Tools I Use: to test bandwidth

June 20, 2016January 14, 2021Leave a comment

I work remotely quite often and I am traveling away from home up to 90 days per year.

Whenever I am in a new work environment, whether it is a client’s office, a co-working space, a coffee shop or wherever, I test the internet speeds to see what is available. This is better than assuming speeds before I start working.

http://speedtest.net is a free online service that measures the bandwidth (speed) and latency (time delay) of your internet connection.

Using this site is a good practice before using any hardline connection or wifi. This is especially good before a video conference call or uploading some new audio podcast files since both could be taxing on the internet bandwidth available as well as anyone’s level of patience.

Remember the speeds slower than 56k? I do. I also remember transferring digital photos for print publications back to the office on a daily basis via 56k. Not fun. Luckily, those days are over.

I recently went to a co-working space only to find 8 Mbps for upload and download speeds. That sounds reasonable until we factored in all the people who needed to do different video conferencing sessions where a clear video feed was critical to seeing the human-computer interactions (UX) being measured during the interviews.

Most video conferencing I have seen are more talking heads just like newscasts, which provides little to no value and suck up bandwidth for no reason. Unless there is a slide deck to be shared/presented, I commonly shut off the video camera and use ‘audio only’ to get clearer audio, where the value comes from anyhow. I don’t need to see someone to understand them. If they have a thick accent, it is actually easier to understand them by closing your eyes and focus on what is said. Try it and hear it yourself.

Questions?

Running Startup Sprints

June 3, 2016March 7, 20201 Comment

Disclosure: Links to other sites may be affiliate links that generate us a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Just to be clear, I don’t run. These Sprints has nothing to do with physically running.

After reading the book called Sprint, this inspired me to try Sprint with a few startups.

As a mentor, I already help a number of startups so as an extension to this, Startups Ignite organized Sprints for a few startups with a small team of people with different perspectives to play the different roles the startups did already not have. Startups Ignite supplied the facilitators, myself being one of them.

What is a Sprint?

According to GV, “The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.”

Running Sprints

This 5 day Sprint process should be a great learning experience for everyone. More Sprints may be scheduled again.

I am running a 5-day startup Sprint (over two weekends 6/3 to 6/5 and 6/11 to 6/12) for 4 startups at a co-working space. Not just myself, of course, but with 20 other engaged individuals.

Learn more about the Sprint process

I encourage anyone interested to read the book/ebook, listen to the audiobook and watch the videos of how to run a Sprint.

Let me know if you are interested in hearing more about it aside from the book.

I will add lessons learned once we have completed the four Sprints.

Questions?

Tools I Use: Scheduling

May 23, 2016July 11, 20231 Comment

Disclosure: Links to other sites may be affiliate links that generate us a small commission at no extra cost to you.

I have saved so much time scheduling calls or meetings because of no back-and-forth using assistant.to

It is simple to use with Gmail along with Google Calendar. And it is free to use.

If you don’t want to be limited to just Gmail nor picking times yourself that would work for you in the future, I have saved even more time by allowing people to schedule time with me based on my calendar availability for Zoom.us calls using calendly.com.

The combination of Zoom for calls and calendly.com save countless hours each week.

Yes, if you really want to discuss something productive for 15 minutes with me, schedule the time here and you will see what I mean.

If I need to schedule a group of people (3+) together for a virtual group meeting days or weeks in advance and want to offer a few choices in dates and times, I use zvite.co, which is free to use.

There are some other appointment scheduling apps available if you prefer to do your own research.

Questions?

Launching Rights.tech

May 9, 2016March 7, 2020Leave a comment

Disclosure: Links to other sites may be affiliate links that generate us a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Since no one else has done this to my knowledge, I thought it would be interesting to launch a series of audio interviews with professionals talking about Rights Management. It is called Rights.tech

Questions like “What is copyright?” and “How to register copyright?” has already been done by others. I am not interested in repeating it because that broken record has little success of audience engagement. The size of that issue is mentioned in several interviews. I was more interested in sharing the perspectives of professionals on the status of this market.

I reached out to the top professionals in the field of Rights Management globally about what they thought about the market.

Here are the 5 questions I asked everyone interviewed:

Who are you and what do you do?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with Rights Management?
What is changing with Rights Management or needs to change?
What advice would you like to share with people interested in Rights Management?
Where can we find more information about Rights Management?

A few declined to be interviewed, but most welcomed it because this is an underserved market (IP and content licensing not so sexy) and it is complicated. I like niche markets for this reason.

Starting in May 2o16, Rights.tech will have new interviews throughout the summer with standards bodies, vendors, licensees, licensors, consultants, create creators and associations with interests in Rights Management.

I reached out to a few conferences about this, but since I am leveling the playing field and I am one of the few consultants not in the pocket of any vendors (yes, I remain vendor-neutral), do not expect to me to be headlining anywhere on the conference circuit. That is what consultants call ‘partnering’ or ‘preferred’ solution providers. I don’t prefer nor partner with any vendors because I am a vendor-neutral consultant.

How do I remain vendor-neutral and interview Rights Management vendors at the same time?

No sales pitches allowed in the interviews. No money exchanged either way. Release all the vendor interviews on the same day. Everyone is interviewed based on who they are and what they do, however not who they work for. No favoritism. I bet most people did not know there were this many Rights Management vendors on the market today. There are others, but they declined to be interviewed.

Same with the standards bodies. There are too many of them. Not all were keen to be interviewed. Sadly, some were just too disorganized to be interviewed.

To listen to this series about Rights Management, visit Rights.tech

Questions?