Here’s the question: I’ve been using Basecamp for internal (and now external) projects, and I had been of the impression that I would/should get an app to work with that site. I’d seen lists of iphone apps, including basecamp’s own list.

But I was trying to get a handle on which one to get; review seem scarce, and the app store model makes it impossible to try unless the maker has created a “lite” version (see Headquarters and their lite version: the app framework might be one where what used to be called “crippleware” doesn’t seem to be so bad.)

But last night, on a whim that seemed silly at the time, I just fired up the Basecamp website to see how broken it would be. Pleasant surprise: it worked pretty darn fine, just like on my laptop. Now, in fairness, I did identify one missing feature: the ability to rearrange tasks in a to-do list was missing (the little 4-way arrow was not there at all). Maybe that’s the dreaded no-flash problem. I can deal.

What this makes me think about, though, is a couple things: first, I just saved $10 or $12; second, those app companies are definitely confined to a niche; third, apps that access web services have their days numbered as mobile browsers improve (or, in the case of the iPad, screen sizes and keyboard functions).

Where these apps would create an immediate urge to buy would be if they mimicked “desktop” add-ons to Basecamp, such that they could operate offline and upload/sync my changes later. True, part of that feature needs to be implemented in the underlying web service, but wifi and 3G haven’t eliminated the need for the mobile professional to be functional when there’s no connection.

[Ed.: followup--  Outpost claims "full offline capabilities." That's the secret sauce; I think this app will make the cut for a full-fledged review/shootout.]

At ThoughtStorm [http://thoughtstorm.com/], we were fans of Groove (it still lives on my several machines, in fact) because of the online/offline capability. Until a client accepts my excuse of “I couldn’t work on it because I couldn’t get a connection in the subway or on the plane,” people like me will always have a need to maintain local/offline access to our materials, even if they are backed up to, or even exist primarily, in the cloud. (See more on this concern in my review of PlanPlus Online.

When do you decide that you want/need an app vs. just using the website? There are tools to “make an app” from your blog. Does this make sense? Do you use these apps yourself to read favorite blogs?

It’s hiding the ball from your customers to try to create a motivation to engage with your company that they wouldn’t naturally have, i.e., don’t need and don’t want.

Example: “emailing” travel reservation info that consists of a link to a website rather than, you know, the actual itinerary info. (Tip: that means you, Expedia.)

History: probably a holdover from the days of hits, page views, and monetizing eyeballs.

Also seen when “giving away” an eBook that actually requires you to confirm your email, ostensibly for the purpose of getting a link to the file but really for the purpose of adding you to the author’s email marketing list. (Tech tip: you need my email if you’re going to email me; if the PDF is hosted on your website, you could, you know, provide a link.)

BUT SEE Copyblogger/Chris Garrett’s Authority Rules ebook and Seth Godin’s recent What Matters Now.

If your business model or marketing plan hinges on getting people to give you an email address so you can send them things they haven’t actually asked for (and “opt-in” isn’t the same as asking for your marketing pitch), you might want to rethink that strategy or at least figure out how you’re going to move away from it. Remember, your customers are your friends. If you treat them that way, they might just become fans.

This very funny tweet triggered my memory and got me to put this post together:

Idea of the day: 100-calorie workout packs to work off those 100-calorie snack packs.

A few months ago, I signed up for HARO. You get three emails a day, each with 25-35 queries from reporters (loosely defined) looking for sources for various pieces. But since I’m primarily interested in a very discrete subset of those issues, namely “autism” or “special education,” reading through the emails was sometimes a hit-or-miss proposition.

Finally, I realized that I was shooting myself in the foot by letting all of the emails rise up to the level of my attention (cf. this video of Clay Shirky re: user filter failures via Lifehacker). Simply put, my new secret is to use an Outlook rule to delete the email from my inbox unless it has “autism” or “special education” in it. That way, if it’s in my inbox, I know it’s high priority and I can give it the appropriate amount of attention rather than subconsciously calculating the likelihood that there was something relevant and the time pressure of a response against my current and imminent workload. That one change, which only took a few minutes to implement was a big timesaver over trying to read three of those emails a day.

You can probably find a set of keywords that work for you, too. A colleague said that she has too many keywords to make this work well, but that’s no reason not to take a short step in the right direction. She could pick her top two or three keywords and let a similar rule or filter treat conforming emails differently, such as changing the subject text to “Urgent – HARO” or moving them to a specified high-priority folder. The key is differentiating more important emails from all the other emails, which she can then treat in her standard email workflow.

Time spent: <15 minutes, total

Time saved: <15 minutes per day

I like the trendwatching briefings: they’re actually insightful rather than wishful thinking; they seek to recognize trends rather than create them. (I’ve always wondered about that particular issue in the fashion world — do designers discover hot colors or try to make a color hot?)

In this discussion of foreverism, which is a little broad, there is a subsection on Forever Beta. Maybe that’s the world’s new take on planned obsolescence. After all, if the software is regularly upgradeable on my phone, maybe you don’t have to make the phone break after all. This approach could clearly be more consistent with improving free cash flow, since software typically has a higher gross margin and, for a company in the marketplace today, they already have to expend the capital to create competitive software in the first place. Sales to people with older phones really exist on the margin, and they can therefore deliver even higher profitability. (Of course, this is one example; tell me how it would work for your field in the comments.)

Another way I think of this is in terms of companies using their brands to create value for customers rather than to take or destroy value for customers. I’ve long said that there are two types of companies: those that make money by giving more to customers and those that make money by giving less to customers. (Put your matched pairs in the comments!)

If you stop breaking your products but let customers use what they have, you’re at least not destroying value (Dell, you failed me when you changed the power connector on the same model number laptop AFTER I bought your extra charger!, and Fujitsu, when you changed the main battery design on your T4xxx series convertible tablets). Companies that use nonstandard power connectors, chargers, interface cables, and so on are showing us exactly what they think (revealed preferences: Economics-speak for “actions speak louder than words) about customer: suck them in with low price main object and charge more than value for accessories.

What companies don’t seem to grasp is that it’s this strategy that creates markets for competitive/knockoff/third-party accessories such as chargers, cellphone batteries, headsets, and so on. Who wants to pay $100 for a single-purpose Fujitsu laptop power cord when I can buy an iGo and extend it across all my devices? Heck, Fujitsu — if you made the universal charger, I would probably invest in your brand since I’m already springing $3-4k for the tablet!

In the olden days, i.e., when I was still in high school, information costs were far too high to undertake the sort of product searching that is now virtually automatic with, e.g., Amazon’s “people also bought…” section on product pages. Companies don’t seem to grasp that consumer behavior is changing rapidly because of the huge drop in costs.

The response from companies is that “our customers are searching on price, not value, and so we have to keep the price of X low like our competitors and make up the difference somewhere else.” Not only am I unsure of whether this is really true (as opposed to, for example, a rational response to high information costs of comparing products), but my sense is that it’s an effect, not a cause, of the fuzzy price-gouging that I’ve described. If customers aren’t seeing the value of your product, I have two questions: 1, do you know what the value of your product is TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, not to you, and 2, are you really communicating the value to them or hiding the ball with easy to sound important lists of specifications that don’t mean anything (like iLink (r) or FireWire (r) as branded names for a standard 1394 port)?

Apple has spawned a big ecosystem of people selling accessories for the iPod. But none of those people are really competing with Apple. I’d have to look for some numbers to justify my conclusion here, but I don’t think that Apple’s pricing policy is built around being able to sell Apple-branded chargers for iPods vs charging a healthy price for an iPod and looking elsewhere for something to sell that adds more value. Say what you will about iTunes, but it provides a lot of value to me, and the Amazon MP3 store doesn’t really match up quite as well, even at a (now-floating and fuzzy) 20% discount to a $0.99 song. In this respect, at least, I think the iPod and its relationship with accessories is a good example of how companies can compete where they want to compete and leave the extraneous stuff to others, deliberately.

Besides wanting to see a greater variety of designs from different people rather than a number of variations on a theme from one person, I wanted to see how the original “thoughtstorm.com” might have functioned. My friends know that the genesis of “thoughtstorm” for me was a play on “brainstorm” as part of my C2B business idea.

So, please feel free to spread notice of the contest to folks who should design an entry. Also, you can vote on the entries yourselves at the project page.

If there are designers who want to improve the project pro bono but don’t like crowdSPRING or others on principle, send me a design (I obviously won’t use unless we agree to a deal), post a link here as a comment (and then everyone else may get to coment), or enter and you can agree to donate the money to REED Academy, Alpine Learning Group‘s Outreach Program, or Autism Speaks. If you agree to that and do it, I’ll match the donation myself.

1. Learn something.
2. Earn a following and reputation.

We’ve added another option in our own business:

3. Help your clients, even if you have to get things rolling by kicking the ball downhill.

We’ve gone to our best contacts, our closest friends and colleagues, and offered to help them by helping their clients. We’ve created the ability to start some of our top-shelf analytical work easily without running up the usual fees and expenses, and so we have hoped that that would initiate a virtuous circle where we help those companies, they generate new work or transactions for our colleagues, and then maybe some additional work trickles up to us.

I’ve long held that a good part of the present malaise in the economy is primarily one of expectations (both past over-expectations aka delusions and current under-expectations aka fear). After all, houses aren’t actually falling down, unable to serve their primary purpose; factories aren’t closing because machinery is decrepit and no longer working. The economy will move when people decide that they need something enough to go out and buy it, whether it’s a nicer house in a better neighborhood or a new couch. The same holds true for companies, whether it’s buying assets that will create future cash flows or hiring better people to upgrade the talent pool.

Starting projects, adding value with your slack time, is not only a way to join arms with your clients and customers but also a great way to keep your own talent engaged. I saw the downside of slow times during the dotcom bust in Silicon Valley: I was at Brobeck’s Palo Alto office at that time. Returning from my honeymoon in August 2000, it turned out that I billed a grand total of 7 hours in September. Now, I didn’t spend the other 153+ hours at work that month doing nothing: I helped other lawyers on their matters and doing my best to train and develop younger lawyers as they worked on other matters.

I just met a recent law school graduate working at an AmLaw 100 firm in New York City. This grad and other new grads are apparently not very busy, which isn’t hard to imagine given the happenings at so many large law firms. However, the response described to me of both partners and associates was often to hunker down and hide work behind closed doors. My advice: partners should be sending these new associates out to client offices, with a no-fee guarantee if needed, to help their clients out. If these associates aren’t billing, it’s better that they be learning as part of an investment by the law firm in its clients than sitting and waiting for work to come to them. Will every client accept? No, but those that don’t are fools. Will every placement generate billable work? No, but those that don’t will generate good will and training. What firm wouldn’t do this?

What are you doing to turn the crankshaft on the engine of commerce? Please pass on your stories and ideas in the comments.

If you are blogging about multiple issues, you should consider separating your blog writing into categories to improve or reinforce your personal branding. Leading by example, here’s our breakdown:

http://www.thoughtstorm.com/blog.html – this is the TSC “official” blog. I try to keep the topics closely aligned to our thinking, our service offerings, and our opinions about similar transactions or related issues. I will soon be making this content the primary focus of the website, using it to give a fuller impression of who we are and how we think – what separates us from larger firms providing seemingly similar services.

http://www.rickcolosimo.com/ - this is my “personal” blog. By personal, I mean only that it’s separate from my TSC business. But I fully expect that business contacts will also see this blog and so the real difference is that I address topics that are slightly different from the TSC core business , such as more law-related issues, or expansions of TSC ideas and themes into other areas that TSC would be unlikely to explore for business.

http://www.30seats.com/ – this is the autism-related blog that I primarily write. I am trying to focus it on creating tools to help people (parents) help themselves. It will slowly accrete links to Pam’s blog (below) and to our wiki-driven site for creating and collecting content, to be found at www.wolfhoundfund.org (no link since it’s not fully installed yet).

http://pamcolosimo.blogspot.com/ – this is my wife’s “science of autism” blog. She has a Ph.D. in Genetics and is beginning to look for a position following the completion of her NIH post-doctoral fellowship at Sloan-Kettering in NYC. Its purpose is as much to get her in the practice of writing about science as it is to provide a deeper portfolio that will resonate with the people she meets.

As you can see, there are some clear lines we’ve drawn between what goes where. While this could be accomplished on a single blog, there are, at least in our case, pretty clear distinctions between the types of things I write about. The autism-related issues, in particular, are interesting to a very different group of people than those who care about our use of data-driven analysis to guide pre-merger due diligence on target companies. Of course the groups overlap to some extent, but nearly everything about the communication is different – tone, style, frequency, subject matter, and call to action. It makes sense to us to give people what they want. Separating your blogs helps people understand what you’re offering. With the cost of a second blog being so low (free from a blogger.com/wordpress.com perspective), the benefits to your readers almost certainly outweigh the costs. Using a second or third blog improves the signal-to-noise ratio for your readers when your topics diverge.

Please feel free to describe your blog separation strategy in the comments, or why you have decided not to use different blogs.