems.  You’d have to input text into a search field using your device’s remote.  This means a lot of arrowing around a keyboard on your screen to type in a title, but a predictive search option will help with that.  And given the convergence between television and computing that devices like the Boxee Box are fostering, you might see more QWERTY keyboards coming to remote controls sooner rather than later.  In addition, the rise of the smartphone means that Netflix could create a mobile application to let users interact with their account and alter their instant queue.

As streaming continues to grow, Netflix will need to shift the management of the instant queue away from the computer and to where people already are – their couches (and maybe their pockets too).

Redesign with the family in mind.

The average US household had 2.59 people in it in 2000.  And I can bet you that at least a portion of those 2.59 people did not all want to watch the same thing at the same time.  So the second major change that Netflix needs to make is to allow multiple family members to establish their own identity within one household account.  Netflix addresses this somewhat with profiles, which are sub-accounts that let you set up individual DVD queues and allocate a set number of disks to each queue at a time, but they don’t translate into the watch instantly queue.  By establishing profiles for the watch instantly queue, Netflix would bring an additional level of customization to their streaming service.

At the same time, this would add a layer of complexity, which can translate into user frustration.  As such, Netflix might have to redesign aspects of its user interface (to change profiles) and device registration process (perhaps to specify a default profile).  There are difficulties with this, given the fact that most of the devices people use to stream Netflix are made by other companies.  But building this functionality into the streaming experience now will provide them with a leg up as more and more people shift away from traditional cable/satellite towards digital platforms.

And for a company whose revenue stream is based entirely on subscriptions, that can’t be a bad thing.

So that’s what I would do to improve upon Netflix (which is already pretty great).  But I’m curious – what would you do?  Leave a comment to let me know!

Something wrong?

Okay, confused kitten isn't really related to this post. (via flickr/fofurasfelinas)

Well then let’s try to fix it.

We can break troubleshooting theory down into four simple steps:

1. Determine all possible causes of your problem.
2. Remove one half of all the potential causes.
3. Test to see if your problem is still there.
4. Repeat steps two and three until you’ve narrowed it down to one specific cause.

The process really isn’t difficult.  We all run through these steps when we encounter a problem.  I can’t get in my car.  Is it me?  Is it my car?  What about me isn’t right?  Oh, I left my keys on my desk?  Cause isolated; when I get my keys my problem isn’t a problem anymore.

Of course, we don’t actively follow each of these steps when we go about our daily lives.  But we can apply this process to almost any process we have problems with, from marketing campaigns to computer programs to people development at work.

So where’s the challenge?

We aren’t experts.

This process works well for us when we know something about the field the problem is in.  I could apply all the troubleshooting theory I want, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to isolate the cause of an issue with the space shuttle.  Or diagnose someone suffering from, well, just about any medical problem.

Sometimes we can figure out the first few steps.

Why doesn’t my television turn on?  Is the problem with the remote or the television itself?  Okay, the television turns on when I press the button on the front.  Let’s replace the batteries in the remote and test again.  And so on and so on.

Sometimes we can’t figure out what to do.

Why is the “check engine” light on my car on?  I don’t know.  And I have no idea what possible causes there are so I have no possibilities to split in half (and for that matter no tests to run).  This is where we turn things over to the experts, specialists who can identify and resolve our problem for us.  They do what we’d do, if we knew what we were talking about.  They run tests.  They reduce possibilities.  And so on and so on.

Sometimes we are afraid to do anything.

Then there are times when we don’t want to make a mistake and make things worse.  Even though we might have an idea of what is wrong or where to start, we don’t want to take that risk.  Perhaps fear isn’t the right word.  Maybe it’s trepidation.  We are uncertain in our own ability to fix the problem, so we don’t touch the matter at hand.  We go and find an expert, who applies these troubleshooting steps for us.  And so on and so on.

This can be a good thing, if the solution is esoteric, or if what we would do is potentially harmful to our goals.  But it can also be detrimental when the solution is simple and our fear stops us from acting.  It’s why there are consultants for hiring decisions, for firing decisions, for personal development.  Because we’re not sure what we’re doing, and these may just be among the most important actions of any company.

So what do we do?

The reasons for our fear varies, but I think it is in part because of the quirkiness of our psychology.  Our minds are optimized to succeed - most of the time.  It’s why we have common sense and rules of thumb to follow.  So when we encounter a situation outside of our comfort areas, something doesn’t translate.  We apply the rules we’re used to to situations we’re not.  Which doesn’t always have the happiest of endings.

We’ll never be perfect (surprise!).  But maybe we can get better.  By taking a look at the results of our past troubleshooting attempts, we might just be able to figure out where our psychology goes wrong and take steps to correct it.  I suppose we’re troubleshooting our troubleshooting – and isn’t that something worth doing every once in a while?

I am a member of way too many online services.  You probably are too.  There’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Posterous, Brazen Careerist, Delicious, Squidoo, Ning, WordPress.com – and those are just the ones that I use at least once a month.  I’ve also got placeholder accounts set up at a variety of services in case I ever want to use them.

Even if I never log in, I still have profiles.  And if I want to do something like change my picture, I have to log in to each and every one to do so.  Granted, I can use Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth to log in on many sites, which ties my profiles to just two places.  But not every place supports those services, and even if they do, chances are the profiles ask for different information.  On Twitter, I have 160 characters and a URL to describe myself.  On Facebook, I have as much room as I want to use.  And  what if I want to use different elements of each profile?  Maybe I want to include my favorite books from Facebook and my educational background from LinkedIn.  I can’t think of an easy way to do that right now.

I want to build a way to manage my entire identity online.  This is the idea behind OpenID I suppose.  But I want to build the reverse.  Even if I have one set of credentials to log in everywhere, I still have 18 different profiles (I just made that number up, but you get the idea).  What I want to build is kind of a modular system where you input all of your information that you’d ever want to share.  Then you provide the system with your login information and check off what you want your profile to say where.  Every time you update the modules, this updater propagates the changes to all of the other services you interact with.  So it’ll no longer take you a half a day to update your picture and bio on all of your profiles – you do it once and the system does the rest.  The closest analogy I have it that it’s like Ping.fm, but for profiles.

Now I know it’s a bit silly to be sharing this on my blog.  What I should do is go find an engineer or two, build this, find funding, and launch it.  By posting it here, I’m letting this idea out into the wild where others can create it without having any obligation to me.  That’s a risk I’m willing to take because, well, I honestly have no idea if I could get this thing off the ground.  For that matter, it may already exist.  Or it could violate the TOS of any of the websites that it would update.

While I figure that all out, what do you think? Would you use this updater? What am I missing? I’d love to get some feedback.

I read the Untemplater Manifesto a few days ago.  At it’s most basic, it contains the stories of six people with entirely different backgrounds who have managed to be happy doing something completely outside of the norm for who they are.  If we move to the more complex, I imagine it can be a combination of an inspirational ebook, a call to action, or an affirmation of your plans (those may all be the same thing depending upon who you are).

I want to embrace what they’re writing here.  I’ll be the first to admit that where I am now, six months after graduating college, was not where I planned to be.  I’m sure that correcting the path I’m on is going to be frustrating and tiring and hard work.  I hope that it will also be fun and engaging and educational and uplifting (this is why I’m looking for a new project by the way).  I want Untemplater to be one of the steps forward on the path I’m hoping to follow.

To give you the sense of the manifesto, I went ahead and put the text through Wordle, generating the following:

I really think this does a great job of summing up what the manifesto focuses on – spending your time making your lifestyle all about what you want.  The other items, like school, friends, work, and travel, all become secondary.  I imagine it must be incredibly freeing.  It must also be scary.  The people behind these stories have all taken some kind of leap into the unknown.  They’re out there innovating in their respective fields, and apparently doing it successfully.  Their combined experiences will probably provide Untemplater with plenty of content.  And as they’re all continuing on their own journeys, we’ll be able to follow along as they both find success and make mistakes.

But I can’t help but wonder – isn’t this all a bit oxymoronic?  This is a website that says it’s going to make you think about how you can control your own life.  Isn’t there a possibility that they’re providing one template to substitute for another?  I really don’t know.

Big questions aside, I held off on publishing this because I wanted to see what they would post in these first few days.  So far they’ve provided some good financial advice, looked at the good and the bad of the mobile lifestyle, and called themselves (and probably me and you as well) crazy.  It’s an interesting mix of articles, and I look forward to reading what they produce in the future.  Hopefully it’ll make my own life a little less routine in the process.

(I should note that while I starting writing this shortly after the manifesto was published, I am using this as my submission to one of Untemplater’s giveaways.  Because, you know, why not?)