Surplus words

Always wish I had more time to participate in such activities. Anyone has a chance to try and let me know?

Sent to a [SYNTHETIC-WORLDS] mailing list:

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS.

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at mfalk@umail.iu.edu.

Thank you.

--
Edward Castronova
Associate Professor of Telecommunications
Indiana University

Now that I am a paying customer for highrise (highrisehq.com) I can request features, right? :)

I am trying to figure out how best to use the “deals” feature, and it would be really great if I could surface emails/notes from people involved in the deal without having to make 10 clicks. It was not even obvious to me that I could assign these to deals until I tried to change the email… At the very least, I should be able to drag an email/note to the “deal” that is already shown on the right side of the screen. Ideally, I would like to be able to add notes/emails from inside the deals - also with drag-n-drop…

Offtopic: Interestingly (for me) - I have immediately begun to expect that companies follow twitter and therefore will just pick up the resultant twit and comment on the blog. It’s all the fault of the GetSatisfaction.com team.

Best Practices and examples are probably more important and useful than out of the box software. Once I see how something is done, it is usually pretty cheap to repeat and customized to my needs. Out of the box, most just means it is broken and needs fixing.

I was passing by a ground-level office– Allied Professional Services – in Midtown today. I pass the building all the time, but I think the office is quite new, perhaps only a week or so since they put in the nice frosted glass windows and a door with various services the company provides stenciled on it. Today, as I was eating a slice of pizza (another post) and walking by the building I thought, “I would not know where to go to get a nice door like that, with good stenciled icons.” Of course, my ignorance is nothing if not impressive, but I was not even sure I knew someone who would know where to call to get this work done. That put made me think of the “6 degrees of separation” problem, but with a twist. How long would my chain of contacts to an experienced door stenciler be? How strong would that chain be? Is this even a different question from the common “do I know a person problem?”

At first I thought it was different, especially between different socio-economic circles, but now I think it might be the same problem. Perhaps there is not a difference between knowing “someone by name” and “someone by skill”, at least in terms of the length of the chain. The difference may occur on the level of semantics – “good lawyer” or, in today’s headlines, “good bank” are different from “John Smith”. I’d be curious to know if people have done reaearch into this question, and what their findings were.

How does this relate to anything useful?

As I constantly think of how best to work with my teams, this is an important, but largely unmeasured consideration. When forming the teams we formally look at the person’s skills, some relevant experience with a similar type of project or industry is helpful – but rarely measured. However, I do not think I have ever heard anyone say, “we must have 40 points of X experience and 60 points of Y exposure for every project we undertake in order to have 90% confidence of success.” We do a similar calculation with technical skills, but not much else. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that the MVPs on all teams are always the multi-faceted guys who not only know how to manage java heap sizes, but also where to get a projector on short notice and can talk sports/stocks/beer with colleagues and customers.

Ed Sim makes a lot of good points in his “When to hire a VP of Sales“. I would particularly like to comment on the following statement:

“In addition, over time the sales team will get frustrated if the product is not ready for primetime and they will be out looking for a new job in a couple of quarters making all of this effort a very expensive experiment.”

That is absolutely true, and I think only comes with experience (or reading Ed’s blog). It is hard to underestimate how quickly sales people become frustrated if they feel the product is not saleable, especially if the market for the product is new in general or unfamiliar to the sales person.
Another aspect of sales hiring, very important to understand before multiple sales people are brought on, is the length of the sales cycle. It is pointless to expect a sales person to produce even after two quarters when the average sales cycle for your industry segment is nine months. So one has to remember that a sales person will use up most of their year getting that first sale, and that despite being “theirs”, the senior technical or business personnel will actually do most of the work in getting that first, or even second and third, sales for every sales person hired. It is annoying for a bootstrapping company to babysit someone who is supposed to be brining in sales and income - but there is often no other way to get the sales people to understand the new technology they are selling to new customers they are engaging.

“…rather than hire a VP of Sales first, I would encourage you to focus on generating leads and hiring a sales rep or two to follow up on them. This way you can take a smaller step to refine your sales model and product before going big.”

Absolutely. This is sage advice (don’t I sound fawning?)