Guy Kawasaki’s “Art of the Start†talk says that you need a mantra not a mission statement for a company. Here is my cut at it:
Helping you save the world without sacrificing your family.
What do you think?
Yesterday, I was at AspirationTech’s 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit and met a few interesting people.
Including one from Sunlight Foundation. Sunlight Foundation has a few interesting mash-ups. First, they have the EarMarks mashup which puts all the “earmarks” from a recent bill on a Google Map. But more interestingly they also have the PopupPolitician which gives information about a Senator or Representative’s voting record maintained by the Washington Post.
Buildcap is focusing on the non-profit space. This results in reading a bunch of blogs about non-profits, including this one about passion:
We need passion for the cause, passion for delivering real benefits to stakeholders.
Charity employees (and volunteers) need to be outward-looking, rather than inward-looking.
This is so true. We are currently searching for people who are passionate about saving the world or working with non-profits. This is our target market. To have someone onboard who is not passionate about making a difference is a complete waste. They are going to be a deadweight around our necks.
I don’t need them to be passionate about the company, I need for them to be passionate about saving the world. That passion will be aligned with our customers’ passions, our customers will see that and it will help BuildCap be successful as a wonderful side-effect.
We have had to pass on a number of qualified people simple because the passion was not there.
The backing blog entry is this
I don’t know either! But fortunately I found this great post.
I am starting a company, BuildCap. BuildCap’s target market includes groups like the Transportation and Land Use Coalition.
TALC staff, like others, in the non-profit space do field work away from computers, but they still need to interact with the BuildCap software. So this leads to a mandatory phone browser support requirement. As a result, I am doing preliminary research on being able to support phone browsers.
I am using a Samsung A900M phone, which is actually a fairly nice phone, but one that only cost me $40+tax and a 2-year contract with Sprint just before Christmas 2006.
Some notable stats:
Some of the info about the web browser on this phone:
This phone is a reasonably high-end phone but still arguably affordable. If this phone doesn’t support something then, it is unlikely that any other phone equivalent or lower in price would either. As a result, this is a good first phone to demo with.
So what did I find so far?
Gothas so far:
Using link <a> with the href attribute containing javascript
This doesn’t work at all in the browser. It complains that it needs a handler for this type and dies. This is probably the quickest way to break a site from the perspective of the phone. Tapestry’s LinkSubmit is guilty of this behavior. Since proper css can make a regular submit button look like a link, a proper <input type="submit"> is probably best. For BuildCap, I am going to set up a checkstyle rule that flags uses of LinkSubmit as an error.
Requiring the user to press “enter” key.
This is the second quickest way to break the site. There is no way that a phone browser user can generate the enter key! So if an action needs to be performed, an submit or link must be available.
Redirects
The browser asks for confirmation on every redirect. So multiple redirects are painful, especially redirects that result from security checks. I would suggest designing code to chain code so that all the things that can trigger a redirect vote for a redirect that is only actually executed by a single piece of code.
Dojo seems to have some issues
Still working on this, but dojo seems to not work well on the browser, even though the browser allegedly supports Ecmascript. For example date/timepickers are not working at all. They are not creating their input fields, yet the browser claims there are no “scriptng” (sic) errors. More research is needed.
Color selection limited
Considering how many colors the phone itself can support, this surprised me. The browser looks like it only supports these colors for text:
That’s all for now. More to come!
update According to this from Alex of dojo, Obingo’s browser “will be poorly supported”, because(?) “No way to easily get emulator”. Again more research is needed.
Yeah! We are going into early alpha for the new buildcap.com for non-profits and political organizations. More news later. (right now the alpha site is a little secret 
)
or “don’t you read the news”?
Sorry I don’t have much sympathy, Julie
Former Wal-Mart executive Julie Roehm’s personal e-mails has become a central piece of evidence in her vicious legal battle with the retail behemoth.
After Wal-Mart fired the 36-year-old advertising chief in December, she sued the company, claiming that it refused to pay her severance and failed to return personal belongings that she had left behind in her old office.
Last week Wal-Mart got its revenge, going public with allegations that Roehm romanced a subordinate, which violates company policy. The company started investigating her relationship with Vice President Sean Womack after one of Roehm’s staffers complained about it, said a spokeswoman for the company.
Wal-Mart’s evidence included a personal e-mail between the two co-workers that Roehm claims was exchanged outside of the company’s e-mail servers. In general, e-mails exchanged over office computers are considered company property, but those sent through employees’ personal computers are deemed private.
So, how did Wal-Mart get its hands on the incriminating message?
Womack’s estranged wife reportedly gave it to the retailer last week, after one of the company’s lawyers contacted her.
And what prompted the wife, Shelley Womack, to hand over the e-mail? The Wal-Mart attorney apparently made small talk with her about how they both attend services at the same church and mentioned that her husband still hadn’t received a $200,000 bonus, according to New York magazine.
Freaking $200,000! I wonder how much of it was earned by screwing these 2,000,000 women:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The biggest sexual discrimination case in U.S. history advanced against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Tuesday when a top court ruled that more than a million women could join a suit charging bias in pay and promotions.
The plaintiffs estimate they could win billions of dollars in lost pay and damages and that as many as two million women who have worked for Wal-Mart in its U.S. stores since 1998 could join a class-action lawsuit.
“It is time for Wal-Mart to face the music,” Brad Seligman, a lawyer for The Impact Fund, a nonprofit group in Berkeley, California representing the female plaintiffs, told reporters.
Maybe Julie should help Wakeup Walmart!
More countries ignoring the silly backwater U.S.:
If you’re a world traveler, you’ve probably already heard about the LGV Perpignan-Figueras, a new high speed rail line, currently under construction, which will connect the French and Spanish rail systems. Work began on the 44 km passenger/freight line in late 2004 and it is expected to be completed in 2009. Once completed, it will interconnect with two other yet-to-be-completed high speed rail lines, the Barcelona-Figueras and Montpellier-Perpignan lines, thus integrating it with the Southwest Europe High-Speed Train Axis (and completing much of the trans-European transport network initiative promoted by the European Union). As a result of this new rail line, travelers will be able to get from Paris to Barcelona in 5 hours, 35 minutes, and from Perpignan to Madrid in 3 hours, 50 minutes – a significant reduction in travel time.
From the Hong Kong Standard
I called up Linda Arrigo, a local activist and member of Taiwan’s Green Party. I wanted an environmentalist’s take on the HSR’s impact on Taiwan. After all, anything that offers an alternative to driving has to be endorsed by Greenies, at least so I assumed.
But Arrigo told me that Taiwanese environmentalists were less enthusiastic about the train than I’d expected.
“Anytime you concrete over open space you get a negative environmental effect,” she said. “Animal migration is hindered and groundwater systems are disrupted. Personally, I don’t think environmental concerns were a priority in the building of the HSR.”
Surprisingly, Arrigo said the most negative impact of the HSR would be not to the environment, but to the socio- economic structure of the towns the train passed through. “Essentially, what you have with the HSR is a series of airports in areas that until recently were zoned for agricultural use. These areas are already magnets for heavy business and residential development. Though much has been written about how the HSR is based on the Japanese model, in Japan the lines
were built through urban centers. The Taiwan HSR bypasses them.”Back at home, a quick glance at Google Earth showed that Arrigo was correct, at least as far as geography and population density is concerned.
The HSR track - straight in most sections - stands in sharp contrast to the smooth noodle map of Taiwan’s road system. Whereas the highways generally follow the curvature of the coast, jutting in and out of city centers, the HSR line carves a path from Banciao (on the outskirts of Taipei) to Zouying (on the outskirts of Kaoushiung) without actually passing through any major cities.
Sure enough, I discovered the next day that station names along the HSR are a bit misleading. Hsinchu’s station turned out to be in Jhubei (”North Hsinchu”), 15 minutes by taxi from the city center. And Taichung’s station was again as far from the actual city itself, in a small hamlet called Wurih. At every station along the line, the story was the same - big-city satellites in the early stages of massive development. While the HSR promises to bring prosperity and development throughout Taiwan’s west coast, it’s probable that all the trappings - traffic and urban sprawl, to name a few - will follow.
But surely a little urban sprawl, not to mention the US$15 billion (HK$117 billion) estimated price tag of the project so far, is fair trade for the speed of travel that the HSR brings to Taiwan? The answer dependends on how much one likes rice paddies versus how fast one wishes to travel.
Less subjective is the matter of speed itself. While it’s fun to throw around numbers such as “287 km/h,” the hair- raising speed the train reaches on the flat-out 28-minute burn between Hsinchu and Taichung, can the speed of the Taiwan HSR be put in easier to grasp terms?
<< more fluff >>
This segues into the most important question of all: is Taiwan’s bullet train safe? There’s something about moving so fast while still attached to the ground that gives some people the willies. Paul, a photographer friend of mine living in Taichung, says he’s dubious, and it’s more than just gut feeling.
“I’ve seen the inspectors coming by and checking out the loose rock that’s slid out from the track bed,” he tells me as we drive around the railway looking for a good place to get a shot of passing trains. “That sort of thing scares the hell out of me. If it goes five years without having a major accident, then I’ll consider taking it. Until then, I’m fine with the slow train.”
High-speed rail systems in general have a far lower rate of derailment incidents than normal trains. The problem is that when an accident does occur the results are disastrous.
On June 3, 1998, a high speed train en-route from Munich to Hamburg derailed in Lower Saxony and the results were horrific. One derailed carriage slammed into the concrete piling supporting an overhead bridge, obliterating it and causing the bridge to collapse. Of the 287 passengers onboard the ill-fated train, 101 were killed and 88 were severely injured.
For comparison’s sake, two-thirds of the 97 passengers on the iconic Hindenburg not only survived, but escaped with relatively minor injuries. Had the train not been at less than 50 percent passenger capacity, fatalities would have been far worse. Had the accident occurred just two minutes earlier, before the train bound for Munich had already passed, the results might well have been unthinkable.
Rather than mull over such grim statistics, consider instead that Japan’s Shinkansen, the world’s best-known bullet train and on which Taiwan’s HSR is based, boasts a near-impeccable safety record. In operation since 1964, the Shinkansen has recorded only one derailment, caused by an earthquake in 2004 and resulting in no fatalities. There have been bullet train-related deaths in Japan, but except for one (some poor soul whose arm became caught in a door), all were the result of people jumping in front of, or off, speeding trains. You can’t blame fatalities such as those on poor design.
So this from the east…. notice not a word about how Americans love their cars so much that they would never get out to take a train… especially a train that easily beats the car!
Published Tuesday, September 12, 2006, by PA Office of the Governor
Governor Rendell, Amtrak Announce $145 Million Upgrade of Keystone Passenger Rail Service
90-minute, 110 mph Express Starts Oct. 30
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Governor Edward G. Rendell today joined with Amtrak in announcing the completion of a $145 million upgrade of the Keystone Corridor that will bring 110 mph service to the Philadelphia-to-Harrisburg passenger rail line.
The enhanced service, which begins Oct. 30, will feature 90-minute express trains between Harrisburg, Lancaster and Philadelphia, a 30-minute improvement over the current two-hour trip. Local service will also improve to 105 minutes between Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Amtrak is adding three Monday-through- Friday roundtrips and one on Saturday and Sunday to the lineup of 67 roundtrips.
“Throughout the past three-and-a-half years, we have made investments to significantly improve Pennsylvania’s transportation system,” Governor Rendell said. “A quality transportation system is essential for economic development and growth as well as improving the quality of life for our residents. Upgrading the Keystone Corridor is an example of the positive investments we are making.”
“Given the right service frequencies and equipment, this route easily draws a million riders a year,” Governor Rendell said. “This faster service should attract even more riders and marks a significant step forward for rail transportation in Pennsylvania.”
“How we use transportation will be crucial to addressing how we manage fuel consumption in an era of rising prices and uncertain supply sources,” Governor Rendell added. “Our experience with the Keystone Corridor in Pennsylvania shows that passenger rail is far from being relegated to our museums. Passenger rail is viable and can help America work towards energy independence.”
The 104-mile Keystone Corridor is one of Amtrak’s most popular routes.
“Over the past several years, more and more Pennsylvanians have chosen to take Amtrak when traveling across the state. Just last year we saw a 14- percent increase in ridership on our trains along the Keystone Corridor,” said David M. Laney, Amtrak chairman. “To respond to this demand, Amtrak and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania worked together to develop a partnership to improve rail service at the local level. This new service will provide much-needed additional rail service between Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New York.”
Completion of the upgrade, which included new rail, track bed, signals and rebuilt rail cars, caps a long effort by the commonwealth and Amtrak on the corridor. Governor Rendell and Amtrak announced in July 2004 an amended agreement that expedited the project. Funding was split among the commonwealth, Amtrak and the Federal Transit Administration. The upgrade also marks a return of all electric service to the line. The 110-mph service will be the fastest outside Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
Among the upgrades being added to the corridor:
* Push-pull electric train sets, which will eliminate the need to turn the train around in Harrisburg or switch engines in Philadelphia.
* Installation of approximately 200 miles of continuous welded rail, which provides for a smoother ride.
* Installation of 216,000 concrete ties, 48,000 wooden ties and 52 new switches.
* Upgrading of signal and electrification systems, including two dozen signal instrument houses.
This is the first upgrade of these systems in 70 years on the line, which once was part of the Pennsylvania Railroad and has had passenger trains running on it since 1834.