I was telling my wife how I gave a free copy of my book to someone and this 6-year-old boy (my son, Anim) butts in and says how it’s not a business if you give things away for free.

I say “hold that thought” and we set up this little video lesson.

It’s such a basic principle of business, but people (especially in the web-app world) give away too much stuff for free. He’s a smart little dude. Makin’ his daddy proud :)

More Videos By Anim

» Anim Performs In The Park
» 5-Year-Old Designs an iPhone App
» Working From Home Again
» Giant Bubbles!
» My Little DJ
» The Mysterious Noise – 2 years old!

Apps Featuring Anim

» DJ Baby iPhone App – Voiceover
» ShareCam iPhone App – Appearance In Promo Video

He’s 5 and he wrote me this message:

It also looks like he drained the battery playing Angry Birds :)

Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how I created the ShareCam iPhone icon.

Paper Sketch

I believe that all good design starts with a sketch and since I haven’t designed many iPhone icons, I thought I’d try the same approach.

Vector Illustration

Here’s where the crude sketch is turned into more formal shapes. It’s supposed to be the fingers and thumb of somebody holding an iPhone :)

Color Fill

The shapes are starting to feel like something real. This is where I truly started to get excited for the end result.

Final Icon

Final treatment with some additional sprinkles. Here is where I spent most of the effort, this is probably the 3rd or 4th iteration. This icon looks and feels good when alongside its peers on the home screen.

See It In Action!

We’re launching the ShareCam app this holiday season. Be the first to know by subscribing to our launch notification.

I started working on my first startup, YikeSite, in 2006 when my son was 1 years old.

At the time there was pretty much nobody talking about running a start-up while nurturing a young family. Over the last couple of years some of the weblebrities in our industry are starting to have kids of their own (or at least are mentioning them more). People are increasingly talking about family at conferences, podcasts and blogs and it’s a really great thing for people like myself to finally see more of.

And that’s why my ears perked up when I came across a Hacker News post asking the HN community how a baby changes your life.

After sifting through several dozen comments I noticed that a lot of people were sharing how many kids they had and some even mentioned if they had boys or girls.

This totally intrigued me because it’s nice to see other entrepreneurs in the same boat as me with a lot of the same challenges and motivations. So as an experiment I crudely started tallying up the counts in the comments and created the infographic below.

It’s by no means definitive data (or a big enough sample size) but I just had to put something together to share with other Hacker News parents out there in hopes to encourage more people to share their experiences running startups/side-projects and managing family life. I have created a survey to send out to the HN community and see if I can get better data.

At 1 and 5, my two boys are the most original and promising “Little Startups” I’ll ever have :) I hope you get value from this infographic.

View Large (156kb PNG) | Download PDF (295kb PDF)

My Dad once told me that at a job interview you should interview them just as much as they interview you. I think that’s a sound piece of advice and it’s something that I have been able to apply to my consulting business when looking at new projects.

My Criteria For Choosing Projects

When choosing projects at Animikii, I generally think about the following things when looking for new projects and client work. In no particular order:

Personal Connection

Answers The Question: Do I connect on a personal level to the goals of this project?

When a project directly impacts your personal life then you will take ownership over the success of it. Does this project relate to your personal interests or your community? Adding your passion to the mix ensures a certain amount of dedication that your client will pick up on and appreciate.

Professional Development

Answers The Question: Am I going to learn things that will help me in future projects?

There’s no sense doing anything unless you are going to get a good learning experience out of it. This may mean doing something that you’ve never done before or improving upon skills that you’ve been building as a strategic advantage.

The Client

Answers The Question: Do I like the person I will be working with?

This is what one of my mentors would call rule number one of working with people. In his words “don’t work with assholes” — or perhaps in my words “only work with people you like”.

Making A Difference

Answers The Question: Will completing this project make the world a better place or improve the life of people I care about?

I have always been lucky in this regard and have been able to take on work that not only impacts me personally and/or my community but also improves the lives of others.

Time

Answers The Question: Do I have enough time for this project?

And not only do I have enough time, but will it take time away from already existing projects, my business or most importantly: my family!

Money

Answers The Question: Can I take this project on and pay my bills next month?

I’m running a business and I need to include money as an important deciding factor for choosing work. I can’t forget that I am in fact running a business here. At the most basic level, a business means ensuring that at the end of the day more money came in the door than went out. There’s no shame in doing great work, working with great people, making the world better place AND getting paid while doing it.

High Scoring Projects Win!

In taking into account all of these principles when evaluating whether or not a project is worthwhile, if a project scores well in each category then it’s going to be very hard for me to say no.

How Do You Choose Projects?

I should note that this whole blog post was inspired from several discussions I’ve had with my good friend Jo Hund at ClearCove on this very topic. Luckily we have a lot of the same criteria which makes it easy for us to work together on so many projects but I’m always curious to know how other consultants choose their clients and projects. Please post your thoughts in the comments below.

Here is a timelapse video of a graphic facilitation session I did with Susan Low from pictureyourmeeting.com. We talked about the YikeSite Reseller Program and the upcoming revamp of the messaging/positioning for the YikeSite marketing site.

I’ve been into rock carving for years but recently I’ve picked it back up again. It’s a good creative outlet that is physical and provides a good venue to get some thinking done.

I am very excited to announce that I have received a National Aboriginal Role Model award from the National Aboriginal Health Organization.

I am looking forward to visiting communities across Canada throughout 2009/10 with the role model program where I hope to inspire youth to get into business & technology.

About The Role Model Program

“Each year, 12 Aboriginal role models are nominated by their peers. They are selected for their achievements, leadership, and innovation. Throughout the year, the role models will attend celebrations, school functions, workshops, and conferences to share their stories with other Aboriginal youth.”

Video From The Awards Night

Writing down and recognizing your gifts is just as important as writing down your goals. Goals can change over time and so can your gifts but what successful individuals have in common is that they focus on their gifts and not their faults. They focus on their assets, but not their deficits.

Successful companies and communities become so by connecting individual gifts that weren’t connected before.

Recently I’ve been asking people about their gifts have been humbled by some of the responses:

• “I’m a good listener.”
• “I’m a good singer.”
• “I’m good at dealing with different types of people.”
• “I’m a good public speaker.”
• “I’m good at baking.”
• “I’m good at selling things.”
• “I’m good at sports.”
• “I’m good at working with youth.”

How many people would I have to ask before hearing the same gift twice?

My Gifts

The first one is a new one I just discovered about myself and the second one I’ve survived off of for quite some time.

• I like to connect people’s gifts together.
• I’m good at figuring stuff out if I don’t know it.

I’m going to try harder to focus on my gifts and not my faults.

What Are Your Gifts?

If you are inspired, please share your gifts with me by adding a comment. I really really want to know! If you’re feeling modest just ask your friends and family what you’re good at and go from there.

In Canada, we have a few mobile phone companies and only one of them uses GSM technology. For us iPhone lovers, our only choice was to go with Rogers.

This morning, news of a joint effort by Bell and Telus was announced and we learned that they will be working to offer 4G GSM technologies as early as 2010.

A shared network will mean that they can extend each other’s national coverage and compete heavily with Rogers. For the tech-savvy rural business travellers that I know, all hopes have been lost to use an iPhone since Rogers’ GSM network is not available in all areas.

Competition is a good thing and we seriously need this from mobile providers in Canada. I think this is a great move for mobile in Canada and is very exciting for me as a web developer to know that we can build some great things on these faster networks (and reach more people).

“How can I find time to…?”
“If I could just find some time to…?”
“Could you find time to…?”

Expressions like these are commonplace in today’s busy world. The frustrating part is not the actual “doing” of the thing you’re supposed to be finding time for, it’s the actual act of… finding the time!

I’ve been playing with a little life hack that I like to call: Recognizing and Maximizing “Found Time” (or RAMFT™).

So what is “Found Time”?

Found Time™ can be recognized in the moments where we realize that we’ve just saved a bunch of time.

Examples where small amounts of time can be found:

1. You’re standing in line at the grocery store and the customer in front of you pulls out a huge wallet of pennies. Another till magically opens up and you’re spared at least 5 minutes of counting and recounting change.
2. You’re on a conference call and it gets cut short by 20 minutes because the client had a bad tuna fish sandwich and needed to go.
3. You’re in stop-and-go traffic and at the last second you see a shortcut which saves you at least 10 minutes.

Total Found Time: 35 minutes
(Go clean the bathroom!)

Examples where larger amounts of time can be found:

1. You’re given an hour to research something on the interwebs and your mate taps you on the shoulder to give you the exact answer you were looking for.
2. Kid goes to bed a couple of hours early
   (Hey, I wrote this blog post didn’t I?).
3. You’ve writing a contract and then discover that you can reuse a previous contract and change the names around. Possible savings of up to 6 hours!

Total Found Time: 9 Hours
(Add a new feature to your web-app!)

Maybe not the best examples, but you get the idea (I hope?).

Templates, systems and other productivity tricks can help maximize the opportunities for Found Time™.

What works for you?

Congrats to our friends at AbeBooks! Getting acquired by Amazon ups the ante for start-ups in Victoria and shines the spotlight (at least for a little bit) on where I call home, Vancouver Island. The tech scene in the last couple of years here has seen quite a few new startups and while some have moved away across the puddle, AbeBooks is staying in Victoria. A major win for Victoria and the startup scene here.

Looking to start a company in Victoria? Read ViaTec’s article, Why Vancouver Island.

It seems that I keep refining my interface design process for each new project that I work on.

In this article I’d like to share with you my process of designing a user interface from sketch through to the implemented design for Apricado Music.

Apricado is a service for independent musicians to sell their music online as a digital download.

Step 1 – Start with a sketch.

Reasons to start with a sketch:

• A sketchbook is a little more portable than a macbook and doesn’t run out of batteries.
• It’s perfect for getting ideas down, quickly.
• You can do 10 versions on paper, scrap (recycle) 9 of them and not feel that you just waisted a bunch of time.

Step 2 – Wireframes & Copywriting

By “wireframes”, I mean using a tool such as OmniGraffle or Visio (but really, go with OmniGraffle) to be able to rapidly set up chunks of information on the screen. The idea is to not worry about design details too much but to worry more about the flow of the screen. Position on the screen is important, aesthetics are not. Words and copywriting are crucial for me at this point but some may argue that even this is too much detail.

The process of moving ideas from sketch into wireframes gets my head into a different space. I love this phase because you start to get a glimpse of where the interface is going by using words and layout together to define the user experience.

Step 3 – Design Mockup

When you get into “design mode”, it’s nice to not have to worry about business logic or mocking up a design with Lorem ipsum text because all of that thinking has been done by the wireframing step. Now is the time to think about branding, color, gradients and rounded corners :)

Some feel that you should skip directly to HTML/CSS and sometimes you need to do that but I still love me a good Photoshop session from time to time. As long as you know what can and can’t be done in code and your inner designer can live with the web version not looking exactly like the mock-up version, you’ll do just great.

Step 4 – Ta-da!

It’s simple. Take your design, slice it up and glue it back together in HTML and CSS.

It’s really hard to mockup web-based text so this is where you get to bust out your sweet CSS skills on the text formatting front.

In each phase there is always room for improvement and this step is no exception. In the designs below you’ll notice certain last minute iterations that made all the difference.

The Apricado Signup Form

Sketch

Last year, I attended the Future of Web Apps in London and I spent a good few hours on my flight from Vancouver sketching out a user interface for a new project that would be later called “Apricado Music”. I had been thinking about this app for quite some time and now it was time to put pen to paper.

I really wanted to make setting up a store as easy as possible so that more indie musicians can start selling their music with little effort. I knew that this would be one of the biggest challenges so I started here.

The goal of the site is to get a musician’s music into a store so I decided to make this a priority in the signup process itself. After the song is uploaded – boom – it’s in the store and for sale. But what about all of the song information such as the song name and artist name? That would surely need to be included in the form. I started to wonder what is the least amount of information we needed to sign up a use.

Wireframe

As I mentioned before, I like to write all of the copy in my wireframes. This phase is all about information flow with little emphasis on design so this is the best time to think about words.

I also got thinking about how we can remove barriers for an artist to sign up. We know that iTunes and other music software use metadata to store things like artist name, album and song name so why not just pull that information out of an uploaded song file and make our best guess at pre-configuring their store? This brings the signup form to two fields: an email address and a file picker.

Design Mockup

I handed a friend of mine the wireframe and asked him to get is creative on. This enabled him to be free of making business decisions while also trying to make it look good. Andy kicked it up about 20 notches and presented the following photoshop mockup. I love this step because this is when it starts to look like a real web-app.

You’ll also notice that along the way we dropped the “Jam” and just went with “Apricado”.

In HTML and CSS

With each step provides an opportunity to iterate and improve on the design. Can you compare this to the mockup and spot the differences?

Artist’s Store

The other key piece of this is the checkout process. We really want to minimize barriers for people to be able to support the indie artists they love. I didn’t want to have the fan sign up for an account or go through a lengthly checkout process. By using smart user interface design with some Ajax tricks, we could keep the entire checkout process to one or two pages maximum.

Sketch

This is the first attempt at the public facing store that an artist would have their songs up for sale on – a single page shopping cart with credit card form. Press the submit button and see a page where you can download your music.

Wireframe

In HTML & CSS

We could make some inferences on branding from the marketing and signup pages so we skipped the mockup step and moved directly to HTML.

Store Administration

Wireframe

Mockup

In HTML & CSS

There’s Always Something

I’m interested in the process of making things better and the journey for Apricado is just beginning. It will be interesting to look back at these images in the coming years to see where Apricado got its start.

In addition to future design iterations there will also be plenty of business decisions that might make some of these early designs moot and that is totally ok. We’ll take it step by step and respond as appropriate as required to keep it looking and working great.

Thanks for following along.

Thought I’d introduce you to my 3-year-old son Anim. He is the funniest kid I know.

Maybe I’ll try dropping the odd video here and there to see if we can make it work. This one was sure fun to make. Enjoy.

Every conference I attend I have a real hard time going outside of my personal comfort zone and actively trying to meet people. As an entrepreneur I’ve learned time and time again that the broader your network is the better it can be for business and personal growth.

I have just returned from RailsConf ’08 and for at least half of the conference I didn’t talk to anyone. Most of the people I did meet I met by accident and by the end of the conference I started to notice a pattern of how I ended up in a conversation with somebody.

Geek dating

The first thing to consider is that everybody is basically in the same boat as yourself: scared shitless to start a conversation with a random person. This is “geek dating” at its finest.

Don’t sit with friends

This one is really hard because if you travel to a conference with friends, the easier choice is to just sit together. If you just can’t be away from each other then choose places to sit where there are already other people sitting and start a conversation.

Wear a silly shirt

I noticed that most of the people I started talking to was because they had a funny shirt or a shirt representing their company. It’s an easy in to get a conversation started. If it worked for them, maybe it’ll work for me at the next conference.

Everybody is important

You never know who you’re talking to so be nice, stay interested and ask lots of questions. Not only that but this person could be anywhere in the world but they are here and spending time to talk to you. Give them the attention they deserve.

Say hi to your heroes

One reason I love conferences is that it gives us a chance to see, in person, the industry experts and leaders in our community. Most of the micro-celebrities in your industry will be happy to give advice. So just ask and you’ll be surprised.

Seize the day and make it count

You’ve spent the money to get there so you might as well make it count. Get up at an open mic and share your experiences. If you’d always dreamed about being interviewed on a popular blog or podcast, why not just ask?. This is what led to me getting interviewed on The Web 2.0 Show and the Ruby on Rails Podcast.

How do you do it?

What kind of tips/tricks do you use when conference-going? Please share.

Whuffie is a new term we’re about to hear a lot of with regards to social media, online communities and internet presence.

I believe the term was originally coined in the sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. In this story, Whuffie is a “reputation-based” currency that replaces money, is constantly being updated and is instantly viewable to anyone at any time.

A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.¹

In Tara Hunt’s upcoming book The Whuffie Factor, she relates Whuffie as the “Social Capital” in online communities. The more you’re engaged with your community, the more Social Capital you raise.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more people will interact with you, which attracts others to you as well.²

Just For Fun

The idea that one’s Social Whuffie is always changing got me thinking about how Alexa ranks the most popular sites based on traffic. This is totally ridiculous, but what if one’s Whuffie was also indexed?

Just for fun, I spent a few minutes and mocked up what an index might look like. I based this off of the Victoria Start-up Index (notice YikeSite and Apricado by the way).

Rank	+/-	Name	Whuffie
1	+21	Tara Hunt	3,454,234
2	+2	Ze Frank	3,150,001
3	-1	Kevin Rose	2,980,234
4	+2	Ryan Carson	2,001,243
5	-2	David Heinemeier Hansson	1,800,339
6	+4	Om Malik	1,632,990
7	-5	Guy Kawasaki	1,614,635
8	-7	Michael Arrington	1,424,014
9	+1	Gary Vaynerchuk	1,231,323
10	+23	Your Name Here :)	1,000,207

The Whuffie Algorithm

Examples of how you gain your Whuffie:

• For each social network you belong to: +50 (plus +1 for every “friend”)
• For every Twitter/Pownce Message: +5
• If you have a blog: Instant +500
• For every blog post: +50 ( x Number of Subscribers)
• If you host a video podcast: Instant +1,000
• For every video podcast episode: +100 ( x Number of Subscribers)
• If you have a Tumblog: Instant +300
• For every Tumblog entry: +25
• For every conference you attend: +200 (Plus bonus +5 for each #tweet)
• For every conference you speak at: +10,000
• Create a popular web framework: +750,000
• Get mentioned on Digg, TechCrunch, etc: +3,000

Examples of how you loose your Whuffie:

• Trash talk somebody: -1000
• Trash talk somebody and get called on it: -2000 (per incident)
• Create a blog post, Twitter/Pownce message or video update that offends the majority of people who see it. -3000
• Twitter about doing laundry -50

Help me add to this list, add more examples in the comments.

¹ Whuffie Wikipedia

² Tweeting for Companies Tara Hunt

People who work from home get a pretty sweet deal: Pants are optional.

When I first started working from home, I’d brag that I could sit in my underwear while taking a client call or wake up by noon and work all night. It was cool for a while but eventually got old.

I found that I’d wake up and get stuck into work right away before even grabbing something to eat let alone getting dressed. It would be 11 or 12 until I hopped in the shower, got dressed and got motivated.

After a while it just felt that the days (mornings especially) dragged on and on. I needed that shower to hit my “reset” button and go at it for another day.

Dress For Success At Home

One thing I figured out after a few years of doing this was that choosing the right clothes became very important. Instead of having a shower and throwing on a sweet tracksuit, I found that I needed to take my self seriously. For me this meant jeans and a button-up shirt – oh and doing my hair.

I now have an office outside of the home but those days I do take a “home day”, I still remember to wear pants.

Next up in the series: “Dads, Get An Office”