I recently had the opportunity to hear famed designer, Patrick Robinson talk about his philosophy on designing. He said design for yourself. He noticed that a lot of his associate designers under him were working on “personal projects” and not presenting them to him. Their said that they did not share because it was nothing serious and didn’t meet the end customer needs. Patrick gave them the advise that they should share those “personal projects” because they themselves are the customer. Don’t think of yourself as too good or even different from the end customer. You are your customer.

With the free flow of information, cultures, and ideas – we are truly starting to become “one”. His comments are very relevant to technology companies. No longer are you in the elite crowd just because you subscribe to RSS feeds or have your own website. While digital divide is still very much existent, it’s getting smaller everyday.

In my personal experience, I thought that there would only be a few people interested in Baybayin (pre-Filipino Script) but when I setup the site, I’ve had the opportunity to meet hundereds of people who share the same interests.

Just downloaded the new Wordpress iPhone app. I’m currently on Bart. Hopefully this photo will show up.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is sick of waiting for an affordable and simple tablet.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

I don’t know why I was a little shocked to see the post today when I’ve been a fan of Arrington for a while now. I guess that’s what makes the dude smart. This is a classic example of the “See a hole, fill it” philosophy. Instead of waiting for Apple or someone else to make one, do it yourself or better yet – get someone else to do it for you. Just reading through the comments, you will see a lot of supporters willing to contribute to this project. The power of crowdsourcing.

On a personal note, I’ve also been waiting for something like this for the past 2 years. If the iPhone was only bigger. I have an HP Pavillion tablet that works great but even though it’s small, it’s still not very portable or sexy. I want something that I can take to work and take care of business during lunch time or on the train commute home. If this project see’s the light of day, I might be building my 1st computer.

Had my 1st screw-up with my t-shirt business today. Since I sell them on 2 different sites (LakasProject.com & PinoyTattoos.com), I was also using 2 different shopping carts. Going forward, I will use E-Junkie.com as the credit card processor and inventory system of record. The shopping cart has been pretty much flawless since I started using it for my Baybayin transliteration service.

I emailed my customer advising him of my screw-up and offered him a discount when the new shirts come in at the end of the month. He was cool with it.

In a move to practice what i preach, I installed Kampyle on my PinoyTattoos.com website. I thought it would be a good idea to also add it on this site as well. After poking around the user interface for 3 minutes (2.5 minutes too much) looking how to add a new website profile, I gave up hit the Live Support link to chat with someone who can point me in the right direction. I’ve had great customer service chat experience with AT&T and Comcast in the past and prefer it rather than calling.

I filled out the form and noted my issue. Once I hit submit, the pop-up closed. I tried it on Firefox & IE with the same end result. I assume that “Live Support” is off line. I’ve seen other companies have a status of “Online” or “Offline” next to their “Live Support” link.

If your not online to support the live support chat as advertised (I did this on a Sunday morning), then take off the link. There are live support chat applications that will either remove or display online/offline status. Failure to do so will result in an unsatisfied customer.

Woke up this morning and saw an email form one of my webhosts:

Good morning folks,

As of about 9:08 AM EST, Fused Network went offline due to a networking issue at the facilty our infrastructure resides in. At this time we don’t know the full details of the outage however all systems do appear to be go at this time. We will be issuing a full statement on our status blog as information comes available about the nature of the outage, what is being implemented to prevent similar occurrences in the future and what we’re doing here at Fused to ensure communication continues even during massive problems (despite how infrequent they are).

In the past we had made moves to decentralize our blog, community and status systems onto separate servers so that we could easily move them off to external networks during extended outtages to keep information flowing. We’ll be moving them to completely external networks during the next week to ensure even in the worst of scenarios that we’re able to communicate with you.

As always during issues — updates are available on our status blog at http://status.fusednetwork.com
We’ll have a specific write-up regarding this event there for your perusal and additional updates will be posted to it as they become available.

Thank you for your time & patience.

David McKendrick
Fused Network
1-888-282-0003 / support@fusednetwork.com

This is great customer service because it’s pro-active and honest. Most of their customers probably did not notice the outage (like me) but would like to know if there was one.

Here are some transparency tips for a 1-man small business that’s bound for unintentional screw-ups

1) Set the expectation with your customers
Be clear as to what the possible issues could be with your service or product.

• Item may look slightly different from what is photographed.
• Larger items take longer to produce and will lead to longer fulfillment time.

2) Get your customers to trust you
If they know and trust you, they will be have more compassion when things go wrong. Keep a blog about your business & some personal activities.

• Your a single dad and this is your side business that you only work on during the weekends or late nights.
• You were sick for a week.
• Photos of yourself. Gone are the days of avatars. Show your mug even if your not a supermodel.

3) When sh!t hits the fan, be honest
Like what FusedNetwork did, explain what the issue was and your steps to prevent it.

• Communicate to your customers as the issue is happening. You may not have all the details but acknowledge the issue and advise that it’s being addressed.
• Once the issue is resolved, provide non-technical root cause analysis to your customers. Provide a statement of the issue, business/customer impact, root cause, and prevention action items.

3) Take feedback and treat it like bling
Ever receive feedback and just archive it in your gmail account without doing anything about it? I have….we should be at least be responding with a personal email.

• Design your feedback form to have key fields that you can use for analysis. Don’t just have a free form field. Create specific categories like “Product Suggestion” or “Bug”.
• Import all your feedback into Excel to breakdown percentages. Better yet, sign up for an online feedback analysis service like Kampyle.

Wordpress 2.6 is out now. Here are some of the new features:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Download it Wordpress 2.6

When the 1st iPhone came out, there was some elitism associated with owning one. Just because someone was more privileged to be able to afford one, they had a distinct technological advantage over the next guy. While standing in line this morning from 8:45am to 11:00am, I was able to chat with people of all backgrounds and ages eager for the latest iPhone.

The Nurse
She wasn’t technical at all and had a lot of basic questions about the phone. Her biggest dilemma was should she get an 8gig or 16gig? With her primary use going to be medical ebooks and the Netter’s Anatomy application, I suggested she go with the 8gig.

The Teen
This 15 year old kid knew his stuff. He had an old Samsung phone that was obviously a hand-me-down from his parents while his mother was sporting a 1st generation iPhone. His primary interest was games. We had a conversation about jailbreaking and using the internet to cheat in school.

The Homemaker
She was actually the mother of the 15 year old and was holding off on getting a 2nd gen iPhone because she was happy with her 1st gen. What made her decide not to get a 3G iPhone was the 2.0 software that she recently installed (her son probabaly did it). Surfing the internet faster wasn’t a biggie on her list, nor did she care about GPS.

The 50’s Man
This father of 2 teens was suprising his kids and wanted to show them how “cool” he was. He came from an old school cobalt programming background and let the technology pass him up. This was his way of getting back in the game.

The Artist
This woman will about a dozen tattoos worked for an art house needed to get the new iPhone because the agency she worked for was developing an app. As much as she hated confirming t the masses, she couln’t deny the fact that 1) It’s functional and 2) It looks good.

The Jock
He didn’t know much about the technology. His friend was with him so he can help pick the right one and set it up. He honestly said he’s getting it because it looks cool.

I’ll admit that it did feel good to have a phone that not that many people had but now I want everyone to have it. Why? It helps connect people and creates new business opportunities for the innovative.

Only a couple more days until the 3G iPhone comes out and I’m pretty excited. I held off on buying the 1st gen iPhone mainly because it was a bit too expensive and was missing a few core features. I eventually caved in around December and got one for FREE with my American Express points – yeah, I do have a little debt The main reason for getting the 1st gen iPhone was to have access to the internet to keep in touch with my clients and work on my websites. Besides the 24/7 internet, the camera came in handy as well as Google Maps.

So why am I upgrading? Here are some reasons….

3G speed - While having the internet on hand 24/7 is great but Edge is like dialup. I’ve never experienced 3G speed but if it lives up to the hype, the browsing experience will be much better. That means getting things done faster – like updating websites (more on that later).

Applications - Once of my biggest issues with the 1st gen iPhone was the lack of basic features like IM and video recording. While video recording was not announced during the last keynote, I have confidence that an application or system update will allow it. 1st gen jailbroken iPhones can already do it. With the upcoming Wordpress iPhone app, I’ll be able to blog and post pictures anywhere. Maybe I’ll create a Baybayin translator app? All companies want a piece of the iPhone and applications are the way in. I expect my everyday web apps like Meebo to launch their native apps soon.

GPS - As I mentioned before, I use Google Maps a lot. With the addition of GPS, I may no longer have to by a standaline for my car. I’m also excited about using Loopt to track friends and clients.

Corporate support – I’m trying to hold off on getting a Blackberry for work and having to lug around 2 phones. Hopefully my day job will support it so I can have that life work balance.