It seems like every time I think of blogging these days, I think "oh, I should be working instead". Blogging doesn't really take that long, but it takes a while to sort of compose my thoughts on various subject before I write them down. And then of course there's the old problem of confidentiality.

Anyway, I've finally got some thoughts to share.

Google AdSense ... not too impressed so far. The ads it's serving up don't seem to me to be very appropriate. I'm starting to wonder if you really do have to engage in a lot of silly optimization strategies in order to get any decent results out of it. The problems seems to me that their algorithms are looking at my blog page and deciding that what people want to see are "make money from home" type stuff, I can kind of see if you were a simple algorithm why that might seem correct, but it's not at all what I really write about.

So basically I need to either (a) engage in optimization or (b) switch to some other system that allows me to actually pick what kind of ads are going to show up. I'm thinking of trying amazon.

Making money ... I was in Starbucks the other day. They served me a chocolate croissant that was horribly stale, but were nice enough to replace it when I complained. Starbucks I think is an excellent example of what Crossing the Chasm calls the "whole product". If you were Starbucks, what would you be selling. Coffee right? Pastries and the like? (preferably fresh...) Of course you're also selling a pleasant environment in which to drink that coffee. Which means you have to play music.

Of course the choice of music is important, but Starbucks has taken that several steps further. The "whole product" includes the ability to effectively take the Starbucks environment home with you. They have created their own record label effectively and they sell CDs in the store, the same music that they play. Now I wonder who thought of that — because it's pretty smart. Perhaps they started with the coffee. "Hey, people might like/really want to buy the coffee beans we use and brew them at home". So they sell their coffee beans. Then, the brewers. "Hey, people might really like to feel even more like having Starbucks at home, let's sell them brewers as well." Then, the music. "Hey ... they want more Starbucks ambience, let's give them music as well." Hey starbucks: how about selling furniture too?

It's all about providing not just a product, but a COMPLETE solution. I know that sounds like a tired cliché, but it's not. It's not superficial to sell Starbucks music (or buy it). Starbucks puts a lot of time and energy into choosing the right music already, so it makes sense to "monetize" that effort and allow people to enjoy that during their time off. (And now they have a satellite radio station too.) And ultimately for Starbucks, this reinforces the customers. Starbucks becomes a whole lifestyle, as opposed to just coffee. This is something that your mom and pop coffee shop might not think about. They are focused on the product. But if you want to make the big money, a product is not enough.

It's actually amazing how learning business has improved how I see these things. Before I would have thought "starbucks sells music, that's amazing." Now I can actually examine their motives and see how it works.

So, if you want to make a successful business, I think you need to find a way to wrap your customers in a complete safety blanket. Provide them with EVERYTHING they need. If they ask for something, the first thing you do is say "yes". Then figure out how / if it fits in. Then build it yourself or partner/outsource the work.

But the point is that it's like a luxury hotel. When your customers check in to you, you provide them with 360 degrees of comfort.

The New York Times wrote this weekend about mobile barcodes . Nothing you don't already know about what you can do with the technology, although it gives a bit of extra weight to HP, Publicis, and Neomedia, the three companies are involved in a bit of industry consortium building with the stated aim of ensuring compatible standards. It's not something I worry about too much, as long as people stick to industry standard barcode formats. I'm not too picky about data matrix vs. QR Code -- although data matrix is better at small sizes, QR is more popular in Japan.

The particular example they give though is not a particularly good one, "qode", it only stores 18 bytes, and that's including the error correction, so that the actual capacity is less. In other words, you'll have to lease a string from Neomedia instead of just using a normal URL like you would with semacode or QR, which can both store upwards of 1000 bytes if necessary. Still, I wouldn't expect the NYT to understand the subtleties of that kind of issue.

Anyway, the US is usually a few years behind Europe in adoption of new mobile technologies, and Europe a few years behind Asia (Japan and Korea in particular). And mobile operators do have a tendency to move pretty slowly.

In other news I've been experimenting with Google AdSense to see how it works. I went with the small ads for now. I have to say, so far it's not very good at targeting ads automatically. It seems to think that "Make money at home" is an appropriate ad for this blog. Maybe I'm not using enough big business words like monetization and revenue generation and business model and ... whatever ... I think mostly those words are more complex than necessary since it all comes down to "making money" ... but there you are, the price that we pay for being picky.