As many as you know, I've been helping out at the Butterfly Of Life ® Jewelry Supporting Cancer Awareness website.

It's been a fascinating journey. We're raising awareness of cancer through beautiful butterfly jewelry. It started with a butterfly pendant designed by Rita Willeart, and has grown into a huge collection of Butterfly Pendants, Butterfly Pins, Butterfly Earrings and Butterfly Charms.

We've grown the website to 500% more orders in the first few weeks than the previous version of the website had in three months. The redesign of the site was just the beginning - and we used the same design and coding firm. The magic was drawing the knowledge out of the team, and thinking of the project as a new business - not just a website.

If your company needs help overseeing the development of a new venture, please drop me a note.

Labels: butterfly jewelry

I've been following Apple as a stock for years. It was the first stock I ever purchased - 10 shares around 1980.

I own a bunch of it, purchased a various times over the past 8 years. I'm way up.

Yesterday, another big announcement. New phone, lower cost, .ME subscription service.

The stock went down. Why?

Well, a couple of things to remember. On any given day, a stock price has nothing directly to do with the fundamentals or health of a company. The price is a product of supply and demand.

Yesterday, more people wanted to sell than buy... the price goes down.

Lots of smarter people than me (Warren Buffet being my favorite) point out that great companies perform very well over time - that there is a 100% correlation - sooner or later great, profitable companies are rewarded with higher valuation.

Back to Apple - my first take, watching the Keynote address by Jobs - Apple just launched a $99 a year "Exchange for the rest of us." - and lowered the price of their phone, and made it a lot more usable.

I doubt this makes the company worth less in the long term.

I'm not selling, I'm buying.

Labels: apple

I love Quickbooks. I want to use Quickbooks. I really, really do.

I own Quickbooks. I bought Quickbooks edition 1998, and upgraded to 2000, 2002, and 2004.

I own all sorts of "Tips and Tricks" books on Quickbooks.

I teach my entrepreneurship students how to use Quickbooks, and recommend it to my start-up clients.

So why am I not using Quickbooks?

Because the process sucks. Here's my story:

I needed to send out a few invoices - and I finally had rid myself of my desktop. I had moved everything over to my Vista laptop a while ago. I just had never tested Quickbooks 2004.

Crashed. Reinstall. Crash. Google. Not Vista compatable, sometimes. Crash.

Decide to upgrade.

Upgrade box on website requires longer number than my number.

Call. 45 minutes. Lots of "absolutely sir, can you hold a few more minutes."

Call center guy: "Upgrade is only $189.99, regularly $209.99"

"But your website says the regular price is $189.99?"

Call center guy: "But this is for an automatic download plus the backup CD."

"I can get this on Amazon right now for $169"

Call center guy: "Hold sir." ... ... ... ... ... ... ... "I can sell it to you for $169"

We do the deal. Phone number, credit card, email. Lot's of "can you repeat that."

Call center guy: "I'm sorry, but this price is only for the automatic download."

Sigh.

Call center guy: "And now I give you your free one month trial to our support. In 30 days your credit card will be charged $29.99 a month."

Thinking "AAAGGGGGGGRRRRRGGGHHH @#$@#$@$"

Saying "No, no, no. I don't want that."

Call center guy: "But you can cancel."

10 minutes of polite arguing.

End up agreeing to it.

I try to download. Not Firefox compatible. Try with IE. Oops, not Google tool bar or any download manager. Find link for direct download.

25 minute download - 500+gig

Install.

Crash. Error c=343

Clean registry, uninstall previous version, clean registry again, reboot, reinstall.

Error c=343

Google. Apply solution. Crash.

Call tech support.

Automated Girl from Hell: "Your average wait time is 30 minutes."

Put on speaker phone. Do other work. Afraid to leave office for bathroom breaks.

55 minutes later, still on hold, hang up and leave for a meeting.

Connect at 4pm later that day.

Explain, crash, re-apply solution, reinstall, crash, escalate, explain, crash.

I finally just canceled my order - and it appears my card was never charged. We'll see if I get charged for tech support. Surprisingly, this was the easiest thing to do all day.

I ended up installing my 2004 version on my wifes laptop... took me 10 minutes to print invoices. I'll use her computer a few times a month. A hassle, but not worth $189 and a day of my life to work around.

Somebody at Quickbooks should read The Best Service is No Service by Bill Price and David Jaffe.

Why their process sucks is that they are not following through. They need to make sure that what happens never happens to anyone else. EVER.

It's O.K. that my experience with Quickbooks sucked. I still love their software, will still teach students and recommend it to clients. Just not as enthusiastically.

Price and Jaffe argue that the best companies take experiences like mine and use them as an opportunity to improve their products, their customer knowledge, and strengthen relationships.

I doubt I'll hear from anyone at Quickbooks.

Shame.

This is pretty Cool!

From a mention in Guy Kawasaki's blog this is an eco-friendly wild flower spreading device.

You pedal, and vegetable based soap bubbles carry tiny wildflower seeds to line the cracks of our city sidewalks with a little bit of nature.

I like this kind of stuff!

Jules doesn't know I'm doing this, and will make me take it down, but I just had to say how cool she is.


She is on the cover of this month's Womens Inc. magazine. She rocks.

Check her out!

-Mike Nolan

Hey, I'm currently helping out with the Butterfly of Life cancer awareness jewelry. Check it out!

Got an email from my former program director at KEEZ-FM - a very talented guy that went by the name Jeff Nixx.

We swapped some emails about the future of radio. He shares my passion, but too is looking towards a horizon that seems to be shrouded in haze.

Then I read this great article in the Washington Post, which I found via my friends at Hear 2.0.

Here is an excerpt:

Radio, shedding talent as fast as it loses audience, is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the younger generation. Yet most Americans still listen to something for much of the day. Radio could be the way into those ears, but only if it invests in creating compelling reasons to be there, only if it grabs hold of us the way the voices of past decades connected to the loves, pains and dreams of young listeners. As always, the future lies in the past.

Want to help save radio? So do I. Let's figure this out together...

Labels: radio