It’s October, and that means it’s the season for the chestnut harvest in the nearby Valle del Genal.
We left Marbella this morning around 10am, heading up the Carretera de Ronda where we stopped (as usual) at the Venta Navisillo for a late-morning breakfast. It was an absolutely beautiful morning — cool, crisp, sunny and blue. Perfect for a bike ride.
This is a long article, but one I think could be important to you. It’s about something that, for me, has proven transformative in my life. It’s about the Paleo diet, and I hope you enjoy it.
My company develops an iPhone application called RaceSplitter for the timing of sporting events. It’s a well made product, that until now has received almost exclusively exceptional reviews. And that’s important to us, because user reviews strongly influence the purchasing decision of potential customers.
Today, a new review came in from iTunes — giving the product “one star”, i.e. essentially saying it couldn’t be any worse. Let’s take a look at user WEDALLARD’s review of RaceSplitter (in an iTunes view that also shows us his other product reviews).
It seems that each day we get to read comments from political leaders — whether Obama in the US, or Zapatero in Spain — arguing for increased taxes on those who have earned or saved more, with justification that it’s “fair”; that this segment of society should do more to help those in need.
Moral issues aside, the problem is that the reality is far less straightforward than one segment of society helping another.
I’ve been reading the book, “Why we get fat” by Gary Taubes. If you’re interested in understanding the relationship between eating and getting fat, then you must read the book. It could change your life.
The revelation of the book is that some common dietary beliefs are, as demonstrated by science & biology, complete inverted. And that got me thinking about possible parallels in other areas, such as productivity.
Having tracked my personal finances and investment transactions in Quicken for Mac since around 1992, I was keenly interested in an email from Intuit, with the subject, “Is Quicken compatible with Mac OS 10.7 Lion?”
Coming from a company who’s major product upgrades over the past years have included new features along the lines of, “Enhanced Toolbar Icons”, and “Includes free copy of Stuffit Expander”, my hopes weren’t high.
And it’s a good thing they weren’t. The email pointed to this page of insulting corporate speak.
I’ll do you the favor, and translate it here to plain English.
BEFORE NOW, THE CHOICES AVAILABLE to organizers of trail running events for the timing of their races were:
Expensive — Contracting a professional chip-timing service, the cost of which can easily exceed 1,000€.
Painful — Manually recording times, using a stopwatch and paper, or typing into an Excel spreadsheet on a laptop.
An exciting new option exists that costs a fraction of a professional service, is convenient and easy to use, yet provides high quality, reliable results.
A few months back, I received an email from Ramiro Rejón, owner of a local Spanish company called “Avent y Event” — organizers of the popular series of local ultra trail running events, including the Animal Trail (in El Burgo) and the Inferno Trail (in Tolox). He and his partners, JuanMa and Yolanda, wanted to talk about the possibility of using RaceSplitter in their newest event, the INFINITA Ultra Trail, taking place on Saturday, June 25, in Cortes de la Frontera, Spain.
How to best organize a society is certainly an area in which I’m hardly qualified to offer opinions. That said, having studied economics for a couple of years, what I’ve heard that makes most sense to me are the free-market, small government ideas of Milton Friedman. For that reason, I tend to gravitate towards conservative political candidates like Ron Paul.
The thing that most bothers me about the conservatives, however, is that they seem to assume their “market” is composed of uneducated dimwits, and as such, the best communications strategy is to speak to them as simpletons attending a Saturday-night Baptist revival.
This past weekend, the nearby town of San Pedro celebrated its annual “24 hours of sports” festival, during which a variety of sporting events are conducted over a one-day period. One of the events was a 2km race for the town locals. The Makalu team volunteered to provide timing service using our RaceSplitter product — an iPhone/iPad app used to time sporting events and races.
Yesterday we got a glimpse of the future of race timing, as the Makalu team traveled to Atarfe, Spain to conduct a live demonstration of our new product, RaceSplitter — an iPhone application for race timing.
AYER HEMOS TENIDO UN ANTICIPO DEL FUTURO DEL CRONOMETRAJE DE CARRERAS, al tiempo que el equipo de Makalu viajó a Atarfe, Granada, para llevar a cabo una demostración en vivo de nuestro nuevo producto, RaceSplitter – una aplicación de iPhone para el cronometraje de carreras.
Like most people fascinated with the potential that devices like the iPad have to change how we read and learn, I rushed to the App Store to purchase Push Pop Press’s highly-anticipated first interactive book, “Our Choice.”
An office on the beach and next to El Tinglao — perhaps one of the best kept secrets in Marbella, Spain. Fresh fish, barbecued meat, and creative mediterranean dishes are served up daily on the scandalously priced 8€ lunch menu. We’re pretty darn lucky here at Makalu Interactive, to have become friends with Emilio, the owner and chef extraordinaire at the El Tinglao restaurant.
Marketing and advertising have long been important ingredients in the success of commercial products. What has accelerated those industries forward over the decades has been the ever-increasing ability to close the analytics loop from advertising to sales.
For example, through direct mail coupons, which can be traced back to specific campaigns, advertising professionals have been able to conclusively demonstrate the effectiveness of long copy, have identified particular words that are effective in headlines, understand the importance of captions, and can determine cost per sale to the penny. Online, tools like Google analytics, in combination with techniques such as A/B testing, have taken us even further.
The iOS market, however, currently suffers a critical shortcoming in this area.
Apple do not provide any mechanism to close the loop between a source (referral from a website, or advertisement) and, ultimately, a sale. Without it, Apple are denying product makers with precisely the mechanism that propelled advertising from an industry of guesswork to one that, today, has nearly become a science.
Furthermore, controlling a single marketplace, Apple have the potential to take advertising and sales analytics to a level never before possible. For example, in addition to providing positive- and neutral-feedback analytics, they could provide negative-feedback as well — i.e. they could provide product makers and advertisers with closed-loop data relating ones own ads to the direct purchase of a competitor’s product. Things could get very interesting!
So here’s to hoping Apple make this a priority.
My friend Babak Alimoradian of Team Extreme recently had this cool video commissioned to promote our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu program. Check it out!
Draculino Team from Barray Audiovisuals on Vimeo.
