Andrew Lisy's Blog

It's been a terrible month for user data security. Epsilon and Sony, both high-profile and data-rich companies, have been breached and revealed sensitive personal data to hackers. In Sony's case, the 77 million users affected weren't even notified that their names, addresses and potentially credit card data were compromised until six days after the attack. Many speculate that in the rush to get out new product features, Sony neglected to carefully think through their security model for protecting the valuable user data they they stored. Clearly, the current system of data storage and retrieval is broken. As today's New York Times reports, there is currently no U.S. federal law regulating data theft, penalties, and notification requirements, so states are left to determine their own protocols. Companies have little downside to collecting troves of information, since the penalties for losing it are unclear while the benefits to having it are potentially great. Meanwhile, consumers have little or no control over what happens to the increasing amount of personal information that they give or leave as they interact online and in person with well connected businesses.

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These are the Glengarry leads. And to you, they're gold. And you don't get them. Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers.

A few weeks back, Groupon, everyone's favorite startup, offered a nationwide Gap coupon -- $25 for $50 at Gap. By the end of the day, Groupon/Gap had sold over 400,000 of the deals -- over $10 million in discounts to customers purchasing the offer and likely around a 75% discount to Gap stakeholders after Groupon's cut. Based on their latest 10-Q (June 2010), GAP Stores has a gross margin of 42.1% (this is averaged across Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic). Therefore, every $50 Groupon they sell has a cost to them in the neighborhood of $29 (technically a bit less, since a few costs like rent are fixed but included in the gross margin calculation). After Groupon's cut (assuming 50%), Gap receives $12.50, leaving a shortfall of $16.50. For Gap to break even, every customer entering the store must therefore spend an additional $40 (.421*$40=$16.84). So with the numbers out of the way, how does Gap, or any business, make this deal worthwhile? They key is how much value a company is able to extract out of a customer once they're in the door.

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The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a "culture of ideas". Google is the prime example of this -- if you work at Google, you're encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this -- Google "loses" one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting! Dig a little deeper, however, and you'll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

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As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped "too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates". The thinking then, which remains to this day, is that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its "softer" alternatives.

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The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they've harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

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I've noticed more and more lately that there seems to be an air-conditioning problem nearly everywhere I go. Businesses for some reason think that their customers want to be kept at a frosty 68 degrees while they shop. Office buildings think that the computers and inhabitants will melt if the temperature leaps beyond the 70 mark. At the offices I've worked at, it's typically so cold that people bring sweaters or fleeces to wear during the day! The Department of Energy says that HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) account for 40-60% of the energy use in buildings. Given that it's expensive, inefficient, environmentally harmful and just plain uncomfortable, why not just turn the thermostat up a few degrees!

I have a ton of photos that I've taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos -- view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn't one solution that works for everything. 

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I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.

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In his latest article called Phone Revolution, Tony Lawrence talks about Google Voice and his excitement about the new features. Its been blogged to death in the last week, but some of the highlights of this cool new service include:

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• ...etc

What struck me about this post wasn't anything about Google Voice specifically, since I've heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.

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In many states, New York included, there is a $0.05 deposit on aluminum cans. The deposit is designed to provide an economic incentive to people so that they recycle their cans instead of just throwing them in the garbage when they're finished. The program works beautifully; however, like many such programs, the way it works isn't necessarily the way you'd immediately picture such a system to function. People that buy the cans and pay the extra $0.05 are rarely the people that end up collecting the nickel when they're done with it -- for them, the deposit is just an added tax on cans that they are still going to throw away. Instead, the people that benefit are those who are able to collect cans out of the garbage and off the street and then turn them in for the deposit. The economic incentive turns an otherwise difficult task -- collecting and sorting a city's worth of cans from the garbage -- into a task done readily by people that otherwise may have few other work alternatives.

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