Tiago Costa

Internet entrepreneur and triathlete (Ironman Finisher). Founder of WayNext – digital agency and other companies. Blogging for myself, this is not the agency voice. Welcome!

12 January 2012
by Tiago Costa
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Apple’s iOS 5 still missing multi-user support

Apple iPad

Apple iPad

Since I took the iPad home for the first time and as we got more and more addicted to it we’ve been missing multi-user support. Currently you can not have separate accounts on the device so you can efficiently share it with other people. That would allow a more personal usage of the device for each user I understand Apple prefers each person in the household to buy his own iPad but from what I mostly see around that is not how it works.

This represents an annoyance because you can’t have separate logins, so every iPad user could log into his area and have all his apps and settings ready to use. I find myself logging in and out of several websites to be able to get to my stuff when I was not the last one to use the device.

I have thought about this inconvenience a couple of months ago and I wondered that even if it is not as efficient it could be done on an App basis, meaning that each App would implement it’s unique user authentication allowing for multiple accounts (not necessarily simultaneously logged in). But I expected that since this was something missing from the OS itself and knowing the way Apple fights for the ecosystem control I would not expect them to approve Apps with this feature.

So it came as a surprise when they did approve Flipboard’s latest version which includes multi-user support and that is a good thing. I’m not sure whether they would have the same approach towards a low profile App, but they did it for Flipboard and that can lead us to wonder if they will release native multi-user support for iOS itself (which I think is not relevant for the iPhone being a de facto personal device, but the iPad being in the living room is a different story).

11 January 2012
by Tiago Costa
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Reasons not to be a entrepreneur

Yes, I know it sounds awkward coming from me, because I believe in entrepreneurship, but this post is so brilliant pointing out the many of the risks of becoming an entrepreneur and launching a company. To fully understand how huge the issues are you must really the whole post.

This is about the Hungary status quo, but if you do a find & replace and put Portugal in there, it is very close match.

Check it out here (via @mvalente).

5 January 2012
by Tiago Costa
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Why I chose the iPhone 4S

Nokia 7110 and Nokia E71

Nokia 7110 and Nokia E71

I have been a Nokia guy since mobile phones were a mature product (I still have the 7110 matrix style phone!). As far as I can remember I have owned about 4 or 5 Nokia models and I enjoyed using them until the last one I bought which was the E71.

I recall I went out to buy the E71 after the aquapack I was using while kitesurfing failed and the phone drowned. At the time I still thought the iPhone was too expensive and besides I felt like I needed the full qwerty keyboard to really be productive on the road (mainly doing emails away from my laptop). I even considered Blackberry but that thing about being tied to their servers (for increased privacy, so they say) when accessing data didn’t made much sense so I went with the E71.

Since the first power up of the phone I disliked the ugly graphics. Could Nokia really have paid someone to redesign the application icons again in 2010 instead of using the ones from 2007 E51? They could, but they didn’t do it so the phone’s desktop really looked crappy for a 2010 model. Also email support was far from being flexible but I was mostly using mobile web Gmail so it was working for me. The web browser was also very limited and inefficient (ahah) so using Twitter or Facebook was a really bad user experience!

So I just got in the mindset of buying the new iPhone and when the iPhone 4S hit the stores (I was hoping for the iPhone 5) I bought it together with a decent data plan. After about 1 month of usage I am almost as productive as I was with the E71 physical keyboard when writing stuff and I can now take the most of my downtime (you know, waiting for a meeting, being in line at the supermarket and other daily stuff).

One of the things I am most interested is email and I am still trying to make my mind between the native Mail.app or Gmail App. As for the rest my beloved Flipboard is something I also use regularly but I think it is no where near the same killer App it is on the iPad. I’m also enjoying Intragr.am filters for the quick and dirty photo shooting. Of course I am also using Runkeeper to track my runs and it does a much better job than Nokia’s Sports Tracker I can say! It is also a good thing I can load the iPhone with Youtube videos and listen to them while running. About Siri I still couldn’t find much effective use for it but I didn’t had the time to test it in full – it would be interesting to be able to dictate text and email messages but so far I could only ask some dumb questions about the weather and use it to set the alarm clock. I also must say the phone’s battery is far from perfect because it’s hard to make it last for even 2 full days, if I use it heavily it will last no longer than 24 hours, but it seems that other top smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy II have this same issue, unless you turn off 3G which is beyond the point for any of this devices.

23 December 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Dynamic pricing (Seth Godin on eBooks)

I just found a very interesting post from Seth Godin about eBooks pricing.

The pricing model he explains is a very interesting one from the author’s point of view, starting low to allow the word to spread and gradually increasing prices and once you’ve reached the best-seller stage and everybody must read it.

The only thing I believe that can back fire is the known fact that people value a lot less things they get for free – be it a service or even thin air. We all know that when we pay for something we must take the most out of it. That is why when we attend to a public seminar we don’t give it so much credit, but if we shed out 1.000 Euros to attend to that workshop, we will try to take away as much as we can – even if the quality of both events is exactly the same.

So back to Seth’s example, when the book is priced really low or even at no cost at all, it might just be seen as something that is not worth your time; or you can consider you can just came back to it anytime so you’ll just leave it for another day… Read it all here, it is a great insight.

12 December 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Is this email productivity or just plain rudeness?

Mailbox

Photo by foxspain posted on Flickr.

I have been dealing with this subject in my head for a while now and it seems the perfect time to write it down since 1) I just came from vacation 3 weeks ago to find emails piling up and 2) because we are in the middle of the year end craziness. Meaning there is a lot to be done and quite some stuff to wrap up before January 1st.

When I am really busy I find myself writing shorter (as in 1 or 2 words) and not so “by the book” polite (no “hello”, no “how are you”, no “regards”) emails and sometimes I wonder how people on the other feel about getting those emails. If the messages are for internal communication I believe they are not harmful since my co-workers understand the “cut to the chase” approach and salutations are just putting in some extra words to be read (and written, of course), so in the end everybody benefits from that, because we all agree we get too many emails.

But what about people outside our company? With Clients/Partners/Suppliers I don’t feel at ease writing those plain emails unless the other party is already on that mindset as well (which is something easily spotted). On these external contacts I always try to be more respectful of the norms and avoid rushing things for productivity sake, but more and more we need to GTD and I see 3 word emails as a contributor for that cause. We never know how our very short and right to the point email will be interpreted on the other end (and it may be seen as plain rudeness), so I try to make sure I will not be offending the recipient, before hitting the send button.

Anyway I guess the trend towards shorter emails is growing and becoming widely accepted because of mobile. I believe most people will give you a break if you are taking your time to get back to them while on the go or on your downtime, and then they don’t expect a perfectly crafted email – anything that allows them to move forward will suffice. Overall and in the end most people don’t know if you are sending from a desktop or a mobile device so as long as they have the mobile possibility in mind they will go along with it.

Power Tip: always double check if you really must hit reply. Most likely, if you are only sending a “ok” or “thank you” note you can probably skip it altogether and avoid yet another email on the other end – at least that’s how I feel about that.

5 November 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Scalable business

Here is something I just found linked in a newsletter I subscribe about scalable businesses.

Of course the dream of every investor is to find the perfect scalable business where costs go down as you grow and anyone can run it (the legendary W. Buffet says he will only invest in companies that could be run by an idiot… because some day an idiot will). This would most likely put the company in auto-pilot while being a cash cow; but, even if I believe this is mostly a myth, because we all know it is never that easy, there are some fundamental principles that make sense.

I’m pasting below a couple of insights stolen here from Christian Mayaud, that really make a case.

A scalable business requires:

a) Marginal costs decreasing along revenue curve growth

This means that the cost of each incremental dollar in revenue must be going down.

b) The ability to grow with mediocre resources (people and capital)

If your business requires smart talented hard-driving management or sophisticated investors or customers to grow, it is, by definition, NOT SCALABLE!!!

2 November 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Working from home

No, I’m not going to preach you about any get-rich-quick-work-from-home-and-make-1.000-euros-per-month.

This post is really about working from home, like in working in whatever your current job requires you to do, but doing it from home instead of the office. When I started working I did it out of my bedroom (also known as office or headquarters in some circles) because we were running a bootstrapped start-up so that was all we could afford.

Apart from that and even if like most of us I try to squeeze an extra hour or two in the wee hours of the night, just to get back on that urgent matter or to try to gain some leverage for the following day, I have been working most of my time in the  office, at the companies I have founded or for the short time I have been someone’s employee.

In the most recent months, perhaps since one year ago, I have tried to skip the office every now and then, maybe for half a day or even for a full day if my schedule is clear of meetings and so I have been working from home maybe 1 or 2 days a month. And even if the reasons are way too obvious, I must say that it is a bit awkward to acknowledge that my productivity is in fact much higher for the periods I work from home (I’m not considering the extra push late night, because that is a whole different beast). I believe I could track the productivity increase anywhere between 50 and 100% depending on the task at hand.

With all the technology surrounding us nowadays, things like VPN’s, real good and cheap audio/video conferencing online services, IM, Dropbox, shared documents on Google Docs and the likes, you can easily co-work with your team, while maximizing productivity since you tend to stick to what is really important and cut to the chase to get work done. I can honestly say that I don’t feel so many handicaps working from home and that some hassles from the past (things like crappy audio/voice online, slow file transfer, emails with documents  being reviewed via email sent back and forth, etc) are no more, creating yet a bigger upside for this work mode.

Of course that besides the peace to get in the zone and make things happen faster, there are other collateral benefits like for me saving a 30 minutes (x2) daily commute, eating a decent lunch at home, lowering my blood pressure, taking a break to walk the dog, among others.

But this is no news for anybody because I am sure we all read or listened to the pros and cons of working from home and from the office. Probably one of the most interesting point of views is from Jason Fried under the curious title of “Why work doesn’t happen at work” – watch the TED Talk here.

Anyway I have been thinking on whether this work from home thing should or should not be extended to more people and after giving some thought let me say that I don’t think working from home is for everybody. It isn’t. Some people just lack the discipline and self control needed not to spend the whole day watching TV or browsing Facebook. They need to feel some pressure from the guy on the next desk or cubicle, and those, should keep their daily commute to the office.

Then there are of course those kind of jobs that require you to be in the office or at least those where your productivity would be severely reduced if you are working remotely. I’m thinking, for instance, of the account managers at WayNext – they have to assure traffic and communication flows among different internal and external teams and they have to take lots of phone calls on which they need to act in real time  and for that, many times email/IM is just a waste of time since it takes longer and sometimes information is lost between the communicator and the keyboard so the quickest and most reliable way is a tap in the shoulder of the one who might need it – yeah yeah the tap in the shoulder interruption problem – and making sure things are being done just like they should.

So I guess I don’t see myself working from home everyday, because I need to meet people and also because leadership, from my perspective, requires the leader to be visible, show up, interact, discuss and act as a role model. But I’ll keep saving a couple of days a month to work from home because I can really use the productivity boost to cut down on the average 10-12  daily work hours and the dog appreciates the extra walk in the park.

BTW, this info graphic just came in my way – check it out to see if you should let your employees work at home or not!

 

26 September 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Why the cap when the upside is good for everybody?

I have been in several business proposals where things are capped but few times I could found any reasoning on that.

And it seems that I am not alone, because Seth Godin here explain is point of view on it.

Basically if someone is taking risks with you, why limit the upside shall success came and both parties can profit from it? If the deal is balanced and well structured most likely you don’t need a cap. Besides the cap can harm, reduce motivation and limit growth “out of the box” and that way probably both parties loose.