Planet Jeffro

A lot of people wonder what I do all day.  Here’s a list of all the stuff I’m currently working on (as of October 22, 2011):

1. BluTrumpet.com business development - it’s a neat new ad network with better yields than iAd and customizable. I’m finding app developers and reaching out to them. Also incorporating their SDK into several of my own apps.
2. VocabSushi - supporting all the teachers using VocabSushi with their classes, looking into a very cool partnership opportunity with a large education website, working with a new social media star who will manage outreach and other stuff, updating the VocabSushi iPhone App.
3. Tutoring - I have 6 high school students. I see them once a week for SAT prep, math and/or physics tutoring.  Been doing this for 7 years.  I enjoy it and am always trying to get my students interested in programming (it’s a much better skill than knowing calculus, as it turns out.)
4. Fareshare - working with our partners in London, Green Tomato Cars, to finalize development of our cab-sharing iPhone app so they can launch it and ramp up for the Olympics. Things are on track and we’re planning to launch in January.
5. Corporate Videography - I work with a big PR company and shoot media trainings.  If you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and you’re about to go on TV to be interviewed, you’re going to want to prepare your messaging.  That’s what these trainings are for.  I film the mock interviews (with a backdrop, light, and mic) and play them back.
6. PatientCommunicator.com - this is a communications and practice management platform for independent doctors to streamline their workflow. My father uses it and he cut all 3 of his secretaries (his overhead is just 15%). He was profiled in Forbes for having such a tech savvy and highly efficient (and profitable) primary care practice. I’m working with a business partner to raise money from several already interested investors, and demo’ing to other interested parties.  Also speaking with interested doctors and getting them on board. Finalizing the specifications and product roadmap - our next few releases will sport features never before innovated by any EMR or platform management system on the market. It’s an exciting time.
7. Cnvrge.com - I’m coding this speed-networking via SMS app (though I’ll soon partner with my friend and developer James to unload that work to him), and using the app to run about 2 networking events per month.  Still proving out the concept through lean methods, but people seem to really like it. If you want to run it in your networking event, let me know!
8. Bandsnearby.com - A weekend hack I did with Pinzler, this is Pandora for local bands to help you find which intimate music venue in NYC you should go to tonight.  Had my virtual assistant grab all the bands playing at 13 venues over the next 6 weeks. Still tweaking a lot of functionality and data. Planning to get a designer to clean up the look.  It’s already allowed me to discover a few bands I really love that are local and small.
9. Supermarket Classroom - My mom’s app. This is for parents in the supermarket with their young children who want to give them something educational to do in the context of the aisles.  I just used Tinyproj to find a great graphic designer and hope to get this in the app store within a month.
10. IngeniousOwl.com - An online SAT course powered by Bespoke Education.  I’m working with a designer and star python developer to finalize the functionality and get this really helpful site up and running and into the hands of our students who need the extra help. If you want to beta test it, let me know. Planning to officially launch in January.
11. The Census Bureau - This is a spoof video of the Honey Badger video to celebrate the tireless Census Takers who come to your home when you don’t return the census forms. I’ll be editing this and loading to Youtube shortly. Stay tuned.
12. Blogging / running / walking Sagan (our greyhound) / hanging with my amazing wife (and occasionally proof-reading her papers) / Skype-ing with my dad / dreaming up dozens of new projects and ideas

So yeah, I’m stretched pretty thin.  But as always I’m loving my crazy days which let me regularly work on about 7 or 8 of these things. I rotate through a lot and by the end of a 16 hour day I git ‘r done.

Image by seanfraga via Flickr

Don’t Stalk the Admissions Officer: How to Survive the College Admissions Process without Losing Your Mind is a new book by Risa Lewak.  I chatted with her a while back about my experience as an SAT tutor and what kind of stress these students go through when prepping to take the test and apply to college. (Though I wasn’t quoted, my website VocabSushi.com was mentioned!  See the screen grab below.  Sadly, it isn’t entirely accurate: VocabSushi now has some ads on it.  Sorry!)

Risa’s book looks like a great read and I’m sure we at Bespoke Education will get a few copies for our office, as founder Tim Levin was also interviewed in the book.

Good luck with the sales, Risa - Can’t wait to come to your book reading/signing!

(The picture is of Gilman Hall, an iconic building from my alma mater, Johns Hopkins.)

I was using the Yelp app the other day and saw a neat feature.  They show the most common phrases that appear in the reviews for a particular venue so you can see what people are yapping about.  Cool, so everyone is talking about peanut butter fudge.

But it inspired me to do the same for VocabSushi and search through all the sentences for a particular word to discover what key phrases appear most with that word.  This concept, by the way, was actually the motivation behind VocabSushi.  You don’t really need to know the definition of most words to do well on the SAT.  You can get by with just knowing the common phrases and that will tip you off when you take the context into consideration.

Obvious examples:

egregious error

inclement weather

exorcise demons

I’m working on the Perl program to tackle this problem automatically.  It’s not too easy.  I’ve delved into “n-grams” before but this isn’t as simple as just taking every 2, 3 and 4 word phrase and counting them up.  You end up with “it is egregious” which isn’t a useful phrase at all.

I’m thinking of only doing 1 word before and after and ensuring that the word is at least 4 characters long.  But this cuts out a lot of phrases, such as “aid and abet” or “effusive with praise”.

If anyone has an idea on how to approach this, I’m all ears.

From Yelp:

In their reviews, Yelpers mentioned the linked phrases below a lot.  And these aren’t any old common phrases, they’re also the ones that our Yelp Robots have determined are unique and good, quick ways to describe this business.

I’d like to get my hands on one of those Yelp Robots!

Image via Wikipedia

Ewan Chou wrote two posts about VocabSushi on his blogs.  One is a general profile piece about the site and how it can help people learning English (it is in Chinese, so use Chrome to translate), posted on Orribu, a blog about learning English.

The other is an interview where I talk a bit about starting a business and what some of the issues have been and where things are going.  That was published on Asia-Thinking.com.  Appended below:

Ewan: You have mentioned in some interviews that the product is named VocabSushi for 2 reasons. First is because you love sushi. The second reason is combined with the keyword “bitesize”. Could you explain what exactly does the vocabulary “bitesize” mean, especially in the context of VocabSushi?

Jeff: The word “Bitesize” means “being or made small or brief especially so as to be easily manageable”.  That’s exactly what I set out to do for vocabulary.  We all know the best way to learn vocab is by reading… a lot.  Books, magazines, newspapers, essays, whatever.  But we don’t always have the time.  VocabSushi delivers just the sentences that contain the vocab words you’re trying to learn.  So you no longer have to stumble upon interesting vocab in the news or books you’re reading.  VocabSushi prepares the sentences for you in a way that is “easily manageable” and delicious!

Ewan: The market for eLearning is huge. And there are undoubtedly a great amount of competitors in the U.S. and from the whole world. What is the most significant feature, which differentiates VocabSushi from other eLearning platforms?

Jeff: The market for eLearning is indeed very large and I’ve tracked quite a few really interesting companies – both startups and established brands – in the space.   When you’re talking about learning English vocabulary, though, there simply is no other product on the market that pulls sentences from the news and generates questions and games with that content.  There may be a ton of test prep books, for example, but the sentence examples and questions are static and limited and get stale quickly.  VocabSushi has more than 500,000 sentences from 600 newspapers and it pulls about 3,000 new sentences every day.  So every time you use VocabSushi, you’ll encounter new and interesting articles, and that’s primarily what keeps the site so engaging.

Ewan: What are the biggest stumbling blocks since starting your own business?

Jeff: The biggest issue with starting a tech business is that you tend to overthink features that your customer wants.  What ends up happening is you spend a lot of time and money thinking of and building all these features that you think will be so amazing and necessary.  When it’s finally built and users are putting the site through its paces, something really interesting inevitably happens.  A whole bunch of those brilliant features you thought were absolutely necessary for version 1.0 aren’t used at all.  That sort of happened with VocabSushi, but you live and learn.  After the launch last year, I immediately started to incorporate user feedback into all new development ideas and that has been a big plus.

Ewan: Has it sprung to you that VocabSushi would receive venture funds or other kinds of investment? Or will it stay self-funded?

Jeff: VocabSushi was self-funded and bootstrapped.  I’ve spoken with some investors and that’s definitely one direction I might go, but ideally the service will grow organically first.  It’s certainly not easy to finance this kind of stuff yourself, but I like challenges.

Ewan: You have said that VocabSushi plans to expand to Spanish version. Do you foresee the possibility launching business in Asia, where education, especially English learning plays a major role?

Jeff: Absolutely.  I hope to get VocabSushi rebranded for the Asia market in the next year.  I’m actually speaking with people in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Korea to explore the potential of those markets.  Of course, VocabSushi is already available worldwide and our user base is global, but entering the English learning market in Asian countries will require some strategic planning.

Ewan: Besides iPhone Application, which you said for VocabSushi will be launched soon. Social networking has also been a hot topic today. Have you thought of integrating social elements into VocabSushi?

Jeff: Making VocabSushi more social is definitely on the agenda.  We are hoping to build a Facebook app as well as expand the games section to allow users to play each other.  We want to introduce gaming components as well as social components to get users engaged around specific vocabulary words, sentences and articles.  I think there is a huge potential for where this can go.

Ewan: What are the key factors for you to make VocabSushi a sticky application?

Jeff: Let’s face it: most people don’t think vocab is too interesting.  Most of the educational products and test prep books out there corroborate this fact with boring exercises and quizzes.  I think VocabSushi has three main features that keep users coming back: the sushi theme, the customized experience, and the interesting sentences.  We set out to make the site visually engaging with a unique theme, and the sushi/Japanese motif I think adds a lot to the enjoyment of the site.  Second, we did away with long generic lists of vocab and flash cards.  When you sign on to the site, you get a personalized set of words and questions and the site tracks everything you do.  The more you use it, the more the site adapts to your skill level – which words are you really learning, which words are you struggling with.  Finally, the sentences are from current news stories, so you’re bound to find interesting stuff every time you log on.

Ewan: You also have a journalism degree and receive a lot of press attention for VocabSushi. What are your tips for Startups to approach journalists for an editorial or press release?

Jeff: I think it’s important to recognize the types of outlets you’re going after.  Some blogs, like TechCrunch, really want to announce new products and interesting stuff, even if there are no users or it’s not even a great idea.  They are much more willing to dive into your site and write a post about it.  On the other hand, more traditional outlets tend to want to see a real “story” in your site.  It’s not enough to say “here’s a cool product I just built,” you have to be able to say “this cool product is being used by x thousand people in some amazing ways, they will tell their stories too.”  Often those types of articles (which VocabSushi hasn’t gotten yet) are more substantial because they demonstrate just how valuable the product is, rather than list out its features.   I’m connecting with many of the schools and teachers using VocabSushi Pro in order to get some feedback.  Perhaps these stories – a struggling school that now is seeing improved vocab scores, for example – would make for a compelling article.  That’s what I’m working on now.

Ewan: With a journalism background, how do you see the future development of online news? How could they sort out the problems with the monetization for their contents?

Jeff: This is a huge topic in my alumni email lists.  On the one hand, you’ve got major news outlets becoming redundant in the face of all these amazing blogs that cover specific beats – education, tech, energy, environment.  For example, the editors of the NY Times Tech section read TechCrunch to stay up to date on tech startups and trends!  I read lots of tech blogs and never find major news outlets to have much extra information I didn’t already read.  On the other hand, however, you absolutely need investigative reporters and journalists questioning the status quo, questioning government and researching financial records, interviewing CEOs and also knocking on doors and calling sources.  These are the stories that few blogs cover, and in fact there are fewer and fewer “real” stories being written these days than ever before.  Most news is “street knowledge” – like that there was a hurricane or riots in some country.  But you don’t get many stories that dig deep and expose something big.  It’s not that there aren’t many of those stories – there are probably more than ever before! – it’s just that we have half as many working journalists than we did just 5 years ago, when I graduated journalism school.  That’s very very scary.  The big issue is how to reconcile the fast and easy money of “now” stories on the blogs (which can pull in lots of eyeballs and ads and have large short term gains) with the less lucrative but much more important investigative stories that require maybe 3 or 6 months of research and seasoned reporters.  Sadly, things are definitely moving towards the former and the latter is getting squeezed out.

Ewan: NYC surely has its specific startup scene. What are to you the most attractive points or advantages to start your own business there?

Jeff: I’m originally from just outside of NYC and I’ve lived in Manhattan for the past 6 years.  I love it here and can’t imagine being anywhere else (except maybe San Francisco).   New York City offers a startup a huge amount of resources for a fledgling company.  For example, “co-working” is a hot trend these days and there are some fantastic places where you can rent a workspace for cheap and work next to other tech people.  I haven’t done that yet, but I want to.  There are tons of people and groups and networking opportunities here, so it’s pretty easy to find like-minded people.  If you’re looking for a top notch programmer or web developer, NYC has loads.  I attend the NY Tech Meetup, a meetup.com group, that has 13,000 members and monthly 800-person events at NYU.  It’s an amazing way to meet other startups in the city and swap stories.  I’m trying to take advantage of the proximity to all this talent, and arrange meetings with founders of local startups.  NYC is also home to a fantastic community of VC firms and angel investors.

Ewan: If you would have not founded VocabSushi, what you would be doing now?

Jeff: I would have founded something else!  I’m actually involved in a few other startups as well, including an iPhone app to help New Yorkers share taxis, an online SAT course, and a patient-doctor communication tool.  I’m pretty busy!

Ewan: Next time when I go to New York, which Sushi restaurant would you recommend to me?

Jeff: A few years ago there was an amazing all you can eat sushi restaurant on the Upper East Side, but it closed down (maybe because I ate too much!).  For a less expensive meal (and bring your own alcohol), check out Cherin in the East Village.  On the Upper West Side, my favorite place is Tenzen, which has a “Tenzen special for two” which is amazing.  People have recommended Sushi Samba and Blue Ribbon, but they are quite expensive.  Finally, Sushi Yasuda in midtown, which I have tried, is pricey but has an incredible selection of fresh fish.

Image via Wikipedia

I finally finished up the mockups for a sweet iPhone app that will use the sentences from classic books as the basis for learning vocab.  It’s a totally new concept that I think will be a big hit.

Basically, I’m utilizing the same indexing engine that is used for VocabSushi to go through news articles and extract sentences, and applying it to books from Gutenberg.  This app is going to be completely independent of VocabSushi - so you won’t need an account or anything - and it’ll be free and include 1 or 2 books.  Additional books will be available as an in-app purchase for 99 cents.

What is a book?  This app is NOT an ereader.  So when you buy a “book”, what you’re really obtaining is the vocab and sentences that use that vocab from that particular book.  Emma, by Jane Austen, might have 875 vocab words that appear in 1,243 sentences.

The app will have a few main sections: Vocab, Learn, Quiz, Progress and Profile.

To make the screenshots, I spent a lot of time searching for a decent mockup tool for the iPhone.  Well, it turns out nothing good exists.  They are either way too complex or way too simple.  An iPhone app mockup should not take long to make, but all these tools are horribly inefficient to use.  The best thing I found was this powerpoint file with all the elements.  (“best” is purely relative… it was still incredibly cumbersome and annoying).

I wish someone could build a mockup tool that doesn’t involve so much clicking and dragging.  Large parts of the process should be automatic.  For example, if you want to change the “back” button to have certain text, the text should dictate how big that button is, and what happens to the text at the top.  Styles should be easily applied to a group of elements.  They should automatically be snapped into the only feasable place they can go!  Why do I need to drag them to the right spot?  There should be templates to work off of, so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time.  Most apps are pretty derivative, and that’s totally fine.

If you know of a good app mockup tool, let me know?

Update: No, I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t install the dev tools.  I did find a few interesting iPhone apps that let you create the mockups directly on the phone.  That seems pretty neat.  Pretty lame Apple didn’t make a Windows version.