We’ve been busy digging into Google’s Android over at NthCode. I just posted an article there about
Porting Android to a New Embedded Device.
Check it out.
Anyone else following the Obama transition on Change.gov? Did you see the daily videos they are publishing to Youtube?
I’m used to seeing interesting amateur videos, funny commercials, and ripped-off copyrighted content on Internet video sites. But this is the first time I’ve watched Youtube and thought of it as a legitimate news source.
I spent 14 hours trying to find the right three photos for my presentation — that’s 12 hours longer than I had estimated.
Let me summarize what I learned.
First, I started with Presentation Zen, which has a great blog entry aptly titled, “ Where can you find good images?“
Presentation Zen and other sites all recommend the use of stock photos. Stock photos are photos taken by a professional photographer, put into categories, and then made available on-line.
I liked the look of the presentations I saw that used stock photos, so I decided to find some for my presentation.
I checked the free stock photo sites first. Unfortunately, they all either didn’t have what I was looking for or didn’t have it in the quality level I needed (maybe a content fit but was too dark, etc.).
I also checked the best site, Corbis, where it turned out photos cost around US$60. I wanted nice photos, but not that nice. This cost me about two hours.
Also, all of the stock photo sites have have a search interface, not unlike Google, where you can enter keywords that describe what you’re trying to find. One lesson I learned is that it’s important to try a few queries with different keywords at the beginning of your search to see which one returns images most similar to what you want. Otherwise, you can spend a few hours paging through screen after screen of thumbnails that don’t quite match your needs.
I ended up purchasing two photos from iStockPhoto and another two from DreamsTime. Each photo cost US$5 and the three I put in the presentation (I ended up not using one of the four I purchased) do a wonderful job of showing the problem better than I could with words.
Money well spent.
Next step is to run through my presentation in front of a mirror — many times — to make sure it’s concise and smooth, and then try it out on a few folks here in Beijing.
Now I’m starting on the my next task. I’m writing a White Paper.
Last Sunday, I drank lots of coffee and built the structure for my presentation. This involved pulling together all the information I had gathered, boiling it down to the essential principles, and finally writing a rough draft down in an editor.
Here is my outline:
0. Company logo
This is the first of two company logo slides. The audience sees this one while I’m plugging into the projector but before I have started the presentation. With the logo on the screen, I can say, ‘OK, everyone ready to get started?’ and then I can go to the next slide.
1. Company logo
They’re thinking, “Who is this guy?”
“Hi, I’m Peter McDermott, the founder and CEO of NthCode.”
2. Team and company
Their next question: “How big is NthCode? What’s his team look like?”
Here I’ll show a photo of me together with the team, and then am going to tell the audience where we are located, how long we have been around, and, briefly, what we have done over the last three and a half years.
3. The Problem
“OK, so why is Peter here talking to us today?”
I’ll introduce the problem users face in the marketplace today. I’m planning to do this with three separate images that show the problem in a way that people immediately connect with. So, yes, it’s not exactly one slide.
4. The Competition
“Aren’t other companies already solving this problem?”
Yes. And with a simple slide with two-by-two competitive matrix I can show how and why the current solutions don’t do an adequate job. The slide has a minimum of words. That’s because I want the audience focused on me, not the slide.
5. The Solution
“So how does NthCode do it better?”
This is where I talk about how we solved this problem. This also transitions over a number of slides, each slide just having a short key-point phrase that I expand upon with a few sentences.
6. Benefits
“What is the unique value of NthCode’s offering?”
This really expands upon the above slide but connects our key technology to the people we are serving.
“We help X with Y. We help A with B.”
7. Demo
And now that everyone has a taste for the issue, here’s where I pull out a demo so they can see our solution in action.
8. Sales model
This is the business slide that details how we charge for our offering. Potential customers will want to know how we are going to charge them.
9. Go to market strategy
This slide isn’t necessary for every presentation (for example, if I’m talking to a customer, the fact that I’m meeting with them is part of our go-to-market strategy, so I’ll substitute this with another slide).
10. Summary
This is a simple summary slide that includes my name and email address.
And that’s pretty much it.
Key Points:
- Don’t forget to introduce yourself and your position.
- I follow Guy Kawasaki’s
advice of 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font.
- I don’t use bullets — they distract people.
- I use images to show, if showing is better than telling.
- But I only use images where necessary, so people stay focused on me.
- Put your name and contact information on the last slide, because people might have forgotten it and will be embarrassed to ask you questions.
I expect to be done with the first round of my presentation by next Monday. After that, I plan to do some trial demos with folks I know here in Beijing who are in the tech industry so that I can get some early feedback and see what’s working, what’s not, and what I didn’t think about.
By the way, if you want to see a great presenatation, check out this one
I’m creating a couple presentations for NthCode. Presenting is not hard for me — I was a debater and dorm president in high school. However, I haven’t spent time actually forming a message, arranging content, and thinking about audience impact in a long time. (In fact, it’s been so long that I’m now not sure I’ve ever done much more than just talk at length.)
So to get up to speed, I checked google and quickly found some meaty articles on how bad powerpoint presentations can be.
If you read enough of these articles, people inevitably start to talk about how one of the worlds’ greatest presenters is Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is the co-founder and current CEO of Apple, and the legendary father of the Macintosh. He is endlessly speculated about by the press, and respected and feared by his competitors. The guy is a legend.
So I checked on Youtube and found a bunch of his old presentations. They’re great fun to watch.
First, the Apple Macintosh introduction. The video below starts after much of Steve’s presentation is over, but you’ll get to see some of him as a showman.
Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984
This next one is interesting — it’s more about pure consumer advertising than any of the other videos I found. It’s Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s “1984″ Macintosh TV advertisement. This is based on George Orwell’s dark future novel, “1984,” which was getting lots of press that year.
The 1983 Apple Keynote The “1984″ Ad Introduction
That was something, eh?
A few years later, Jobs was out of Apple and founded a new computing company, NeXT. This is the beginning of what I think is Jobs’ current presentation style: Market-centered and well-structured.
Steve Jobs at Next part 1
Steve Jobs at Next part 2
Okay, those two were Steve’s internal presentations to his staff at NeXT computer. A number of years later, Steve was back at Apple (you can see the details of that in the last video below), and he unvelied the iPod, which changed the music industry forever.
Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction&feature=related
And then a few years after that, probably the most impressive product to be introduced in recent memory: the iPhone.
Macworld 2007- Steve Jobs introduces iPhone - Part 1
Macworld 2007- Steve Jobs introduces iPhone - Part 2
Macworld 2007- Part 3 - Steve Jobs demos the iPhone
Macworld 2007- Part 4 - Steve Jobs demos the iPhone
Macworld 2007- Part 5 - Internet on the iPhone
Macworld 2007- Part 6 - Widgets and Google Maps on iPhone
In fariness, the iPhone is such an amazing product that a Borat could have introduced it at MacWorld and it would have been a great success.
Finally, I think if you want to understand a bit about Steve Jobs, the following video is the best of the bunch:
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Creating software is like making sausage — it looks good at the end, but you don’t want to know what goes into making it. So I was happy to read Robert Glass’s great article about some things those of us who make software for a living should remember.
Why are projects late? Unstable or wrongly estimated requirements. Why are you saying that this awful software has great quality? Because quality is not the same as satisfying users. How much time does it take to fix all the bugs? About 40% of your project’s time.
And the list goes on…
They need the work. You need to get paid. They send you the contract. You check the details and make small changes. You sign. They sign. Then you get to work delivering what they need.
That’s the way we’ve done contracts at NthCode for the last three years. And, given that we’ve been doing work-for-hire software development — where everything we do belongs to them, but we get paid monthly for our labor — the above negotiating process is really just a means to an end to ensure that they get the work they need and you get paid for it.
But things quickly become complicated if you’re trying to sell a product: How will selling your product to this client constrain your business elsewhere? Will you be able to advertise the fact that you have worked for this client? What if the deal becomes bad and you or the client want to end the contract? What happens to this contract if you or your client are acquired by another company?
What is the spectrum of possible answers? What is normal and reasonable? And what might be the first proposal from your potential client? These are things you can spend hundreds of dollars per hours finding out from a lawyer.
But, before you do that, spend just a little time with this article and be enlightened.
Geniuses. These people are geniuses.
In the last three years of building NthCode, I’ve learned about such fun stuff as the monthly and yearly accounting cycles, dealing with cash-flow problems when customers are late in paying, and keeping my team headed in the right direction no matter the adversity.
And while I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, it is hard.
Pardon me, in the last three years, I have learned to use the word, ‘challenging,’ instead of ‘hard.’
Dealing with the challenges takes … empathy — someone who has been there, understands, and, ideally, can offer advice. So I read the blogs of seasoned technology entrepreneurs, such as
Paul Graham and
Marc Andreessen,
who consistently write great essays. (Paul founded one of the web’s first e-commerce sites, ViaWeb, and Marc wrote NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape.)
Paul’s most recent essay, The Pooled Risk Management Company, sums up some of what I feel:
“The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom and security. They want enough money that (a) they don’t have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don’t have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.”
So true. So true.
There is some good news: the longer you do it, the easier it gets. Just, naturally, the cyclical things like accounting and HR become routine.
So now, after three years, NthCode, while still exposed to significant risks, is operating efficiently.
And it’s getting fun again: I’m thinking more about not just how to manage and lead my team, but how to motivate and coach them.
So, today, I enjoyed reading a Fortune article
The Secret Coach
The article is loaded with loads of history and other goodies about how Bill Campbell, a former football coach, works with Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Google and Apple to make them not only great technology companies, but also places that get the most out of people while treating them with the dignity they deserve as human beings.
Good reading. Enjoy.
Here’s one for the nerds: Olympics technology: Planners’ heads are in the clouds
Culture modifies perception, and, as a six-sigma trained nerd, I see the above as a good sign.
Six-sigma? Wikipedia covers it.
Anyway, I read this and immediately thought of the six-sigma DMAIC process — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. Buying the supercomputer should definitely help them with the ‘Measure’ and ‘Analyze’ part of the equation.
Now let’s see how much Improvement they can get.
Hi, I'm Peter McDermott, an American who's been living in Beijing, China since 2002.
I founded and am the CEO of NthCode. We make software electronics companies embed in their devices so consumers can seamlessly find and play media from home networks and Internet services.
This blog is a creative outlet for me, and a place where my friends can keep up with what's going on in my life, work, and interests.
If you would like, you can add me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Flickr, and Twitter
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