If you haven’t heard of MTV’s newest reality show: “Jersey Shore,” than you might be living under a rock. It follows the (mis)adventures of 7 Italian-Americans spending the summer partying at the Jersey Shore.

I wasn’t a watcher, but I got to enjoy some of the more choice quotes through my co-workers (thanks guys!). However, yesterday my roommate threw a few episodes on during a lazy Saturday morning.

What hit me is how much I was reminded of a line from Goodfellas where Karen starts getting introduced to the culture of being a mafia wife:

“there was never any outsiders around, absolutely never… being around each other all the time made everything seem all the more normal.”

Any community that engages in activity that the general public finds unsavory, faces a lot of pressure to conform to the group. Avoiding the general public is an effective defense mechanism against this pressure, but ends up creating a feedback loop where that group becomes more isolated and gets less feedback from the general public.

Is isolation a requirement for counter-cultural groups?

Just to be clear:
The show has caught a LOT of flack for promoting negative Italian sterotypes. These 7 self-described “guidos and guidettes” are definitely pretty polarizing figures. It’s hard to justify their status as nationally televised personalities (read: potential role-models), but I’m not going to pass judgement on them. They are young party-goers who are not particularly unique in prioritizing the fun of a highly-sexualized party lifestyle over more socially redeeming pursuits.

My take is that any blame here fits squarely with the network execs who are exploiting the choices of these young adults through a slew of reality programs (Real World, Road Rules, etc.).

Today marked an historic announcement. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Obama’s first State of the Union, but rather Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the new iPad.  So, how has Uncle Steve changed the game? Let’s take a look.

A perfect machine for Baby Boomers

I’m convinced the iPad is the perfect unit for a selling into a large market that hasn’t been catered to yet, has plenty of disposable income, and is would benefit the most immediately from what we will all come to recognize as a new type of computer: Baby Boomers.

At the time of the 2000 census, there were more than 79-million Baby Boomers in the US whom are now starting to slow down the pace of their daily lives as they transition towards retirement. Their personal computing needs (outside the office) aren’t very intensive — they communicate via email, read the news, share photos, maybe use video chat and do light research.

So, it would seem that current laptop or desktop computers do far more than is necessary for this audience.  And since added complexity often causes frustration, there may be a better solution. What would the perfect “home computer” for a boomer look like?

That machine would be:
- Simple to understand and use
- Quickly capable of completing tasks (see below)
- Be available whenever and wherever a need to interact with the digital world arose.

Here’s what that computer should be able to accomplish:
- Email/Calendar
- Booking movie tickets or reservations online
- Looking up references (online recipes, fact checking, manuals, etc.)
- Video chating with their family
- Storing pictures of family trips or events
- Occasionally doing light amounts of work
- Online Banking
(note: this is not intended to be exhaustive list,)

When you think about a machine that handles those common tasks well, and does so in a very responsive and always accessible way, the iPad is really the first good answer (more will follow if the iPad is successful).

Apple creates Ambient Computing

This type of machine represents a new concept — Ambient Computing.  Ambient Computing is robust enough to handle most computing tasks but requires much less effort to access than a traditional computer.

The most impressive innovation, and the one that truly makes Ambient Computing possible, was the A4 chip.  That chip is at the hart of the new devices speed and responsiveness. While, I hope this new chip design extends to the iPhone in the future, it currently, makes the iPad capable of near-instant boot and it empowers applications to be incredibly responsive.  It removes all of the experience associated with computing other than getting into your desired program and completing your goal.

If Apple has built a machine that almost entirely removes the starting cost of completing an action on a traditional computer (which, even in good scenarios, often takes 20-30 seconds on non apple machines), then it has created a machine that’s much more capable of capturing cognitive inspiration from it’s owner – making you, as the user, more likely to act on your ideas.  Apple is already good at this (going from sleep/closed to working on a new macbook is generally a sub-10 second proposition), but carrying a laptop with you everywhere is a nuisance, and pulling a computer out of your bag for a 1 minute task in most situations is awkward (and often rude). Smartphones already handle these issues well, but they are generally sluggish and unreliable for anything but the simplest tasks.

Bridging the accessibility of a mobile device with the robustness and trustworthiness of a full computer, will appeal to the large audience generally — which will grow over time.  But, Apple’s best bet for establishing this device category is to put up impressive sales numbers for the first model.  There’s also a huge immediate ability to replace the standard machine for lightweight home PC users – like baby boomers, as outlined above — or families, as outlined by Kottke.  If I was Scott Forstall, I’d be focused on empowering applications that resonate heavily with this crowd:  cookbooks come to mind, board games also, news/photos/communication will be killer (and already are on the machine), what else?

Sure, there are fairly unacceptable limitations like no camera, no easy solution for printing/scanning periphery, and questionable support of other screens (TV) for media content, which will have to be ironed out in V2. There are also broader reaching issues that might cause trouble for Apple: like the lack of flash support and the inability to show and track most web advertisements in mobile Safari. But with the hardware improvements announced today, the content and consumer-billing relationships Apple has built, and the knowledge that they can improve over several generations (do you remember the first iPod?), I think we are looking at a large market that Apple has a good chance of succeeding in.

That’s why I’m bullish on the iPad. With the keyboard dock, this could be a full-on replacement PC for some non-power consumers (Think of  WebTV — and trust me, WebTV users didn’t need multi-tasking). For heavier users, this still provides a great “ambient computing” experience that can allow someone to act on their immediate thoughts with far lower effort (creating more personal value), while still having a more robust machine capable of handling more demanding tasks.

I’m concerned about the movement away from open systems, but, that doesn’t change the writing on the wall for this type of device need — kudos to Apple for seeing and defining a great first step at an ambient computing device that I expect to become a category definer.

Great job Apple.

A friend of mine just asked me for some advice on sending surveys. This is the list I came up with.

Sending surveys is an important part of early customer development; it helps you test a hypothesis and delivers you “perception” data. You can track how a user interacts with your service, it’s harder to track how they perceive it without surveys.

Early on in development of a consumer facing product, I’d recommend sending out simple surveys at short intervals (1-4 weeks) to a subset of your userbase. Below is the advice I gave my friend, if I’m missing anything, please leave it in the comments (Hattip to Hiten Shah, Leonard Speiser, and Sean Ellis who heavily influenced my thinking on this through tweets, posts, and conversations on this topic).

Hey,

First thing is too check out this: http://venturehacks.com/articles/measure-fit (not shocking that Venture Hacks has the go to resource, is it?)

Then check out the tool that video is about: www.survey.io

But here’s my advice:

- Order your survey intentionally. Use early questions as eventual filters. If your second question is “how bad would you feel if you couldn’t use this product” that helps you sort later questions (i.e. my power users think this is the key feature, everyone else thinks it’s something else).

- When evaluating the data, you don’t want to optimize for the largest segment, you want to optimize for the segment that’s most engaged.

- Don’t ask any questions without understanding how you’d apply the data you’re collecting.

- Ask some open ended questions. The open-ended everything survey recommended in the post is a great way to start. But I like to have less than half my questions require typing — and it’s usually just an “anything else you think we should know?”. You get much higher response rates. But, there’s definitely a time and a place: open-ended questions are really useful for messaging questions and for early “discovery” surveys. Those questions also allow you to learn a lot more about the user (and how committed they are — you can tell a lot from the length and quality of their response).

- Ask for the ability to followup by phone, and do phone followups with every person who says yes. You’ll learn a lot in that conversation — and you’ll develop deep relationships with potential customers.

- On the subejct of developing relationships, provide an option for opting-in to the “elites” club — let them self select into beta testing groups. These elites can often become marketing assets. Yelp did a great job of this. David Barrett at Expensify is also doing this well right now. Survey’s aren’t just data, build a marketing asset.

- Ask for their reactions to the product, optional and freeform (limit text length if you would like to use in materials or on twitter). Ask “can we use this for marketing purposes?”  Another idea: followup and get a small photo, name, link, etc. — use these assets to personalize the testimonials when you put them online.

- Don’t put explanatory text in front of questions. It’s tempting to try and put people in the right “frame” — it hurts you in the long run. Don’t alter the answers they want to give you.

- Short surveys win.  <10 questions. <5 mins to complete.  half that is much better. Don’t write an SAT test.

Had a great lunch with two really smart folks – the following was asked, and it rattled a theme around my head.

What if you had to prove (through actions) that you had already provided real value to someone, before you could “friend” them?   What would a social network look like if  every one of your “friends” was guaranteed to have listened to your advice, in a meaningful way, at least once in the past?

Social Networks evolve in a way that demonstrates how people use different tools for interacting:

1. with their closest friends (email/sms/fbmsg for me)
2. with their core audience (RSS/4sq for me)
3. with their broader but still relevant audience (RSS/Twitter/FB for me)
4. with the people they want to denote social relationships with (LinkedIn and Facebook for me).

What tends to happen with successful social networks is that they have a core value to the first user and some incentives to connect with friends (LinkedIn is better than traditional resumes and you look more valuable with better social proof).

But, after reaching a core network size where the product is optimized for relevant information or connections, the incentive continues to push growth; the network starts to signal relationships over information and becomes less relevant.  That’s happened to LinkedIn and to Facebook.

Facebook’s investing in games (and other platform apps), to maintain the users attention and keep them motivated in the quest for ultimate “connection with everything.”  As a result, Facebook’s got a broad ownership of your entire social graph (how you connect broadly to companies, products, people) — it’s probably going to win there.

So, if you want to build a social entity, don’t compete on the broader data play — ask yourself what niche information can you get detail and clarity on that either users or marketers care about?

Back to the original question — I’d find a network that shared the people that are influenced by the people I influence (Think LinkedIn, back when you only had 150 connections).  I could understand whom you actually have a good relationship with, so that I could ask for good quality introductions from you, or discuss relevant people with you.

There are a lot of other niche plays available to us out there. That’s where the hustlers should focus right now.

It’s been a Reasonable Doubt day on my headphones. Say what you want about Jay-Z, but this album has some great lines, some of which are applicable to building your startup.

Some of you don’t believe me, but Jay is an entrepreneur through and through, and, like any good entrepreneur, he shares his hard won lessons with a younger generation of up-and-comers.

To celebrate the end of another great week at Involver, I give you…

Eight startup tips from Hova:

1. “For the dough I raise, gotta get s**t appraised, no disrespect to you, make sure your word is true.” (Politics as Usual)

Ronald Regan said it best: “Trust, but verify.”  Your word should be your bond, but it may not be the other guys, do your due diligence.

2. “If every homie in you clique is rich; yo’ clique is rugged. Nobody will fall, cuz everyone will be each others crutches.” (Feelin’ It)

Surrounding yourself with people who can pick up the slack when you miss is important. You need to surround yourself with the best people and work to make sure they succeed as well.

3. “Even if ain’t sunny, hey, i ain’t complaining, I’m in the rain doing a buck 40 hyrdroplaning.” (Feelin’ It)

Sometimes you gotta play a bad hand, find a way to make the best of the situation. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

4. “Nothing to gain, and a whole lot to loose, you still singing? Fool.” (Feelin’ It)

Know when to walk away, not every game is winnable, or even worth playing.

5. “What, you’re broke, what the f**k you gon tell me? (22 Twos)

Consider the source of advice, choose carefully who you listen too.

6. “We offer our lives, what do you bring to the table?” (Can I Live)

Every entrepreneur should remember this when raising money or working with large partners.  You are making the ultimate commitment, don’t let other stakeholders devalue you’re stake because they have the dollars.

7. “I see his hunger pains, I know his blood boils. He wanna, run wit me, I know this kid’ll be loyal.”  (Coming of Age)

Find hungry proteges and teach them.

8. “The percentage who don’t understand is higher than the percentage who do” (Can I Live 2)

No explanation needed.