Spreading the word on QuickSchools.com: 8 conferences in 1 month!

Wow, what a month it has been. So this is what it’s like being a road warrior. I have completed 7 conferences (soon to be 8 ) in 4 weeks. Every week I essentially do one conference on Monday/Tuesday, and another on Thursday/Friday.  The 8 conferences take place in the following cities, in this order:

Raleigh, NC -> Orlando, FL -> Richmond, VA -> Columbus, OH -> Baltimore, MD -> Orlando, FL -> CAIRS, NY -> Orlando, FL

Pretty crazy right? I go up and down the east coast. But it turned out to be quite alright.

As for QuickSchools.com, we had a great run. We took a risk when we decided that we would focus exclusively on a self-service online system for smaller schools (typically those with < 300 students). But at the conferences we could tell that that market is indeed underserved and the reception was fantastic.

Here are some pictures.

Sue Bartow of McGuffy Foundation School, OH. She signed up on the spot.

The teachers of Mansion Day School, OH. They signed up on the spot, and here they’re receiving an on-the-spot briefing.

This is Mark McClelland of Lima Christian School, NY. He signed up on the spot.

Pastor Scott Van Kirk of Finger Lakes Christian School. He signed up last year, and this picture was him being blown away by the new version of QuickSchools.com.

Sr. Asma Lyons of Hamza Academy, NY. She signed up on the spot.

 

 

An NHL Experience

First, a disclaimer: We don’t have NHL-level games in Malaysia, so this blog post is written by someone who doesn’t get to see those kinda games often. In fact, last NHL game I saw was probably in 2002 when I was still living in San Jose, CA.

Yes, in Malaysia there is a small but passionate bunch of people who play ice hockey and we love the game to bits. And I love the Malaysian Ice Hockey Federation (MIHF) for everything that it does for the sport. But about all the NHL we get are lousy quality streams over the Internet or DVD copies burned by one Gary Tan.

And so when I discovered that the Nationwide Arena, where the Columbus Blue Jackets call home, was just around the corner from the hotel I was staying in, I made a beeline to find out how to get tickets. Lo and behold, it would cost just 10 bucks! Okay, obviously we’re not talking fancy schmancy seats (okay, we’re talking about the worst seats in the house) but dude this is the NHL.

It was actually a pretty good game, with overtime, shoot outs, and fights, but we’ll get to that.

Hours before the game, as I walked around the Arena, I could feel the tingle of energy that something was coming down.

 

Even before you got to the arena, you could tell this was a hockey town.

But once the crowd started coming in, then the energy REALLY pulsed.

During the first period, a Blue Jackets player named Boll got into a fight with a Sharks which he completely owned. He nailed the other guy till he fell to the ground, and the crowd loved it!

Later another sharks player tried to get revenge. And they were tied up for a good 2 minutes. But the outcome? The sharks player got the penalty, and Boll didn’t haha.

The game tied 2-2, and went into overtime where no goal was scored. Finally during the shootout Sharks won. Yay!

Above: Thornton and Blake. Two big guys you don’t wanna mess with.

Below: Panoramic view of the rink.

Well, it was great fun and hope to see some sharks games when I’m next in San Francisco.

 

My first zipcar experience

So I rented a car via zipcar for the first time last week. I rented it for 4 hours, totalling 8×4 = USD32 (all in, including gas and insurance).

I booked the car using the iPhone ZipCar app about 2 hours before I actually needed it. Quite a few of the cars at Stanford were taken, but I managed to get one car – a Toyota Matrix.

It was in reasonably clean condition. I put my zipcar card next to the device by the window and the doors unlocked!

Here’s a short video clip of my driving  the matrix. This is going down I-280 in the San Francisco bay area, a stretch of mountainous highway that I always enjoyed driving down back when I was in the bay area

Day 1: San Francisco

When I got out of the hotel this morning to walk to the BART station, the cold wind blowing across my face somehow or other brought back a lot of memories. As Doc Naim says, this place really is paradise. Well, minus the earthquake risk.

I gave my friend Liz a surprise call when I was in SF, and lo and behold she was only 2 blocks away so we met for lunch. Went to Soup Freaks, and had yummy roasted tomato basil soup. Ah… the (healthy) food options here are always good. Which reminds me… I totally have to go to Tofu House in Santa Clara for my favorite Korean spicy tofu soup.

I signed up for zipcar, and I have to say the process of being a member, even with a Malaysian driving license, was pretty painless. I dropped by the SF zipcar office to pick up my member card, and I swear it took less than 30 seconds. Zipcar’s great coz you can rent cars by the hour, and can book cars using your iPhone. Haven’t actually driven a zipcar yet, but soon.

I also bought an iPhone, and was very pleased that my credit history has lasted the 7 years since I last lived in the SF bay area. Cool.

Tomorrow’s a full day. I will be catching up with 1 friend over lunch, 1 friend over dinner, and another friend at SFMOMA. On Friday, I’m going to a Meetup called Bootstrappers Breakfast to chat with people who are bootstrapping their businesses. Also, I’ll get a chance to chat with the nice people from Carden Day School in San Jose on their experience with QuickSchools.com.

Alrighty, time to start winding down. Stay tuned for further adventures as I head over to the east coast for a whirlwind of conferences to promote QuickSchools.com.

The Writing of a Constitution

The Constitution of a nation is an awesome thing. It is a document which governs how a country is to be run for hundreds and possibly thousands of years.

The topic of the constitution has been running through my mind recently. The Royal Rumble involving the now-public battle between the Negeri Sembilan royalty and the Johor royalty reminded me of how ex-prime minister Dr Mahathir pushed through a difficult constitutional change limiting the power of royalty. I recently watched the TV series ‘The Revolution’, a story about the American Revolution and how the constitution of the United States was drafted. And I recently saw for the 2nd time the movie Evelyn, about a challenge to the Irish Supreme Court on laws that were ‘repugnant’ to the Irish Constitution.

I mulled over things and I had some observations to make about Constitutions:

* They are usually conceived and drafted in a very short amount of time, say in less than one year (a nation is awaiting, after all). And yet constitutions must last a LONG time. Imagine if that was your task – to write a nation’s constitution. Wouldn’t that be a daunting proposition, knowing it must stand the test of time? And knowing you had one hell of a deadline to make it?

* When you write a constitution from scratch, you have a blank slate. You can write anything down from whatever principles or ideals. There will be debate over philosophies, to be sure, but those debates will be among a small number of people. Any one particular clause will probably involve far less than a hundred hours of debate.

* But once a constitution is penned down, that’s it! The basic framework is in place. Any change, no matter how minuscule, would require a tremendous amount of political and social will. Any mistake made will have to be lived with for generations to come.

Since constitutions are tremendously difficult to change, and any changes to be made must necessarily be small in order to be passable, how might a constitution be rewritten in a big way?

* There is a revolution and subsequent drafting of a new constitution. But for a revolution to occur, things must get really bad first. So this is not a great option.

* There is a secession, with the drafting of a new constitution for the new state. Well, we know central governments HATE secession and would do anything to prevent one. So this would be a very ugly option.

I can’t think of any other way for a sovereign nation to rewrite it’s constitution from scratch.

So, clearly a constitution is not easy to change once written. So that moment when a new constitution is being written is crucial. The drafters should be highly educated and have a LOT of knowledge of philosophy, political science and law. They should have read countless books in these fields, and had countless debates. And the drafters should be of the highest moral standard, so as to be able to draft a constitution with solely the interests of the people in mind.

With these thoughts in mind, it would be interesting to dive deep into the circumstances surrounding the drafting of the Malaysian Constitution, and to know more about the people involved, the knowledge they had on nation building, philosophy and political science, and the interests they were looking out for. It would also be interesting to think about what kind of Constitution would we come up with today, if we had the opportunity to write a new one from scratch?

RoboCup 1999: 10 year anniversary

Prof. Raff D’Andrea sent me an email with 3 youtube links. I nearly fell of my chair laughing when I saw what they were: 3 cheesy music videos which we found hilarious when we were in Stockholm, Sweden during the 1999 RoboCup competition. I remember the ATB and the A*Teens ones especially.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgvePeDIt3Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8l8OG3SL7M

RoboCup 99 was one heck of an experience for me. Winning a world competition, beating teams from countries liks USA, Germany, Australia and Japan really felt GOOD. And totally worth one year’s worth of hard HARD work.

You can find videos of our robots playing soccer here as covered by Scientific American Frontiers.

I also reread the report by Prof. Raff, which brings back the memories of the competition in sharp focus, including the luggage crisis!

Monday July 26, 1999 2:30PM

Andrew, Aris, JinWoo, Lars and Tom arrive in Stockholm, after having flown the red-eye from Ithaca. Even though the team is tired, spirits are high as the Cornell team looks forward to 2 full days of testing, calibration, and set up before its first game on Thursday. A minor complication arises when the team finds out that ALL but oe of the checked pieces of luggage did not arrive in Stockholm; this is not too much of a concern, since the British Airways staff informs us that luggage is delayed from Heathrow all the time.

Monday 10:00 PM

Three flights later, the luggage still has not arrived.

Read the rest here.

Making a tennis group stick: A user experience perspective

Some of my colleagues and I were discussing exercise the other day, and how to make a routine work. Some of us do individual exercise (jogging etc), whereas some do group sports like tennis. The discussion went to the problem of group sports: everyone is fired up in the beginning, but the enthusiasm dies off, and the group eventually disbands.

We were asking ourselves, what is the core reason some sports groups survive, but others don’t? In my opinion, it comes down to the user experience. In a previous post, I talked about sculpting the user experience for products and services. But could the reason sports groups fail also because of user experience?

For example, here are some salient points of my friend’s tennis group:

• Someone has to go to the tennis courts in person to book the courts (annoying, but the courts are very affordable)
• The courts are open courts (i.e. exposed to the weather).
• They do collect money in advance (and thus “lock” people into the commitment), but a lot of the money goes into tennis balls and stuff (i.e. “capex”) and not the actual court rental (i.e. “opex”).
• They do have a large enough group so some no-shows are cool.

So why is the group slowly disbanding (though still surviving by the skin of their teeth)?

Let’s look at the user experience:

• “I really want to play tennis. But shucks, someone has to go book the court. That person will probably be me. Argh, never mind, maybe next week.”
• “Oh no, I think I have to cancel tennis tonight because of so-and-so engagement. That’s okay, I haven’t really prepaid that much anyways, the money goes to tennis balls so it’s not a waste.”
• “Argh, the rain is always screwing up our tennis sessions. This is such a bore…”

Not very conducive is it? How on earth is that tennis group going to last the long haul (i.e. years and years)?

I can’t say I know the solution, but I do believe that if you sculpt the user experience you’ve got a shot at it. For example:

• Go for a more expensive court, one that is preferably rain covered. You can book by phone, so it’s painless to book.
• It’s more expensive, so the commitment level is higher.
• Can they afford it? Yeah, they can.
• Playing is no longer affected by rain, so players know that wednesdays at 8 PM is ALWAYS tennis night. Players can better manage my schedule, and can better say “no” to wednesday appointments.
• And so on.

If anyone has experience in the above, let me know! Definitely would like to hear on this.

Online business tip: Track important dates on a big wall

What I’m about to write is simply obvious, but then again, it did take us a year to learn this, so I’m going to share our lesson learnt with you.

My company is a Software-as-aSaaS business providing  school management systems (we’re the first in the world to do it fully-online, might I add). Because of our devotion to providing a fully-online experience, tracking our website traffic via Google Analytics is very important.

Sometimes we’d get spikes on a particular day, and we’d know exactly why we got the spike. “Oh, yes, we got that spike because we put an ad out”, or “We got that spike because we announced a new feature.”

Now fast forward 12 months, and we’re looking at our traffic growth and analyzing it, and we realize that we can’t really remember what events triggered those respective spikes!

So now we have a wall where we write down whenever something of significance happens, and it helps a lot in understanding the traffic patterns months down later.

Why do so many services and products fail to deliver on the user experience?

How often do you consume a product (especially software) or a service, and you get a less than perfect user experience? For example:

• You get a promotional flyer, and it tells you to go to location A.
• You go there, but the person tells you that you also need to bring along item B to get the promotion.

How could they, the creators of your user experience, miss that?

Or here’s another common experience:

• You’re trying to drive somewhere, and you see a turn signboard for a particular destination.
• You turn.
• You no longer see signboards for that destination.

You scratch your head, thinking, how exactly did the creators of the signboard think you’d be able to find your destination, considering that you needed the signboard in the first place to make the turn?

And yet, some companies/organizations get the user experience perfect every time. Take Singapore Airlines. You can ask anybody in the world which airline gives them the best experience, and seasoned travellers will answer SIA nine out of ten times (anecdotal but go ahead, try it!).

Why do they always get it right? So perfectly right that they’re known for it throughout the world?

I’ve been on the hunt for an answer to this question for a long time. For those that know, I’m in the business of providing a fully-online school management system called QuickSchools.com. This means that K-12 schools use our system completely online, usually without human intervention unless something goes wrong.

As you can imagine, getting the user experience right will determine to a large part our success.

I think we’re discovering the answer.

We’ve got to sculpt the user experience, from step 1 all the way to the end. I use the word sculpt to remind us of a sculpter artist who lovingly sculpts away at her work of art, ensuring every curve is perfect, in detail as well as in overall form.

Take a look at the picture below:

This is our sculpture. We map out every single step of the user experience and paste it on the board. Every screen, every email, every click.

Then we stare at it. Everybody in the office can stare at it. And we imagine the user. And we walk through it. Day in and day out. And we invite people outside the company to walk through the user experience.

And guess what… all those gaps in the user experience get blazingly obvious. Because it’s staring you at the face! We sculpt and we sculpt.

Because everything is in front of you, you can jump around based on any idea that pops in your head.

You can look at one screen printout, and wonder if the email sent out 3 days later jives with what’s on the screen printout. So you then look at the email, and you spot any discontinuities. And you mark the board, with a pen, with a post it, with a colored sticker, with whatever.

The next person sees your thoughts. And the user experience keeps on evolving from there.

We’ve discovered some mechanisms to help make the process smooth. I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Gaining weight: The 5 kg is back

In one moment of weakness, everything can come back… Okay, not a moment, a weekend of weakness.

Here’s what I had this weekend:

• 1 packet oreos (the long one…)
• 1 packet Pepperidge Farm macadamia and chocolate chip soft baked cookies.
• 1 packet Milano double chocolate.
• 1 bag Ruffles potato chips
• Some raisins

Gotta find my way back on the right path!