I highly recommend Toastmasters. Best place to practice giving a speech in front of a group of people that you don't know. They have chapters all around the world.
Yeah, agreed. But it also gets you comfortable presenting, I was recommended them by a trusted friend as well. The overtly marketing hype on their website reminds me of those motivational speaker cults.
This looks really great! Does this tool have any desktop apps for logging hours? I can't seem to find it on the website. This is the only must-have feature that's missing for me. Logging hours only from the website is not suitable for my workflow.
If you're looking for a comprehensive time tracking alternative, CreativeWorx TimeTracker has a desktop application in addition to a browser version. There's a new desktop application being released in about a week, and it's killer! Check it out: www.creativeworx.com
Thank you! We don't have a desktop app right now, but we want to get it done in the future. We are however working on some pretty cool integrations stuff with the web app and the native iPhone app, so stay tuned for that!
Definitively +1 on the desktop app. And more that just bc that fits better on some workflows is bc the kind of features that a desktop app leave you to implement. Currently my team is using timedoctor, i hate its ui/ux but they have this feature: "track keyboard activity" that lone is not impressive but their desktop app using this feature after a configurable period of time can alert me to ask if im still working on the selected task and if i don't answer he fallback to a "time break" activity. That is great bc right now with timely i can forget about a timer and let it grow for ever and later will be hard to remember when did I really ended doing that.
Great ui/ux I'm on trial now.. and i love what you got... but w/o this feature my team will keep using ugly timedoctor, nothing personal btw ;)
If you haven't seen it, I would recommend checking out Aaron Shell [1], the cross-platform desktop JS runtime environment that Github uses for Atom editor. If your app is mostly frontend JS with an API, porting it should be easy. If the backend is in node.js, porting it will be even easier.
I don't have experience in a lot of negotiations but I have used similar methods many times. I bought a bike a couple days ago and got them to throw in a few extra things for free. I didn't negotiate the price of the bike but I made a point of needing a light and a helment.
First, I asked for a light that would be go great with the bike and the sales person put one he had laying around on the bike. I said it looked great. Then I asked for a helment and found one for me that I liked. I put on the helment and did a test ride with the bike. I told him I'll take the bike. Then I asked, how much for the helment & light? He gave me the price. I said "That's not bad but honestly, I don't have the money for everything. What can you do?" He offered to give me 20% off the helment & light. I again said that was a great deal but couldn't do it. A few more back and forth and me throwing in that I would need another bike (for my gf) and wanted to come back and buy from him, he eventually threw in the light and helment.
What I knew was roughly how much profit they were making from the bike. I knew roughly the mark up of accessories and I knew how they wanted to sell the bike.
It worked out really well for me and the business. I love the bike and the business now has a new loyal customer.
I bought a bike too last year. I paid list price, had them install kiddie seats, I paid list for those too.
The last place I would drive a hard bargain would be in a bike store.
For one, I can afford the bike + extras, otherwise I wouldn't go out to buy it, we're talking relatively small money here. I simply set a budget and didn't exceed the budget, which may have influenced my choice of bike but that's fine.
When I went back a few weeks later with a small problem (crank play) the guy instantly dropped what he was doing, fixed the problem immediately (obviously no charge) and asked how my kids liked the bike. We talked for a bit more and he asked me to come in any time there is anything wrong with the bike right away.
I love the bike and that guy running his small business.
I wonder how he would have treated me if I had decided to haggle with him over the price of the seats or the bike using my negotiation skills. Relative to my income that guy is working a lot harder for a lot less.
Maybe my perspective about bike store owners changed when I worked for a bike store when I was 15 (newspaper route + working in the bike store paid for my first computer).
Car dealerships I approach in an entirely different way.
I'm not sure if you've ever been to a bike shop when they are having a sale. The bike shop I was at had some bikes listed for $999 on sale for $739. That's more than $200 off a bike and they're still making money. The guy selling me the bike doesn't lose that $200 difference. They are making higher profit ratio on a bike than a car dealership does on a car.
If you get treated differently if you have issues in the future because you bargained then that's an issue with the business not the price you paid.
Btw, I paid full price for the bike as it wasn't on sale. My guess is they made 30% profit from the $800 purchase.
It's more likely that items on sale are sold at a net loss. The cost of simply having stock is more than you'd think. As an example, I ran an ecommerce site for a hardware company and after 30 days in stock laptops were no longer profitable, even if sold at full price.
My understand is that bikes have a pretty slim margin and stores make their money on accessories and servicing.
You got it just about right. Bikes now have annual updates, just like cars do. Any bikes not sold end-of-season will be worth roughly their second hand resale value the next year. Hence the stock clearance sales. This effect is stronger for racing bikes and mountain bikes than it is for evergreens (for obvious reasons). If a bike store is borrowing at 7% (good deal with the bank) to buy their stock then a $500 bike that retails for $649 (30% gross margin) will have cost the store ~20 bucks in interest after half a year. If they sell it during clearance they will probably drop the price to $549 or $499 depending on how much inventory they have to move. At $550 they're still making some money, at $499 they're losing.
And they still have to put the bike together, give it the '0' service (mostly checking if everything is tight, re-inflating tires and setting it up for the customer) and a warranty. And clean it up after every jerk that goes puddle hopping with a new bike during their test-drive, after which they won't buy it.
There is not a whole lot of money in selling discounted bikes.
Then after the first year you have hopefully a loyal customer that can't fix their own punctures and that keeps coming back over a long time for fixes and eventually an upgrade. It isn't rare for a sale to make more on accessories than on the bike itself, compared to the price of a bike a bag set, seats, lights (usually mandated by law to be on every new bike) and clothing are sold at much higher margins.
How do you know they were still making money on the $739? How do you know the bike manufacturer wasn't offering incentives, much like with a car dealership?
It's a business - you don't sell stuff if there is no money in it. It made you more money being out of the store for that price than sitting in the store... whether it was through rebates from the manufacturer, some contract deal, etc is irrelevant - the business made money.
Not necessarily true. Old stock is sold at a loss quite frequently because keeping it will cost even more than getting rid of it. Space is a real problem in bicycle stores (and capital an even worse one) if you can't show next years models in March then you're not going to be selling any bikes at all.
You have sentimental feelings towards bikes shops and feel good about paying full price. I can understand that. But, I don't see why you should criticize leak for not having the same feelings. Lots of people work hard and make less than you do (many car dealers included). It's not the consumers job to worry about whether the other side is making enough profit. Businesses can take care of themselves. Sometimes they won't sell at a low price because they don't want to set a precedent for negotiating. But, often times, it's profit-enhancing to price discriminate a bit and charging the rich guy full price while throwing in some free accessories for the frugal guy. There is not need to guilt trip the frugal guy about it.
> But, I don't see why you should criticize leak for not having the same feelings.
I'm fine with his haggling. My time and the way I'm perceived by the store owners of the places where I shop is worth more to me than I could ever gain by haggling over the price of a bike. Leak and I are in that sense not in the same position. I also think that if I want to keep that store in business by the time some warranty issue rolls around that I probably will have to let them earn some money. (the dutch word for that particular feeling is 'gunnen', this doesn't happen often but I haven't a clue what the proper English translation is).
He gets to do it his way and I do it in mine. Any guilt complexes are on account of their respective owners.
I do this with all my projects just to see both my progress in learning UX/UI and also my thoughts. I've learned a lot by taking a look at what I thought was "amazing" then the next "amazing" and so on until I got the "perfect" design. For me, the #1 thing I've learned is to leave trying to perfect the design until the real data is available. It makes such a huge difference that I always, without exception, change some aspects of the design as soon as the data is displayed. Just my experiences over the years.
I'm not sure the carriers have a say in what Apple charges. It's probably the market. People go nuts for the iphone. Lines still happen for the iPhone. That's what sets the price. I don't know how many lines were made for the Nexus. As awesome as Nexus or any other phone may be, they're definitely not on the same market level as the iPhone, in terms of popularity not in terms of percentages.
A market segment that makes up a smaller and smaller proportion of the market goes nuts for the iPhone.
That means that carriers have less and less incentive to care about whether or not Apple walks away from the negotiating table if they ask for lower prices.
Apple will still have the diehard fans who are willing to buy unsubsidised directly, if the iPhone market share dips low enough that carriers see the iPhone as optional enough that they feel they can afford to lose it, Apple will have to choose reductions in sales or lower prices.
My inlaws got an iPad last christmas. They've always had windows machines of one form or another, and hated them.
They liked the iPad experience so much that three of their friends have bought iPads. There's a big market there, and it's hardly been touched.
There are a couple places where they need a bit more than an iPad. The big one is photo management, with a library that's bigger than can fit on the ipad. iCloud isn't there yet. They want to be able to print, write cds/dvds, email them and show them off. There's an opportunity there somewhere.
My parents had the same exact issue. I use dropbox for that. I just change the size of all the images to 1024x768 and share a folder with them with all the pictures. It works marvelously!
Dropbox is an interesting idea with that. Given their API, it's entirely possible to build a bunch of services on top of it, such as archival DVDs, or uploads to printing companies. When I was on vacation, I wound up sending my photos I wanted to print to snapfish via Flickr. (after running them through iPhoto for editing)
There are a couple of sticking points:
* There's still going to be space management issues. 2gb on Dropbox doesn't go far when you've got a 4gb cf in the camera, and the next step up is 100gb@$100/yr.
* the other half of space management is clearing it off of the iPad. It's difficult to manage storage of imported photos, it turns out that if you don't delete them after import to iPhoto on your desktop, you either have to delete them individually or use image capture on the Mac to do it. I'd love to see the high res ones synced off to the cloud, leaving smaller jpegs around, but with the promise that the high res ones were securely stored. What I wound up doing for that was using a USB stick and my work netbook as the real storage for all the holiday images, rather than being able to do it on the iPad.
Finally, and this isn't a problem for the inlaws, but for me as a photographer, I shot raw+jpeg. iphoto imported raw+jpeg, and then didn't use any of the raw data, just the small(well, 8mp) jpegs. I tore through them, using iPhoto as a passible Lightroom substitute. And now, the adjustments are orphaned if I want to apply any of them to the raw files. That's annoying. Not critical, but annoying. And it's not as if there isn't a raw converter in the core of OSX that couldn't be used here.
And this is why a "save story" feature should be added. I do this too and it's probably breaking the logic behind why upvote exists in the first place.
https://www.toastmasters.org/