Juixe Techknow

Has Google lost it’s focus? It sure sounds like when you take into account all the investments that Google has made recently, such as investing in social game developer Zynga, a myriad of wind and solar energy projects, and even in DNA analysis outfit 23andMe. But nothing can be further from web search and a self driving autonomous vehicle. You may ask, what does developing an artificial intelligence for a driverless car have to do with Google’s mission of indexing the world’s information. Another question is why wouldn’t Google leave autonomous terrestrial vehicles to the military, or Ford.

Most Silicon Valley pundits have been predicting that Google next project would be Google Me, a social networking site to compete toe to toe with Facebook. But no one predicted these investments outside of search, ads, and mobile.

Over the past few administrations, federal funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA have been cut while military spending has increased. Maybe Google is the new NASA. They are funding and starting projects usually considered the realm of large federal agencies such as NASA or DARPA. What other areas of scientific research will Google fund or get into next?  Will Google invest in unmanned aerial vehicles, much like the MQ-1 Predator?

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google was working on a Googlenet artificial intelligence engine and robots powered with the Android platform.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Email is not the future of UI. I dislike services that use email for data entry or input device.
• Common source of errors, cut and paste!
• Functional specifications are often times as misinterpreted as the Bible.
• I’m a programmer by day, developer by night, and hacker in between.
• Some features are disguised as bugs.
• One man’s feature is another man’s bug.
• Void is my favorite return type.
• Code Commandment: No code shall PrintStackTrace
• Show me your implementation and I’ll tell you about yourself.
• The words “it does not compute” does not compute, they are not in my default dictionary.
• Get your hack on!
• When a developer says, “pretty much working” it does not mean production quality.
• I’m not sure that a software application larger than “Hello, World” can be bug free.
• If there is a giant red ‘Do Not Press’ or ‘Active Dooms Day Device’ button, someone will press it.
• Every design decision should be a conscious choice, not an accidental assumption.
• Will work for intellectual stimulation.
• If you are a User Generated Content site saying you will censor a topic will only inspire your users to find ways around that.
• What’s your default setting for the Ultimate Bitch Mode setting?

Team Dynamics

• Just like how there are no any stupid questions, there are no any stupid ideas.
• In order to get the most out of crowd sourcing you need to source your crowd.
• Look past people’s past.
• If you are going to shot for the stars you best have a rocket ship.
• When the stars align, shoot for them. And if you shooting for the stars you best bring the big guns!
• When shooting for the stars I bring an Klingon Bird of Prey!
• And on the 8th day God said, “Let there be a TPS report.”
• Life is too short to sell yourself short.
• Don’t think in problems. Dream in solutions.
• Never say maybe.
• The next big thing usually starts as a small idea.
• People will always push your buttons, you need to know how o deactivate those buttons.
• I don’t fear being wrong. I fear not being able to recognize when other people are wrong.
• You can’t delete emails once sent, but you can read them before you send them.
• For every great idea there are hundreds of ways to mess it up.
• Show me the monetization.

Product Placement

• Mark Zuckerborg is a geek super evil privacy villain.
• Boing Boing should just sell out to Rupert Murdoch.
• Panda Express’ logo says, “Gourmet Chinese Food.” Really, Gourmet? Chinese?
• American Apparel might file for bankruptcy, maybe China can buy it out and rename it to Chairman Mao Apparel.
• The company Manpower has a very male chauvinist sounding name.
• If only mother nature would have patented all her innovations, we would all be paying royalties to her.
• Why does it cost $30 for Apple’s iPhone earphones? They like $.50 worth of material and $.25 of labor!
• If you Google for love you will find about 1,930,000,000 results (0.23 seconds). At least one of those results is meant for you.
• Google Finance should have a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
• The cake is a lie. Do no evil is a lie.
• The next version of the iPhone should be called ivePhone after it’s designer Jony Ive.
• Upset that I’ve had to purchase yet another iPhone headset!!! At $30 a pop the white earphone are Apple’s razor blade business!

Resume Writing Tips

• Resume Writing Tip: Use a good phone line for a phone interview.
• Resume Writing Tip: At a minimum candidate should be able to figure out our URL by a) clicking the link on job description b) from my email.
• Resume Writing Tip: The minimum research a candidate needs to do is lookup the company website himself prior to interviewing.
• Resume Writing Tip: Ensure your cover letter or email is in one font, it shouldn’t look like you cut and pasted from somewhere else.
• Resume Writing Tip: I would leave out MS Access 2000 out of technical skills. It’s also not necessary to list HTML, DHTML, and HTML5.
• Resume Writing Tip: Proof read your resume and fix obvious typos, you can’t say you detailed oriented if you have basic spelling errors.

Quote

• I want to put a ding in the universe. – Steve Jobs
• The problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. – Daring Fireball
• They [People] want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. – Eric Schmidt
• People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them. – Eric Schmidt

The resume as you know it is dead. Having a great resume and a perfect cover letter is not enough of a differentiator. Every candidate will have the same alphabet soup of buzzwords and they all list the same excellent communication and interpersonal soft skills in their resume. Any hiring manager will have the same experience of looking at inbox full of resumes that read the same. There is very little scientific method in the hiring process, it’s mostly voodoo. One way passionate candidates distance themselves from apathetic candidates is by learning a new programming language on their own, by contributing to open source projects, and by blogging and teaching what they’ve learned.

Recruiters are constantly looking for top candidates outside the traditional job boards, career fairs, job listings. There have been many instances where coders land job interviews because of their top rated technology blog, or their Stack Overflow reputation, or their side project in GitHub.

Recently, two stories made the front page of Hacker News that demonstrates that working running demonstrable code is better than sending out your static resume.

After Google released it’s Search Instant feature, Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh used the publicly available YouTube API to develop YouTube Instant. Feross was contacted by YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and offered a job via a tweet.

Designer Rodrigo Galindez gets hired by Zendesk after posting his thoughts and UI mockup to improve the new Twitter design.

As a candidate, you have to think outside the box, outside the resume. Every candidate will have a nice crisp resume. You can’t possibly distinguish yourself from other candidate by the format, font, or flow of your resume. Where appropriate be sure to highlight your contribution to open source projects, technical blog, of even the small natural language pet project written in scheme you might be tinkering with.

It comes as a no surprise to technologist that Google would pull the plug on Google Wave, I just didn’t expect it so soon. I also didn’t expect Google to kill it’s Google Nexus One phone. As a user of Google products, I am always apprehensive to use new Google products because they have a track record of just dropping support for products they deemed unsuccessful with little or no notice. Google has been known to buy products like Jaiku and Dodgeball only to kill them after a year. The other products that I have used and Google has killed include Google Notebook, Google Video, and Google Page Creator. This is one reason I would not use any Google product still in beta, which is most of Google’s products, for mission critical applications. Most of Google’s consumer applications are free, such as Google Docs, Google Mail, and Google Search but only because they provide zero customer support. In fact, you have a better change of finding a Google employee or Product Manager through Twitter than you do through their About Us, Contact Us or corporate website. It’s joke that you can’t even find Google customer support page for any of their products even if you use Google Search.

Google prides themselves in hiring really brilliant engineers, bordering savants and the top 5% of MENSA, and it designs products for users just like them. Basically they design for nerds, and the first response you will ever get when asking a question to a technology focused group is RTFM, and this is how Google treats it’s users. Google expects it’s user to comb through Google Groups, do Google Searches, and ask your colleagues via Google Voice because Google does not see as it’s job to help users with Google products, but to create new products and see what users use, and see how they use it, how much they use it, and how they can learn from users behaviors.

So one is left asking, what product will Google kill next? Orkut? Chrome OS? Google Reader? Google Knol?

I use Google Documents to manage drafts of blog posts, to keep track of house hold finances, and even to manage an invite list to gatherings at my house. You can do a lot with nothing more than Google Docs. Recently I had to help a friend create a small informal survey to use with her clients and we choose Google Docs from her Google Apps for Domain account. In this article, I’ll go through the motions of creating and using a simple form in Google Docs which can be used in polls, surveys, or questionnaires.

Create New Form in Google Docs

Log into you Google Docs account and create a new Form document. Creating a new Form document takes you to the Form builder which allows you to enter a title and description for your form and any number of questions. For each question, be sure to enter the question itself, any short description to describe the question further, and the question type. There are several question types, most common are the text, multiple choice, checkbox, list, and scale. You can use the text question type for things like persons name, addresses, city, etc. The multiple choice question type is also known as the radio button, meaning that out of several choices you can only select one. The checkbox allows you to check multiple choices at the same time. The scale question type can be use to identify a range between 1 and 5 of how much a person liked the product or service being asked about.

Google Docs Form Editor

Once you filled out your form, you can choose a theme. As of this writing there are over 90 themes available, from plain to whimsical. With the form done you can email the form, make it public, or embeddable in a blog or website. If you reopen the form, you will be presented with the spreasheet view of the form. The form data is saved in the spreadsheet, to view or edit the form again, click Form | Edit Form under the main menu.

Google Docs Form Sharing Settings

You can have three basic sharing options. You can make the form public to everyone in the web, or available to only those that have a link for it, or those you explicitly grant access to.

If you run a small business or a large family, you can use Google Docs to create forms for surveys, polls, questionnaires, or even a small customer relationship management system.

If I’ve had a dollar for every time someone come to me with a half baked business idea, that wouldn’t make for a good business plan but I would have enough for a latte. Everybody at some point has had a great idea about a new business or product, but very few people do anything about it beyond telling a friend. I’ve had way to many friends and family come to me telling me about how if we can get into such and such market and sell such and such product we could make such and such amount of money. It’s almost funny to see people like this just make up numbers up how much money we would make. Every time I hear someone make up a number, I ask for for simple spreadsheet with some basic formulas that describes the business case model. To understand the business risk, you need to understand the cost and benefit of the business.

Let’s imagine we are thinking of getting into the online t-shirt business, we can use a spreadsheet to calculate the estimated costs of running the business to profitability before even getting started. If you are thinking of selling t-shirts online its good to track the base cost per shirt, the markup per shirt, shipping costs, the monthly operating cost. Having these figures you can calculate the total price of the shirt (base cost + markup + shipping) to for each item and how many shirts you would need to sell to cover your operating costs. If your business plan is simple, such as this, the minimum you can do is create a spreadsheet to describe it and model your business.

You can use Microsoft Excel or with spreadsheet document in Google Docs. I’ll be using Google Docs but the following would also work in Excel. In Google Docs create a new spreadsheet. In the new spreadsheet add a header for each variable you would like to track, such as base cost, markup, shipping, operating cost, expected sales, and expected gross profit.

Let’s say that it costs $10 for the each shirt, and we would like to make $4 off of each shirt sold, and that on average it costs $3 to ship, we can easily calculate what our recommended sale price of each shirt is by adding all of this together. To add it all together in the Cost/Item cell, type into the cell and enter the equal (=) symbol. This would allow tell the spreadsheet that this cell will be a formula. You can add two values from two different cells by the something like the following = A2 + B2 + C2. The formula will add the value at A2 with that of B2 and C2 and put the computed value in the cell with the formula.

Using Formula on Google Docs Spreadsheet

If we expect to sale 50 items at this price we can calculate how much money we will take in by using another formula, the cost per shirt times the number of shirts you plan to sale, and in this example the formula would be the following = E2 * D2.

Calculate Expected Revenue

Now the value of simplifying your business into a spreadsheet like this is that if you can easily visualize the effect on your business if the base cost per shirt goes up or if you don’t hit your target expected sales numbers. If you model your business in a spreadsheet in something other than a cocktail napkin you can simulate different business scenarios more easily and come up with numbers closer to reality and based on some thought. Of course, when modeling a business you will have a lot more variables to take into account, but fortunately spreadsheets like those supported in Google Docs and Excel have a wide range of formulas and functions.