Giving the Gift of Light

I’ve been in an engineer for more than 25 years and have designed a lot of products during that time. So every time I get a new product, I look at it from a design engineer’s standpoint. Sometimes I am pleased to the point that I wish I could meet the engineers who designed the product just to get their story on all that went into designing it. Other times I think engineer must have been inexperienced, or possibly under pressure to meet a cost goal or time deadline.

When I ordered a Bogolight a few months ago, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I was intrigued, yet a little skeptical, because I never had seen a similar business model for selling products. The letters BOGO stand for ‘Buy one, Give one’. The flashlight is sold in such a way that when you pay $25 for one light, you’re actually buying two of them, one for you and another for a charity. In this case, the Bogolights going to charity are heading for developing regions in Africa.

The Bogolight is the brainchild of Mark Bent, CEO and President of SunNight Solar who conceived of designing a solar rechargeable flashlight and selling it in a way that would get flashlights to go to a place where they are desperately needed yet without the resources to purchase them. Mark spent over twenty years in the developing world and understands their needs better than most. He realized that in most of the developing world, there is no reliable electricity and so any reading at night must be done by a kerosene lantern, which is expensive and very inefficient. Imagine if all of your night time reading or studying had to be illuminated with the dim light of a kerosene lantern. You’d have probably done a lot less of it. I know I would have.

The Bogolight provides reading light with high efficiency white LEDs powered by solar rechargeable batteries. The solar cells are built right into the flashlight. For every hour that it’s charged, it provides about 30 minutes of brilliant white light. With an 8 hour charge, it can provide sufficient illumination to last for an entire evening’s worth of reading. Best of all, you don’t need to continually replace batteries. It uses 3 readily available rechargeable AA batteries that are capable of more than 750 charge-discharge cycles. I’ve often found that rechargeable products have either built-in batteries or else they use custom-designed batteries that are dreadfully expensive to replace. So my hat is off to the Bogolight designers who chose to use standard rechargeable AA batteries.

The 6 LEDs have a life expectancy of about 100,000 hours of continuous use and the integrated solar panel is designed to last 20 years. When the average life expectancy of consumer electronics products seems to shrink every year, it’s refreshing to see something like this that is obviously ‘built to last’.

I really appreciate the rugged design, complete with moisture seals. Another pleasant surprise was the glow-in-the dark accent to makes it easy to locate in the dark. Its bright orange color makes it easy to find during the day too. It also has a built-in hook to hang it from overhead to make task lighting easier. The hook has a spring-loaded clip so you can attach it to a backpack and carry it around without fear of losing it. I am very impressed with the attention to detail that was obviously put into its design.

Now that I’ve had the chance to use it for several months, I can say with confidence that Mark Bent and the people at SunNight Solar are doing something truly wonderful and if you’re looking for a unique Christmas gift, you can rest assured that the recipient will find nothing else like it. Better yet, when you buy one, you’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing that someone in Africa will be getting a highly-valued and useful Christmas gift, and it’s hard to put a price on that.

LinkedIn tips for beginners

I posted here recently on the topic of ‘What is LinkedIn?’ There’s not much reason to join LinkedIn unless you actually intend to use it to link to others to form a network. So today I’ll discuss some tips for building a network. I should mention that LinkedIn appears to have more members in high technology fields than other professions so you may want to keep that in mind when you’re looking to connect to people. As time goes on, that may change. But I’m sure LinkedIn will always favor those professions where on-line networking is valuable.

Here are some tips I have found helpful in growing a LinkedIn network:

1. Think of people you have worked with during your career and search for their names on LinkedIn. If you find them, request a link to them. There are a number of ways to do this, and if you’ve worked at the same company or went to the same school, then you don’t need to know the person’s current email address. If you do not have those affiliations, but know the person’s email address, then you can describe the person as ‘other’ or ‘friend’ and supply the email address when prompted. You should change the standard invitation text to personalize it a little.

2. Whenever someone from your past pops into your mind when you’re away from your computer, make a note to look them up on LinkedIn when you’re near a computer. This way you can re-connect with old friends and acquaintances you may have lost touch with over the years.

3. If you have a Rolodex or a collection of business cards, go through them as time permits and search for people with whom you would like to stay in touch.

4. You will probably get offers to join networks with someone you do not personally know who has 500 or more connections. Take them. This greatly expands your network and as such, your visibility on the LinkedIn network. People sometimes worry that taking connections from strangers puts them in an awkward position of possibly having to provide feedback about a stranger, but you’ll likely never be asked to do this, and if you are, you can just explain that you connected to the person as a courtesy.

5. Whenever you get a request to connect, you should accept it or archive it. You should not choose the ‘I don’t know this person’ option because if a person gets 5 of those, his account will be frozen. Most people are unaware of this and you don’t want to be the one who gets the person kicked off of LinkedIn.

6. If you find someone in your network who you’d like to connect with but don’t have an affiliation or email address, then you can request an introduction through someone in your network that is connected to that person. The top linked people with 500 or more connections are used to getting these requests and will nearly always pass them along to the person.

7. Periodically scan through the connections of your 1st level connections that have the potential for mutual connections. This is a good way to jog your memory and possibly reconnect with a long lost friend or colleague. Even if someone is already in your network as a 2nd or 3rd level connection, there is a benefit to making a 1st level connection with a person because it will pull more of his or her connections into your network.

8. If you want recommendations from your connections you will usually have to ask for them. Be prepared to write a recommendation for anyone from whom you request a recommendation. This means you should not ask for a recommendation from someone who you are not willing to recommend yourself. Otherwise you may find yourself in the awkward position of returning the favor for someone you may not know well enough to recommend, or, worse yet, someone for whom you cannot write a favorable recommendation.

9. List skills in your profile that you enjoy doing and are hoping to use again. You may not want to show up in searches for work that you are not interested in doing again so you might consider leaving those off your profile if that’s the case.

10. Become familiar with the ‘Advanced Search’ option which allows you to narrow down your search based on more specific criteria than just a person’s name.

11. If you have a blog or website, either put a link to your LinkedIn profile or an invitation to connect to you in a prominent location on the page. If you do invite readers to connect with you, encourage them to change the standard invitation text to something other than the generic, “Please join my LinkedIn Network”, by letting you know they found you from your blog or website.

Understand that not everyone from whom you request a connection will honor the request. Some may be following the LinkedIn policy of only connecting to people whom they’ve actually worked with and know well. Sometimes the invitation email gets trapped by a spam filter. Other times it may take a few weeks or even months for someone to discover the request. Don’t be discouraged if this happens on occasion.

This was just a small subset of tips for building your network on LinkedIn. If you do a Google search on the topic of “LinkedIn tips”, you’ll find many more.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a professional networking group whose purpose is to provide its members a way to search and connect with each other to find jobs, people, and business opportunities in the network. The basic premise behind the service is a sort of on-line Rolodex that updates itself automatically.

An individual’s LinkedIn network consists of one’s immediate connections in addition to people who are 2 levels of being connected to any of those connections. So, as long as someone is within 3 levels of connecting to you, you may contact that person through an intermediate connection. It’s not unusual to significantly expand your overall network by adding a single connection, especially if that connection is well-linked. By the time I got to 30 connections, my network had grown to hundreds of thousands of people. Today I have nearly 150 connections and my total network is nearly 3 million people. There are about 14 million members on LinkedIn with many more joining daily.

Members typically put information in their profiles that is similar to what you’d find on a resume, such as their skills, the companies they’ve worked for, and schools they’ve attended. If you have worked at the same company as another member you find on LinkedIn, or went to the same school, it’s very easy to ask for a direct connection without the need to have an email address for them. However, LinkedIn’s stated policy is that members should only connect to people they know well and trust. This policy is not enforced, and rarely is it strictly adhered to by members. Some of the most enthusiastic LinkedIn members will connect to anyone, and, depending on one’s goals in using LinkedIn, it may be better aligned with an individual’s needs to do that. For example, if your purpose is to recruit employees, the more connections you make, the more search results you’ll get when trying to fill a job opening. So a recruiter will often want to have as many connections as possible. Similarly, if you’re looking for a job, you would benefit by connecting to more members since that will make it more likely you’ll show up in a search. You don’t have to worry about spam-like contacts on LinkedIn because if a person tries to connect to everyone on the network, they only need 5 reports from other members that ‘I don’t know this person’ before his account will be frozen. So that works to prevent unlimited random connection requests from people who are trying to just get large numbers of connections.

I first heard about LinkedIn a few years ago from a friend who had joined it. He invited me to join which resulted in me filling out a very short profile and then I waited for people to connect to me. This didn’t work very well. I got only a few invitations to connect to others in the first few years. Most requests were from people who were recruiters or “top linkers.” “Top linkers” is a term for people who try to collect as many links as possible without regard for knowing and trusting the individuals to whom they connect. They are usually recruiters.

It wasn’t until a few months ago when I knew I’d be leaving HP that I started requesting links of others that my network began to grow. Once it hit a critical mass of about 30 connections, I started getting more frequent requests from others to link to them, but most of my links have come as a result of being proactive about sending invitations to connect. I should mention that even when I had very few connections, I got a call from a recruiter at Apple who was looking to hire me away from HP. I also know a colleague I worked with at HP who recently landed a great job as a result of being found on LinkedIn with a keyword search.

I think a lot of people who join LinkedIn fall into the trap of waiting for something to happen like I did at first. Until you fill in your profile and make your first few links, you will be very hard to find on LinkedIn. Also, even if people do find you, they may conclude that you’re a reluctant participant if you only have a few connections. I sometimes find when I try to link to someone with only a few connections, I may not get a response from them. In some cases I’ve found that they forgot their LinkedIn login credentials or are using an email they don’t bother to check very often. In any event, if you want something to happen, you’ll need to put forth some effort in building your LinkedIn network.

The principle behind LinkedIn is similar to any professional network’s mission, that is, ‘giving to get’. Whenever I hear anyone complain about LinkedIn, it’s usually a result of not yet having adopted this helpful mindset. If someone is trying to remain anonymous on the Internet, or if they don’t like getting requests to help people, some of whom might be strangers, then LinkedIn may not be a good match for them. On the other hand, if someone is eager to network with others and has a friendly attitude toward helping others, then LinkedIn can be quite beneficial.

I don’t mind linking to people I don’t know yet, especially when we have something in common. I invite people I meet through my technical help web sites to link to me and have gotten connections to some very skilled and helpful people as a result. If you are a member of LinkedIn and would like to link to me, you can just add me as a friend using this email address: lee810@yahoo.com. You can change the standard LinkedIn greeting to let me know you found me through this blog posting.

Next time I’ll cover some tips on how to build your LinkedIn network.

What really happened at Enron?

The word Enron is now nearly synonymous with corporate misgovernance. But what really happened there? It’s easy to remember the news sound bites, but those seemed to address only the more egregious and sensationalistic aspects of the debacle. Namely, they focused on rich corporate executives plundering a company while at the same time the investors and employees were left with nothing. Is that really what happened? Yes, that did happen, but if that’s the only lesson we take away from it, we’ll have missed the real reasons behind what went on there.

I recently saw a movie and later read several books about Enron. The movie entitled Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, was based on a book by the same name by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. The other books were entitled Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Mimi Schwartz and Sherron Watkins and Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald. Between them all, they paint a story that you won’t get from reading just one of the books or by watching the movie. Terri saw the movie and read the books as well and she felt the same way. Reading about Enron is like watching a train wreck. It is hard to look away.

Can what happened at Enron be traced to a single root cause? I think it can. The root cause of the most spectacular bankruptcy in the history of business can be distilled down to one key issue. And that is that the reward system within Enron was not aligned with the long term financial health of the company.

The system at Enron rewarded executives who did ‘deals’ with large bonuses and, in some cases, an equity stake based on the absolute size of the deal, not on how well it served the long term financial goals of the company. As a result of this policy, several executives walked away with many millions of dollars in personal wealth after helping to sew the seeds of Enron’s destruction. Despite the size of their financial windfalls, these people seemed like minor players in the affair, partly because they were gone from the company before Enron’s collapse. Those held most responsible for the actual collapse, and whose names were mentioned in all the news reports, were primarily Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. They are certainly culpable for their part in fostering a culture that encouraged behaviors that were at odds with the investors’ and employees’ long term interests. But they steadfastly maintained their innocence, thinking what had happened on their watch was nothing more than a ‘run on the bank’, or the fault of their subordinates, and that they personally felt company was actually still financially healthy. But the balance sheet told quite a different story. They just weren’t really paying attention to it. Whether they believed their testimony or not is anyone’s guess, but they were the ones in charge and thus needed to be held accountable for the malfeasance of their underlings. Both of them had been warned on numerous occasions about accounting irregularities and both tended to defend, deny, or ignore the warning signs.

When executives are awarded sizable stock grants and stock options, it can cloud their judgment. There are a number of ways to get a stock to increase in value temporarily while at the same time jeopardizing the long term financial health of a company. A few of the more notable accounting tricks used at Enron were counting profits years before they were actually due to accrue and hiding expenses in off-balance sheet entities. These two techniques, which go against everything a reasonably intelligent person should understand at an early age, were the most damaging accounting frauds perpetrated at Enron. These accounting techniques skirted legalities while flouting any semblance of sound fiduciary judgment.

In addition to these accounting irregularities there was a perceived need to expand the company at any expense and so a lot of money was poured into risky third world energy projects which ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars. This was unrelated to the fake accounting, yet still an important factor in Enron’s eventual demise. It was the executives’ reward system in striking these deals that caused them to get involved in questionable ventures where their own personal wealth would increase even if the deals went sour afterwards.

Another thing that wasn’t necessarily responsible for the company’s financial woes, but did expose Enron’s toxic culture, was traders’ willingness to engage in schemes to bilk the California out of billions of dollars by exploiting some flawed deregulation laws that left that state exposed. This blatant disregard for ethics exposed a rather laissez faire attitude on the part of the management as long as lots of money was rolling in. The movie features incriminating audio recordings of Enron traders conspiring to overcharge for power using schemes with self-incriminating names such as ‘Death Star’ ‘Fat Boy’, and ‘Ricochet’. Again, this alone did not bring down Enron, but it certainly exposed and reinforced the absence of ethics that permeated the company.

I think that these books about Enron should be required reading for all corporate executives and the story of Enron should be a mandatory case study for all MBA programs as a cautionary tale. I found the stories behind the fall of Enron to be as fascinating as they were educational.

U3 Smart Drive

I recently discovered a new type of USB flash memory device called a U3 smart drive that has the potential change the way that people use PCs. I won one of these on a TechPodcast RoundTable a few weeks ago. Now that I’ve had a chance to use it for a while, I figured I’d write up a review about it.

‘U3‘ is a company formed as a joint venture by two flash memory industry leaders, SanDisk and M-Systems. The U3 smart drives make data and programs completely portable between PCs. When you plug the U3 drive into any Windows PC, it carries its own ‘environment’ and makes even borrowed PCs look and feel like they’ve been instantly ‘personalized’.

The U3 smart drive concept takes advantage of the fact that most people use PCs for email, document creation/editing, and web browsing. Imagine that programs, documents, email, and web browser settings were stored on a flash drive that could be securely locked with a password. It would be possible to use even a borrowed PC just like it was your own. When you eject the drive there’d be no trace of activity left on the PC. You could then take it to another PC and start working right where you left off.

Software downloaded for the U3 installs directly on the device, not on the PC. So instead of purchasing applications and installing them on every PC you might use, you can just insert and run the program directly from the U3 flash drive.

Programs that run on a U3 device can be specially modified so as not to use the PC’s registry or leave temporary files. A free SDK is available for software vendors wishing to adapt their programs. A large number of software applications have already been ported, such as OpenOffice, Skype, Thunderbird, Firefox, as well as lot of handy utilities to help sync data between the PC and the U3 drive. Many of the programs are either free or available for a nominal fee. There are over 70 applications available, with more becoming available all the time.

A common question people ask is whether their existing flash drive can be ‘formatted’ to have U3 features. This isn’t possible because the functions are embedded in the hardware. The U3 controller chip causes the device to behave as a combination CD-ROM emulator and flash drive. The CD-ROM emulator includes an auto-launch program that takes only a small portion (~4MB) of the flash. The auto-launch program prompts the user for a password to unlock the rest of the drive (provided he has set a password). Once that part of the drive is unlocked, a small U3 icon will appear in the system tray.

Clicking on the U3 icon in the system tray brings up the U3 Launchpad, as shown below:

The left side of the launch pad shows the programs on the drive. The right side has all the management utilities for the device. U3 also allows the manufacturer to private brand the drive with logos and links to their websites. In the case of the drive shown in the above Launchpad, Geek Squad (BestBuy) is the reseller brand. Clicking on either of those GeekSquad logos takes you to Best Buy’s GeekSquad website.

Installing programs on the U3 drives is very easy. Just click on the download programs icon and select from any of dozens of the programs and they will automatically download and install themselves. There is also a way to use a U3 installer file and add it through the Add Programs menu item.

Of course, there is always some downside to new technology and a review wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention them. First of all, if you lock the device with a password, you can’t use it to move data to non-Windows platforms such as Mac or Linux computers. In addition, the programs installed on a U3 drive will only execute on a Windows PC, so the people who use Mac and Linux computers can’t take advantage of its most salient feature, i.e., executing programs directly from the flash drive. A customer can use it to share data with non-Windows systems, provided they unlock it first.

If you forget the password, there’s no way to retrieve the data (although it can provide a password hint). This security feature also means that if you were to lose the device, there are no worries about having any personal data stolen.

Currently, the largest U3 device available is 2GB, but this will continue to grow as flash drives get larger. Until flash drives got to be around 512 MB, a U3 smart drive wouldn’t have been a practical solution because of the space needed to hold applications. However, as flash drives continue to grow, its value becomes more and more compelling. The Office-like suites can take up about 200 MB each, but most of the other programs that run on these drives are only a few MB and take up only a small percentage of its capacity. It probably wouldn’t work well for very large applications like Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator but it will hold data from those applications, so if they are already installed on a PC, then the U3 smart drive can work with them and move data between computers like a conventional flash drive.

After using the device for a few weeks, I really appreciate the value in it. For the first time ever, my bookmarks on Firefox and IE on 4 separate computers are completely synchronized. I’ve gotten to experiment with some new MS Office-like alternatives, and the small size of the flash drive sets a new bar for portability. I’m also impressed with the RoboForm password manager that automatically recalls and fills in passwords on any website that requires them. At first, I was reluctant to commit sensitive data like passwords to anything other than my memory, but after using it for a while, and realizing that the passwords are encrypted and double password protected, I’m really enjoying the convenience of having them all entered automatically. It’s one of those applications which, once you’ve started using it, is hard to give up.

It’s impossible to predict the future, so there’s no way to know whether you’re reading about at an interesting curiosity, or “The Next Big Thing.” I’ve long contemplated a time where instead of lugging around a laptop computer, I could just securely connect with my data and programs on a shared PC with a real keyboard, mouse, and display. To a certain extent, the Internet has allowed some of this to occur, but it has security, availability, and performance issues that may never be completely resolved. To insure security and performance, a physical storage device along with a password will likely be required into the foreseeable future. The U3 device is well positioned to deliver these essential features.