Mitchell Geere

Yesterday I did my usual get out of the house drive to my nearest bookstore - in this case it was Exclusive Books - and as I was browsing around I realized I’m not really here to buy a book. I am really just here to clear my head, this made me think. I generally spend loads of money on books I would only read once, maybe twice, and then never touch it again. So why buy the book, why not rent it or read it in store. At this point I started think what would be in it for the bookstore, and as it stands right now nothing.

Currently the bookstores do not monetize the in-store readers they have. They are basically just turning a blind eye because they assume a reader will be a buyer. However what if they reader never buys a book, what if they are there to relax get a coffee and read a book? This works for the reader however every time they get there they have to remember where the book was - if they weren’t done - and also the page they were on.

My idea around monetizing this in-store reading is allowing members to pay a period based subscription which would allow them to read x number of books in store per period and have that book say kept for a few days. The cost of the book will be offset against the subscription fees, and it can afterwards be sold at a reduced rate as a second hand book. The benefit the reader has with this is that he will feel less criminal or shady about reading in-store and he can now have the book bookmarked and he can come back later and finish the book up.

This model will allow people who can’t actually afford the books to either buy a subscription allowing them to read as they pay or buy the book later at a reduced rate – not because he had read it but because 20 others have as well. I do however think the same people who buy new books now will still buy the same amount of new books and perhaps read in store as well depending on the time they have available.

I know there will be books I would buy to keep and there will be those I would read in-store. I would imagine this will create some sort of hybrid library almost, and can see more bookstores designing their stores much like lounges with waiters getting you coffee etc.

Okay so this, so far, has been an interesting experience for me. Some are a mixture of ways that I have done things before and others completely new. So I am just going to try and show some basics in ruby and then its counter parts in C#.

The first thing I will do is show you classes from the basic declaration and then build it out from there.

C#

Ruby

Simple right all looks pretty much the same so far. Next we want to show inheritance, but I am really just interested in showing how the constructors will pass the data up to the base or super class. A note as with C#, Ruby only allows single inheritance.

C#

Ruby

The next thing I am going to show is what we know in C# as extension methods which are Modules in Ruby. I’m not sure if it is in fact the counter part to extension methods however it certainly looks like the closest thing to it. They also have what is called a singleton, don’t confuse it with pattern I will just show an intro to that too as an alternative - at least in my mind it is an alternative. Right so you declare a module and extension in the following way. I will assume we have attributes and properties respectively defined.

C#

Ruby

Again you can still see the similarities and you are happy. Now the next thing would what they deem as class level variables and instance level variables. Class level in C# would be static and the other would be the same. Where in C# you would declare it as say “public static string Variable” the static keyword denoting it as such in Ruby you would you double roses like this @@Variable. Instance level variables are declared with a single rose, however they are only instance level if within a method definition. If it is declared in the class it will be seen technically as a static or class level definition.

Again like I said I am really just informally chatting here I’m not trying to sound like an expert in either languages, although the amount of time I have spent programming in C# I technically am, however it was just interesting to see the differences and I will try and document more interesting stuff next time. For now I will just forge on, its only been an hour so don’t judge me just yet. Ruby is pretty different to C# they have a mantra that Class is an object, and Object is a class. Everything is an object basically, however I read an interesting thing that only a Class can have methods though. Class in the inheritence of Object specializes it into having methods/members.

So for a while I tried to have two persona’s the one “mitcheru.com” and the other “mitchellgeere.com”. I created “mitcheru” so that I could rant, or rave about things and “mitchellgeere” as a more professional blog relating to industry matters.

I have however decided that due to my lack of time to manage even one blog that I will amalgamate them back to one blog and keep it clean. Also joining the two gave me some material to blog about quickly. I know riveting stuff right.

Now in more news my aspirations to move to New York are still there and with such force, however I have come to realize that initially I may have to settle for Miami, Seattle, or somewhere in California. Neither one of the options are terrible at all in fact given the right job or opportunity they would be amazing! However if you have ever been to New York you will know what I mean nothing but nothing comes close to that city. I literally fell in love with the city.

The other things going on in my life is I am facing a cross road where I need to make a decision between sticking with Microsoft with their - in my opinion awesome - .net platform and the C# language and on the other hand Apple and coding then in Ruby and again the amazing Rails platform. I have had a long standing like/hate relationship with Microsoft, and a long standing love relationship with Apple. Learning a new language and platform isn’t really a big deal for me I have done it a million times, however I have always maintained working on Windows as my operating system. This will be a massive change for me because I have only ever done say a ratio 1:30 hours on a mac versus pc. So I decided that I will sink my teeth into rails – have already set myself up with all the material and my server can host rails already - and perhaps kick off one of my hobby projects in ruby on rails. All aboard!

We all know how to do that, just have people talk about it. Now that is much easier said than done. We tried pushing our companies viraly through Facebook, and Refer a Friend campaigns and so on. Some of us even sent Mike Arrington at TechCrunch mails so that he can talk about us.

Have you considered making due with fewer people using your company initially - start with a small core base - and in them doing so you will gain a larger user base without viral campaigns or Facebook? How about plugging your feedback system into GetSatisfaction.com or systems a like. I find so many new companies from just going onto GetSatisfaction.com to post about a companies service I use. In doing it this way you will be able to grow inline with your customer needs far better than trying to gain a huge customer base off the bat.

What I am getting at is that if your customers, those who love and hate your company, talk about your company in the right places you will be allowing your company to grow organically, which I think is more sustainable. It might take longer for you to gain that 1m customer base but the truth is you will have customers genuinely interested in your business and possibly they will be paying customers.

So to get to my point I think that for you to get your company known you should align yourself with companies that allow your customers to interact with you in a public arena with alot of spectators. Whether the interaction is positive or negative you can control it by how you respond and thus gain new customers. Good or bad exposure is still good. The conversion of someone doesn’t happen when you have good or bad exposure from a customer, or ex-customer even, it comes from how you handle and respond to it.

This morning I decided I will figure out some way to have an iTunes account without being in the US. Fortunately to my elated surprise I noticed my country was added, finally I can enjoy the splendors of downloading music from the giant.

They added 40 countries or so to the list they are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

Now even though none of these are really localized I think in time they will be and I can perhaps finally see iTunes sporting local content like jacSharp, aKing, Plush and so on. This makes me very happy because it will also give me the opportunity to enjoy some music from other countries - that is if they allow the music to move across borders.

The biggest reason why I like iTunes is because of its integration into my iPod etc. However I think places like Apricado and Amie Street will push this market a lot further this is perhaps because iTunes is far to restrictive which saddens me because I love the Apple brand and would love to support them but they just make it so hard most of the time.

I can’t wait for a true global economy, where my location is about as relevant as my hair color. So that I can freely enjoy purchasing movies, music and podcasts that appeal to my taste without the hampering of political borders.

This however has a huge impact on local companies such as Look & Listen and Musica in this industry, and to tell you the truth I am okay with that. When I think up some start-up I really don’t limit my thinking to local only unless of course it really only satisfies a very localized problem, that however is very rare. You will always find someone else somewhere else experiencing the same problems as you do.

The next service I would like to see open a bit more is PayPal, that is such a great service but so restricted. I have a suspision that South Africa not having access to it is due to our banks and the monopoly they run in the finance industry here.

Amendment:
We don’t have access to music and movies only mobile apps. I am rather disappointed now, armed with a new apple id, and credit card loaded I attempted a search for some new tunes and only got the app store screen. Oh well someday soon this will change, I hope.