Sonos Play:3 Changes How I Listen To, and Enjoy, Music

Sonos New Zealand was kind enough to lend me a set of their latest Play:3 speakers to try out for a week. In short: they are absolutely incredible speakers. Here I’ll outline my experience with them and what makes them so great.

For those of you who don’t know, Sonos is famous for making the highest-quality and most user-friendly wireless speakers in the world. They speakers are sold individually, in two different models: the Play:3, the smallest and cheapest version, and the Play:5, a bigger and more grunty version. Sonos also gave me one of their “Bridges” – a little white box that you plug into your Internet modem, which then allows the speakers to be used in any room of the house without any cable connecting it to the device from which you’re playing your music. To get the most out of the Sonos speakers you really need one of the Bridges.

In terms of cost, the Play:3 costs $700 in New Zealand, with the Play:5 costing $1000. The Bridge costs $130.

So, how did I find the speakers?

They are incredible.

There are three fantastic things about them, above all else:

1. Having wireless music all around the house just makes music a heck of a lot better.
2. They were a breeze to set up and to use.
3. The sound quality is brilliant.

On that first point – having wireless music actually changed the way I listen to music. Previously, I was using a nice speaker system that I’ve had for a couple of years. It has a large bass unit which I keep on the floor, and two smaller speakers which I keep on their side of my desk. To use this system, I needed to plug them into either my iPhone or laptop. And that meant I’d only listen to music in my room, because there was no way I was going to be moving the bass unit and two smaller speakers anywhere else in the house.

With the Sonos system, I put one speaker on my desk in my room and the other in the lounge. I also downloaded the iPhone app. To plug the Bridge into my modem, and plug the two speakers into power ports took me about two minutes. Downloading the App for my iPhone and installing the Sonos application on my laptop took perhaps another two minutes. So I was playing music within four minutes after unpacking the speakers.

In my room, I’d keep some top-of-the-charts music playing most of the time. I’d just set the Spotify Top 100 list to play right through. Then in the lounge, let’s say on a nice day, I’d put on some Jack Johnson or Donavon Frankenreiter – music to lighten the mood of the whole house. This is controlled completely through the iPhone app, including volume.

It meant I could listen to music wherever I was, and be listening to the right music at the right time.

And when I had a few friends over, I’d simple connect all the “Zones” – meaning the same music would be playing on both the speakers – and pump up the volume a bit. Sonos even calls this “party mode”. It was fantastic.

The quality of the speakers was really astounding, especially for their size. The speakers that I had been using previously (and am back to using now, sadly) were comparable in price to a single Sonos speaker, only in total they were perhaps three times the size of a Sonos Play:3 when you put together the bass unit and two smaller speakers.

But the Sonos Play:3 had better quality than my old speakers. They were a third the size, ran over my wireless network, and still had better quality. I still can’t really believe it and have no idea how on earth they do it.

In saying that, I did notice quite a bit of a difference in sound quality coming from the Sonos speakers depending on how close to a wall I had them. My desk in my room where I had one of the speakers is pushed up against a wall, so the sound coming from this speaker was fantastic. But the speaker in the lounge was on a table in the middle of the room – and on this one, the sound coming out was more hollow and deep noises didn’t sound that great. So I moved this one next to a wall in the same room, and it sounded great again. Just something to be aware of in case you don’t have anywhere next to a wall to put a Play:3.

It was seriously hard to give the Play:3′s back after a week with them. Music now seems quite dull and never really seems to match the mood or place I’m in. I’m definitely going to be saving up for a set of these. And the great thing about them is that you can buy one at a time – so I might get one for my bedroom, and a Bridge, to begin with, then add another Play:3 for the lounge when I’ve saved a bit more.

Thank you, Sonos, for letting me try them. And I’m assuming you did that simply because you knew I wouldn’t be able to live without them once I’d tried them. Smart guys.

Things I Learned From Little Bets, by Peter Sims

I’ve just finished reading Peter Sim’s book Little Bets. It was a book that had been talked about quite a lot in the media and on blogs, so I thought that even when I read it I wouldn’t end up getting that much out of it. But despite that, I did learn a lot – and I thought I’d summarise some of those things here.

Firstly, making little bets is an entirely new and untraditional way of thinking. Traditionally, people think up an idea, write a master plan (business plan) and then do everything they possibly can to execute the master plan to the letter. But what happens is that very often the end result isn’t ideal, because the original idea wasn’t actually what people wanted.

But by making little bets, people start off with an idea, then build one part of that idea and see whether people like it, or what parts of it they dislike. They then make another little bet and build a bit more of their idea. Each time, they can immediately see the audience reaction to what they’ve built to see what they should do next. The end result is a product that more accurately reflects what people will actually want.

A few of you will have been thinking about “lean startup” strategies as you read the above couple of paragraphs. I was actually thinking of lean startups throughout reading the entire book. Indeed, the little bets approach is a core part of lean startup strategies.

But what Peter Sims did a great job of showing is how little bets can actually be applied to all different parts of life, and many different professions. I’m mainly talking in terms of technology companies, but Sims gave examples of comedians and architects and soldiers using little bets.

By taking little bets, your downside is very small as you’re only investing a proportion of the time (and/or money) that you would have invested if you were building a “master idea”.  So even right from the start, little bets looks like a good approach to make because if everything goes wrong, you’ll lose a lot less time and money.

However, your upside by using little bets is potentially even larger than if you were executing on a “master plan”. That’s because there is a much greater likelihood of your idea eventually succeeding because you’re building something based on what your customers show you they want.

I couldn’t understand throughout the book why people ever used traditional innovation approaches (what I’m calling the “master plan” approach). However, as Sims explains, it is a result of the industrial revolution, where people created set procedures and acted on plans in factories. In some scenarios, it makes more sense to have a master plan. But in most cases these days, little bets are the way to go.

Another part of the book that I found really interesting was a chapter on having a “worm’s eye view”. Sims uses the example of Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank to show the importance of this. The Grameen Bank makes micro-loans to people living in poverty.

Yunus was an economist who was frustrated at how many parts of the world were living in poverty. He decided to try and see why so many people lived in poverty. He spent months going to small rural towns and meeting with people, and talking to them, in order to discover why they couldn’t get out of poverty. He eventually worked out that people who ran small businesses to support their families were controlled by money lenders – who would take the majority of their profits each day. And yet these people couldn’t do anything about it, because without those loans they couldn’t survive each day.

By getting out of his office, and actually going to meet with the people he was researching, he discovered one of the key reasons that people in his area couldn’t get out of poverty. As a result, he started the Grameen Bank, which now makes millions of dollars in micro loans to people so that they don’t have to use a form of loan-shark.

I found this a really valuable lesson as I think too many of us these days think we can get everything we ever need to know right from our desk. It pays to get out and look at things up close.

Little Bets was a fantastic book. I learned so much and have found myself thinking differently about innovation and different areas of life. Completely recommend it.

GoVocab Is The Best Way To Learn a Language (With Evidence)

Since the beginning of this year, my Spanish class in school has been using GoVocab as a way of learning all the vocabulary we need. I hadn’t ever heard of GoVocab before, and my teacher signed us all up to the service (we were charged after our 1 term free trial).

In all honesty, for the first term I thought GoVocab was a bit of a joke. It had a lot of bugs, the UI wasn’t very clean, and the lists of vocab were very limited. However my teacher liked it and wanted us to keep using it for homework, so we were required to pay for it.

Over the past term, GoVocab has been adding so many features and improving the site so much that I can say it is by far the best way I have ever learned a language. The only thing that beats it is actually being in a foreign-language-speaking country. I’m incredibly grateful to my teacher for keeping us using it, and I can’t quite believe how much progress my vocabulary is making.

The UI is now beautiful, simple, and intuitive. You can choose which way you want to learn your vocab – multi choice, by sounds, “mix and match”, a quiz, or a new multiplayer mode. It’s social and fully integrated with Facebook to add a competition element with the scores (plus there are badges and trophies). The lists of words are growing rapidly. There is a whole statistics page where you can track your progress.

Seriously, I can’t think of a better way to be learning vocabulary.

GoVocab’s tagline is “Language without the boring bits”. They fully achieve that.

And my class’ scores in a recent vocab test are testament to just how well GoVocab works. We did the test, marked our answers, and then our teacher brought up the “Teacher Dashboard” of GoVocab on her computer. She then showed us the view of the class that she had, which showed in order the people who had done the most on GoVocab during the week down to the people who had done zero work on GoVocab.

Our test scores completely matched the amount of work we had done on GoVocab. The guy who had done the most got 100%. People who had done a little bit on it got somewhere between say 50-80%. And the guys who had done no work were lucky to get a few marks right. Seriously, GoVocab works.

I just thought I’d post this to let other students and teachers know about GoVocab. I love telling people about new web products that I adore, and this is one of them. Completely recommend you give it a try. And if you sign-up, you get a free term to try it out, so there’s really no reason not to!

Also, they’re on iPhone and are adding different platforms often. You can study multiple languages with them, and the team are awesome so you can always email them if you’re having problems.

There’s heaps of websites to learn languages on. And most people would just look at the area and say “that’s been done, I won’t go there”. But the GoVocab guys just said “It’s not being done well enough. It’s still boring”, and came up with a better solution. I love that.

Five Icons Are The Most Important Change Facebook Has Ever Made

Obviously I’ve been watching the past few days in Facebook news with interest. The updates to the news feed and “ticker” I quite frankly did not find that interesting. They’re not big changes and they’re not going to affect Facebook or its users much in any way.

There is one thing that I did find interesting, however. And it’s going to affect all of Facebook’s users, likely forever. If we all start using this feature, we’re going to be using Facebook forever. Forever. We’ll be completely and utterly locked in and won’t be able to go anywhere else.

It’s an absolutely genius move on Facebook’s part, and makes perfect sense.

Anyway, what feature am I talking about?

Five little icons. Seriously, I believe that five little icons are the biggest change Facebook has made, and will be the reason we will continue to use Facebook for years into the future.

Those icons – the briefcase, the heart, the house, the apple, and the flag – encourage us to enter information about ourselves in the past. We are even encouraged to add information and photos about our birth.

When you click on the house icon, for example, you’re asked to enter information about a time you moved or bought a new house.

Clicking on the flag asks you to describe “millstones and achievements” you’ve had.

If you spent hours entering information about your life, what do you get? A literal timeline of your entire life.

On the top right-hand side of your profile page are icons that show dates, and you can browse back through your timeline by clicking on these dates.

Think about it. If you’re entering in information about your life, and all your past experiences, the result is that you have a ready-made diary and timeline of your entire life, including photos, places, and links to your friends’ profiles.  And who’s your “diary” owned by? Facebook.

Facebook will own our memories.

This is both fantastic and scary. We will all never have to worry about forgetting past events in our lives, and our friends can even help us create our diaries by tagging us in entries that they make.

But that diary is owned by one company. A for-profit company, whose primary aim is to make as large a profit as possible. This is the fundamental problem with social networks, and us giving them a lot of information about ourselves. It’s the reason “privacy” issues are so talked about. Because there is just a giant conflict of interest between our data being safe, and Facebook wanting to profit off of it.

So if we all give Facebook information about previous events in our lives, then if we want to be able to look back through that in future, we have to use Facebook. If we leave Facebook, we lose our memories.

This is the biggest change Facebook has made simply because it’s going to have consequences on our use of Facebook for years to come. In itself, it’s not a big change. But if you look at the big picture, these little icons are the most important icons Facebook will likely ever make. With them, Facebook makes the barriers to entering the social network market a hundred times stronger.

I, for one, do not think I’ll be trusting Facebook with my memories forevermore. I’ll be trusting a service which gives me complete control over my information and data, including the ability to download it all to a hard-drive. Oh yeah, one possibility is called Duo.

Avoiding “The Shallows” of Distraction

This post is a follow-up one from my post a few days ago summarizing Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows. I said that I’d write another post outlining some of the ways that I’m trying to avoid distraction since reading Carr’s book. They’re simple, obvious things to do – but they’ve been helping me a lot this past week.

As a result of doing these things I’ve found myself feeling less busy and stressed, and have actually been getting more done. I think it’s too early to comment on actual amounts of work that I may be getting done extra as a result of doing these things to avoid distraction – but will write about that when I feel I can comment accurately.

Here’s the things I’ve done since reading The Shallows:

1. Removed the icons for Facebook and Twitter from my Mac Dock. This has probably saved me hundreds of clicks on them and distractions over the past few days.

2. Put Evernote, Mail, and Safari in full-screen mode so that I can fully concentrate on one of them at a time.

3. Started using Safari for all school/work-related browsing, as it doesn’t have any bookmarks in it that I’ll be distracted by the temptation to click on. I’ll continue to use Chrome for personal browsing.

4. Left my iPhone in another room when trying to get some solid work done.

5. Set specific times during the day for me to email and Facebook to avoid the constant clicking to check for new mail/notifications.

6. Turned off all notifications on my Mac for things like Facebook so that I can stick to my specific times for doing these things.

They’re simple to put into action. But a bit harder to get your mind around. I was scared enough by reading The Shallows to put them into action straight away, and I’m really happy with the results so far.

Give it a go. Try doing the above things for one day, and if you don’t notice any improvement in your concentration and productivity then go back to normal. But I am incredibly confident that you’ll be surprised by how much more you get done, and the increased sense of calmness that will come over you.

A Summary of The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr

I’ve just finished reading The Shallows, a book by Nicholas Carr, which was suggested to me by Anjela Webster. It’s a reasonably technical book that goes in-depth into the workings of our brains to look at how the Internet is affecting the way we “think, read, and remember”. It was without a doubt one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a while, and I’m still thinking about it a lot.

Carr starts off by explaining how he’s been having trouble focussing recently. He says that he sits down to read a book but finds himself unable to read a page without looking up from the book, and he finds his mind wandering off on tangents quite often. He also says that he has trouble focussing on other tasks, and can’t remember things as well as he used to be able to. I have the same problems (mentioned some of them here), and Carr even says that he reckons most people who use the Internet these days will be suffering the same things.

From there, he goes on to describe in detail (with lots of scientific facts and research) why it is that we’re finding ourselves so distracted nowadays. In essence, his thesis is that new media will change the way that our brain works, and there are many side-effects to this. A side effect of the Internet is that we find it harder to focus.

When things like the typewriter was invented, Carr uses the description of how the philosopher Nietzsche found his writing style change when he used a typewriter. He started using smaller, more choppy sentences, and this was as a direct result of simply changing the medium he used to write.

When the wristwatch was invented, people found themselves more efficient but also a lot more tired as they were now acting by bodily rhythms that other people had set for them, instead of by their natural body clock.

All these technological changes, Carr argues, have side-effects that mostly affect our deep-brain thinking. Here’s a few examples.

Carr comes to the conclusion that there are generally two types of knowledge: deep domain expertise, and knowing where to find relevant information. While the Internet gives us access to all relevant information, it reduces our deep domain expertise as we no longer need to store as much information in our brains.

The Windows operating system was the birth of true multitasking. Before this, people did one thing at a time on computers. They would word process, or they would email. There was no capacity to do both at the same time. Therefore there were no distractions to what people were working on. But with Windows, people suddenly had distractions, as different applications would run at the same time. People thought this would lead to an increase in productivity, but in many ways productivity has decreased because people are now no longer as focussed on what they are working on.

The part of the whole book that got me thinking most was the very last chapter. Carr describes how new technologies make us lose part of ourselves. Clocks made us lose our natural rhythm. Maps made us lose our spacial recognition capacities. He gives a lot more examples. But the Internet, unlike most of these other technologies, is perhaps making us lose our touch with the real world. Our brains jump around constantly as if we are browsing websites. We are constantly pressured to be looking at our phones and computers and replying to messages. The end result is that we live more and more inside the Internet, and when we need to leave it, we can’t work as well as we previously could.

It’s not like we can change the course of technology and reverse these negative effects. But I’ve been thinking about how to mitigate them. In fact, what I’ve written previously about “switching off” is part of this. But I’m thinking about many more ways to focus and go back to being able to concentrate more. Will save that for another post!

Read this book. I really feel strongly that more people recognise how the Internet is shaping our thinking so that when we develop new web applications we can have these effects in mind, and develop with thought to how our brains will change. Overall I found the scientific details in The Shallows a little bit too much (probably because I dislike, and am not good at, science) but I was fascinated throughout reading the book.

Natureshop’s Great Customer Service – And Why Your Business Should Focus On It

Zappos is probably the company best known worldwide for incredible customer service. However, I haven’t actually ever bought anything off Zappos – so I’m only speaking from what I’ve heard.

To be honest, recently I haven’t had any examples of great customer service with anything I’ve purchased. Some cases of helpfulness by staff of a shop or through social media, but nothing that really stands out.

Until this week.

Natureshop is a New Zealand company that retails clothing online. For those who read my blog often, you’ll know about my passion for Icebreaker clothing. Natureshop is a large retailer of Icebreaker clothing, so I decided to give them a try a few days ago and buy just a t-shirt that they had on sale.

Firstly, the t-shirt was 30% off retail price.

Secondly, it came with free overnight courier.

Thirdly, it arrived and had weird red stitching which I didn’t want.

So, I checked their website for returns policies and sent them an email asking if I could return it.

I got a response immediately apologizing for the fact that I wasn’t happy with my product (even though they hadn’t done anything wrong on their part), and letting me know that there was a free postage voucher in the packaging that the shirt had come with.

Sure enough, I checked the packaging and the free postage was there.

In their email they also asked which product I’d like the t-shirt exchanged for. I wanted a similar style just without the red stitching. Again, I got a very prompt response saying that they’d just sent the t-shirt to me (again by overnight courier).

I then sent the original shirt back to them the next morning before school, and by the time I got home I had the new t-shirt waiting at my doorstep.

Okay, so that was a lengthy explanation – but I just wanted to prove the point about how fantastic Natureshop’s customer service really was. It was so good that I’ve been raving about them for a couple of days to many people I’ve talked to, and thought I should write a blog post about them too.

The main reason I’m writing this blog post is to congratulate Natureshop on their outstanding service, but also to encourage other businesses to focus on customer service. The very fact that I’m writing a blog post like this should be encouragement – if you do a good enough job of service, then people are going to talk about you. People are going to feel warm inside and be passionate about purchasing from you in the future.

So, thank you Natureshop, and good luck to other businesses in replicating customer service this good!

To prove the point about me being more willing to buy from Natureshop because of their incredible customer service: now that I’ve finished this post, I’m going to order some more Icebreaker stuff from them both for me and my family.