We want to talk to as many people about the big (or small) ideas swirling in their heads as possible but sometimes they shoot themselves in the foot before we even get a chance to get started.

I could fill a book with things one could do to make us say

Thanks, but no thanks.

to an idea they’d like us to work on; I’ll start with this post.

One of the quicker ways for people to disqualify themselves are demands to sign legal documents that completely defy logic. Following is an e-mail we received recently and a concrete example of what not to do. Other than removing all the names from the text this is the e-mail verbatim.

Who wouldn’t want to jump at the chance of legally binding themselves to somebody they don’t know just to get the opportunity to submit a proposal for a chance to work on an iPhone app of some unknown functionality, followed by a few dozen more after we see how the first one does?

Here are a few lessons to be learned from this e-mail

1. We are not incentivized by the amount of work you are going to bring our way. We are incentivized by getting a chance to work on world changing ideas.
2. We would be happy to stop out at your office and bring the entire team to talk, however we’ll need a bit more than 24 hours notice. Currently the BitMethod team is six strong (Amanda included) and it takes some juggling on the calendar to find a time where all six of us are available at the same time. As an alternative if you are in a hurry you are more than welcome to stop by our office to talk (we have beer in the fridge).
3. Non-Compete: The nature of our business creates an extremely hard to navigate gray area in terms of non-compete agreements. A lot of work we do overlaps with projects we’ve already worked on in the past and will work on in the future. It would be impossible for us both financially and in terms of time it would consume to have to navigate this minefield were we agreeable to signing non-compete agreements. We’d much rather have relationships that are based on trust and mutual respect than having to buy our lawyer (sorry Sam) a new Jet Ski every time one of those comes around to bite us in the ass.
4. Non-Disclosure: We are not opposed to and have signed non-disclosure agreements in the past, however there needs to be a very compelling reason and the agreement needs to be very specific to the situation for us to sign one. If we don’t know what you will discuss with us and it’s one of the requirements for us to sit down and talk, we will generally decline to sign one. If you have a generic idea we’ve already heard from two others within the last three weeks, we will generally decline to sign one. Our general policy, whether a non-disclosure agreement is in force or not, is to not discuss anything we are currently working on or are in talks about with anyone that isn’t part of our company or directly part of the work being performed.

We are big believers in legal documents, they ritualize and preserve for posterity a mutually beneficial verbal promise the two parties have made to each other. If we have no way of quantifying mutual benefit chances are pretty good we are not signing a legally binding document with you.

If you find yourself wondering what the best way to protect your great idea is and it truly is a great idea, instead of demanding we sign meaningless documents before you will talk to us, you can talk to the greatest patent lawyer in the world, we’ll be happy to make the introduction.

With yesterday’s release of the Netflix iPhone app I got really excited about having some additional entertainment options on my phone. It also reminded me I’ve been getting a lot of my entertainment on my iPod from small and independent content creators for a while now.

I spend a lot of my time on the road and I’ve found an iPod loaded up with Podcasts and connected to my car stereo is an infinitely better way to entertain myself than listening to a song playing on the radio for the 567th time (not to mention safer than watching a Netflix movie).

Just recently I realized it’s been a while since I’ve added a new podcast to my library so I did what any sensible person would do and turned to my office mates for some suggestions. Other than Scott suggesting I add The Nerdist (Podcast Link) to my list, all I heard were crickets. So I am turning to you, the interwebs, for some guidance.

What are some great podcasts I should start listening to while on the road? I am into both entertainment and educational stuff so leave your suggestions in the comments section bellow.

To get the ball rolling I am going to leave you with a list of Podcasts I am currently subscribed to.

• This Week in Tech (Podcast Link): I am still listening to this show for sheer nostalgia reasons. I started following Leo Laporte back in his TechTV days and the show is more than adequate to pass the time in your car.

• Security Now (Podcast Link): This is another podcast from the TWiT network and features Steve Gibson, the über paranoid computer security geek. Caution, this show gets really technical at times and once in a while even my brain just decides to shut it out and glance over some of the things Steve is talking about.

• This Week in Startups (Podcast Link): I started listening to this one because of Jason Calacanis’s colorful public persona, however the more I listen to him the more I get annoyed by it. The reason you should start listening to this show however are the guests they bring on every week. The stories they tell about their startups are fascinating to me and the main reason I wanted to immigrate to the states in the first place.

• StackOverflow (Podcast Link): Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Attwood (Coding Horror) talk shop in this podcast series centered on their latest startup StackExchange. They haven’t released a new episode since April but in one of the last episodes they did release they were talking about eventually starting to record again, in the meantime you can listen to the archive of old episodes, there is a lot of good stuff there.

2 comments

I am late.

Let me rephrase that: I often arrive late to things that I shouldn’t be late to. However, one of my biggest pet peeves is when other people are late (meetings, appointments, even project or task deadlines). You can see how this makes me a hypocrite.

I am especially cognisant of this shortcoming because I have the word “Operating” in between Chief and Officer in my job title. I am the one person in the organization that can’t be late to things, that can’t miss deadlines, the one person that needs to be the gold standard at the company when it comes to punctuality. I am also the one person that needs to be able to call out the constantly tardy person.

There are only three real reasons for being late:

1. You are a jackass.
2. Greediness
3. A simple mistake or misunderstanding

If you are constantly late because you don’t want to arrive five or ten minutes early to an appointment or because you can’t be bothered to keep a calendar then you fall into the jackass category. Stop it.

My problem generally falls under Greediness. I’m way too optimistic about the things that go on my calendar. A lot of times I like to pack my calendar with everything that is currently on my plate thinking:

I can take care of the 6 clients that have outstanding issues of various degrees of difficulty and are spread all around town tomorrow, NOOO PROBLEM. Also I am going to give myself 10 minutes in between appointments because that is plenty of time to drive across town.

Here is what I pledge I will do going forward to fix my shortcoming:

I, Igor Dobrosavljević, as the COO of BitMethod pledge to be less greedy with my calendar and be overtly pessimistic about how long an appointment will take. If it looks like I am going to be late to an appointment I will notify all the affected parties at least 15 to 30 minutes before our meeting is supposed to take place about my tardiness and will ask to reschedule should I not be able to make it to an appointment in a reasonable time frame.

I expect, nay ask, to be called out if I am being an inconsiderate prick and repeatedly disrespect others with my tardiness.

I will return the favor.

If you find yourself being late more often than you’re comfortable with, honestly ask yourself which one of the three problems you’re having. Maybe you’d like to take a pledge, too.

1 comments

Another new feature on BxB: Apps We Use (and Love!). Every few weeks somebody from team BitMethod will be offering up a feature on apps that we’re using in the real world and really appreciate. Igor is up first with an iPhone app review, though we’ll also be featuring web and maybe even desktop applications as well.

—

This one is for all the road warriors out there. After trying to figure out the best possible mileage tracking system (for a while, nothing beat a notebook and a pencil in the car), two years ago I stumbled upon a better solution: Trip Cubby. Trip Cubby allows you to keep track of the miles that you drive in your car that you can deduct from your taxes or get reimbursed for.

Trip Cubby makes it easy to collect all of the needed data and get the data out of the software into an easily digestible file format you can pass on to your accountant at the end of the year or the HR department when it’s time to get expenses reimbursed.

Say I have a sales appointment across town and have to drive there in my Yugo 65e (in almost perfect condition with only 234,508 miles [$500 to a good home])…Trip Cubby only needs three pieces of information.

1. The purpose of the trip. I usually enter a short description about who I’m meeting and what for.
2. The destination, which is usually the name of the company or restaurant where the meeting is being held.
3. The odometer readings at the start and end of my trip. This is made easier by the fact that the app remembers the odometer-end entry from the previous trip that you’ve recorded.

Done! It automatically dates the entry and adds it to the list of previous entries. It will let you export this list as a nice little spreadsheet — just imagine all the possibilities with that data.

This is just scratching the surface. You can setup frequent trips you take to make entering the information even faster. Say you have a client that you drive to from your office four times a week and don’t want to have to renter every time. Setup a frequent trip and select it when you are creating a new entry, adjust the mileage if it’s off, and you are done.

The app will also let you tag individual entries, which makes it easy to export mileage based on a particular tag. Say you want to differentiate between a sales and a support trip, or you are working for two divisions in a company and they require you to submit mileage based on the division that you did the work for. Tag the entry with the appropriate tag, and voila! — you have two sets of entries that you can use to generate the report from.

I could easily write another five paragraphs about everything the app will let you do to track this information, but instead I’ll just throw this data out there: last year I put 3,582.39 miles on that Yugo. The current rate the IRS will let you deduct from your taxes is $0.50/mile for business travel. The app paid for itself after the first 10 miles. Go ahead and get it (iTunes Link) for yourself.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BitMethod contact:

Daniel E. Shipton
CEO, BitMethod
(515) 460-3618
dan@bitmethod.com

BITMETHOD, DEVELOPER OF BNO NEWS IPHONE APP, ANNOUNCES KNYCH PLATFORM
Push-notification breaking news app evolves into full-fledged threaded update system

(DES MOINES, Iowa – Monday, November 23, 2009) – BitMethod, developer of the push-enabled BNO News iPhone app, is excited to announce Knych (pronounced “nitch”), a revolutionary micro-update driven information platform. Knych will give content providers a powerful, threaded, and multi-media enabled way to communicate with their audience across the web, desktop, and mobile.

Updates pushed through the Knych platform will reach users wherever they are at any time. Brandable distribution channels include the web, mobile apps, SMS, and desktop. Information can also be pushed to social-media endpoints such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.

“The defining feature is context,” said Daniel Shipton, CEO at BitMethod. “With streams like Twitter, there’s no context. Streams are just that – lots of pieces of information flying by as fast as people can update. Knych guides those pieces into threads and categories and creates a clutter-free experience that you’re always connected to, wherever you are. You don’t follow Knych, it follows you.”

Development of Knych began with the well-reviewed and critically acclaimed BNO News iPhone application. BNO News built a 1.4 million strong Twitter account providing breaking news coverage from a global team of editors. BitMethod’s BNO News iPhone application back-end allows the editors to pump categorized updates through the iPhone’s push notification system. The application provides one of the fastest ways to learn about major news events in human history.

Despite growing by nearly half a million followers since the launch of the app, BNO recently announced they are selling their Twitter account to MSNBC and transitioning their business to the role of a breaking news wire. BitMethod will continue to support users of the BNO News app, though the nature of the news alerts provided by BNO may change.

“We’re disappointed that BNO is choosing to leave behind their 1.4 million Twitter followers, but we’re excited for the possibilities the future of this platform holds,” Shipton said. “We’ll be transitioning the BNO app to the Knych platform and BNO will have the same opportunities as other providers as this platform develops. News is only one possible type of information that can be distributed through Knych and we’re looking forward to building new opportunities in the future as this system evolves.”

Shipton encourages brands and partners interested in distributing information through Knych to visit Knych.net. Partners interested in using Knych should contact Daniel Shipton at BitMethod no later than December 11 to be part of the next rollout. He can be reached at dan@bitmethod.com.

***

About BitMethod

BitMethod is a Des Moines, Iowa based app development firm focused on building interactive applications delivered on a variety of platforms. It specializes in building interactive applications for the web, mobile devices, and the desktop. Web standards are at the core of it’s technology expertise which includes Javascript, HTML, and RESTful service oriented APIs. Their focus is on simple, scalable systems architecture and clean, reusable code that enables rich user experiences. They make heavy use of technologies present on almost every device to provide cost effective cross platform development solutions.

NOTE FOR EDITORS
For any questions or interviews related to BitMethod, journalists can contact Daniel E. Shipton at dan@bitmethod.com.

ON THE WEB

Knych Platform – http://knych.net

ReadWriteWeb – BNO News App Launch Coverage – http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/08/03/03readwriteweb-breaking-news-online-the-iphone-app-is-live-13260.html

TechCrunch – 1.1 Update Coverage – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/bno-news-updates-its-great-iphone-app-lets-you-harness-stream-of-push-notifications/

TechCrunch – Apps for News on the Go – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/3-nifty-iphone-apps-for-news-consumption-on-the-go/

MobileCrunch – October Apps of the Month – http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/11/02/apps-of-the-month-best-iphone-apps-of-october-2009/

BNO News: http://www.bnonews.com

BitMethod: http://www.bitmethod.com

BitMethod on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bitmethod