A note to aspiring entrepreneurs

Yesterday my company, Mobile Simplicity, was featured on the young entrepreneur blog FBENow.com. Check it out here.

I find it fascinating that you can move so quickly from the one taking advice to the one giving advice. There is no question that we are still taking in far more advice than we are giving, but I'm happy to be able to help even a little bit.

The iPhone(TM) Now Helps Consumers Keep Their Family Safe from Sex Offenders with the WatchOut! Program

The WatchOut! iPhone application officially goes live with a quick and easy interface to help consumers search for registered sex offenders in any given area while supporting the fight against domestic violence

NEW YORK, April 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The WatchOut! iPhone application, which enables consumers to search any given area for registered sex offenders based on location or specific name, officially launches today. Ten percent of profits from the WatchOut! application go to the Domestic Violence Crisis Center (www.dvccct.org).

The WatchOut! application features an easy-to-use interface that enables users to identify dangers around them by searching for registered sex offenders by zip code or by name. The program also allows the user to determine where the highest concentrations of offenders live by plotting the locations on a map. The WatchOut! application is perfect for parents of young children, people who are planning to move to a new area, those who are in the dating scene and anyone else who is interested in knowing who is nearby in order to be safer.

Believing that nothing is more important than safety, WatchOut! Software, LLC in partnership with Mobile Simplicity (www.mSimplicity.com) utilize the power of the iPhone to make consumers better informed about potential dangers. The reality is that nearly everyone lives near a registered sex offender, but few are aware of who these people are and where they live. "We feel that it is important for people who are moving into a new area to be aware of their surroundings and any possible dangers to their family," said Rick Krakowski, President of Mobile Simplicity, the firm that developed the mobile application. "It should be a part of anyone's research when looking into a new area, or even to increase awareness in one's current neighborhood."

The WatchOut! program is available for download through the Apple(R) iTunes(R) store at the following link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=310086341&mt=8)

About Mobile Simplicity

Mobile Simplicity (www.mSimplicity.com) is a full-service mobile application development firm with iPhone expertise. In addition to producing proprietary programs, including the top-rated applications CraigsMobileList and What's Fresh, they provide a full suite of application development and marketing services.

SOURCE Mobile Simplicity

Our new company logo

Mobile Simplicity finally has an official company logo! What do you think?



The "m" on the left was designed as a reusable asset.


The logo was designed by the delightful and wonderfully talented Lauren Koueiter. I suggest you go to her for your logo needs so she can get her business kicked off! Email me if you would like me to pass along a request to her.

Announcing the WatchOut! program

This has been one of the craziest weeks of my life. The release of What's Fresh was well received and my company, Mobile Simplicity, has immediately become a developer that people want to work with. Quite exhilarating!

Today we launched our 5th app, the WatchOut! program.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=310086341&mt=8

Nothing is more important than your safety, and the safety of those you love. One way you can increase your safety is by being aware of the people who live around you. The reality is that nearly all of us live near a registered sex offender, but few are aware of who these people are and where they live.

The WatchOut! program is a tool to help you stay safe by helping you be aware of these individuals in your community. This program is for parents, people who are planning to move to a new area, people who are dating and anyone else who is interested in knowing who is nearby in order to be safer.

The WatchOut! program allows you to:
- Know who is around you by searching for registered sex offenders by zip code
- Be sure an individual is not an offender by searching for their name in the database
- Find out where the highest concentrations of offenders live by plotting them on a map
- Tag selected individuals to access them quickly and easily

A few statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice:

- An estimated 24% of those serving time for rape and 19% of those serving time for sexual assault had been on probation or parole at the time of the offense for which they were in State prison in 1991.
- Of the 9,691 male sex offenders released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, 5.3% were rearrested for a new sex crime within 3 years of release.
- Approximately 4,300 child molesters were released from prisons in 15 States in 1994. An estimated 3.3% of these 4,300 were rearrested for another sex crime against a child within 3 years of release from prison.

The offender database is updated regularly to capture those who just moved into your neighborhood.

Don’t get caught off guard. WatchOut!

New Mobile Simplicity release, What's Fresh

Today our third Mobile Simplicity application launched in the store. It's called What's Fresh. Check it out at www.msimplicity.com.

Do you like to eat fresh and healthy food?
Do you make environmentally-friendly decisions?
Do you consider yourself a locavore?
Do you enjoy owning beautiful applications?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, What’s Fresh is for you.

What’s Fresh will help you to eat the freshest foods by allowing you to know anytime, anywhere what fruits and vegetables are currently in season in your area. This knowledge is valuable to make selections that are beneficial for both your health and for the environment, whether you are at home or at the market. The transport of fruits and vegetables not only diminishes the taste and the nutritiousness of food, but the fuel used to transport food causes harm to the environment through the destruction of natural resources as well as through emissions. What’s Fresh assists you in making more sound shopping decisions by logically displaying fresh foods in your area.

For seasons when little is fresh in your area, What’s Fresh allows you to determine where in the country your desired item is in season so that you can be more certain that the produce you buy is fresh and delicious.

Finally, What’s Fresh helps you plan your eating in advance by providing a Freshness Calendar displaying what items are in season throughout the course of the year in your area.

All this is accomplished in a beautifully designed app that is intuitive and pleasurable to use – an app that you’ll want to share with others.

Features:

· Lists in season fruits and vegetables within a user-defined region and displays them in a simple and intuitive dashboard.

· Provides a calendar to show what products are in season throughout the course of the year in your area, and if they are produced fresh or in a greenhouse.

· Allows the user to determine where in the country particular products are in season in a certain month using a beautiful and intuitive map

· Currently over 200 fruits and vegetables with more being added each day

· All 50 states supported (currently no international support)

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309667015&mt=8

Are you curious?

Hopefully you've thought some of these posts are funny or interesting, or maybe you are just insanely bored. You may have thought, "What does this Rick Krakowski look like?" I have experienced this curiosity before as well (with others -- I'm not THAT narcissistic). So you go to Google and perform an imagine search. Let me guide you through the results you will see.

Not me. But probably the closest one to the list, and what I may have looked like if my grandparents never moved out of Lithuania and I decided to stick with the BBS.



Also not me. But I was friends with a lot of people from New Jersey.




Still not me. But this hard core Rick Krakowski is a force to be reckoned with.




Could it be?





Thanks for letting me clear things up.

How much is Steve Jobs worth?

Today the blogosphere (yes, I said it) started buzzing about how Steve Jobs looked thin during the big hoo haa earlier this week to announce the 3G iPhone. Jobs battled pancreatic cancer in 2004 and there are fears that his health could be in jeopardy. So why do I bring this up? Simply to provide an interesting factoid.

These rumors (and there is no substantiation to the rumors whatsoever) of Jobs potential declining health dropped Apple's stock $7.55 today. With 881.6 million shares outstanding this means that the rumor cost Apple $6.65 billion dollars (and me $175). Apple better hope they can make this guy live forever.

The lesson here is if you think Steve Jobs is mortal than short sell Apple.


(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the stock market. It is likely that the analysts following the stock know more than I do so if you short sell Apple and you lose all your money when it shoots up to $250 don't blame it on me. This was simply for entertainment sake and to distract myself from my Capital Markets homework. Does it make the advice more credible since I am currently working on Capital Markets homework? Maybe. I will make one prediction. When news comes that Jobs is going to retire, Apple stock will fall significantly. It doesn't take Nostradamus to call that one though.)

Lessons from Vietnam

I'm back from Vietnam, a very beautiful place. Nice people, relatively inexpensive, easy to get around. I definitely recommend it as a place to go. I'd like to write about a business lesson that I learned, or maybe I already knew but it really came to light when I was there.

Successful businesses are run by owner's who care about the business and oversee quality. Successful businesses are customer-centric and provide a unique experience that makes you want to come back again and again.

Let me present two case studies from my experience.

Case #1 -- Mr. Xe

Mr. Xe was a tailor recommended to us in Hoi An. Hoi An is the place everyone goes to in Vietnam to get clothes made. There is literally a tailor every 10 feet. So how does one differentiate itself.

The most successful tailor is called Yali. Through my observation, it seems that Yali because successful by catering to the western travelers (smart). It is clean and the place looks like a Banana Republic. Everyone seems to think its the best, but I have my doubts. When I looked into the sewing room it looked like a sweatshop in there, and the service was terrible.

Mr. Xe on the other hand had a much smaller and more Vietnamese-looking establishment. He was a tiny, gay, Vietnamese man that when I first saw him seemed to be only in his underwear and t-shirt (I later determined that they were just extremely short shorts). When he spoke in English he sounded like Smiegel from the Lord of the Rings, "Yeeessss, peeerrrrrfect" Needless to say, this guy was a serious character.

Every time we walked in the store, and it was at least 5 times, they provided us seats and free water. Mr. Xe and his employees helped us to pick out the linens for our clothes, but in the fitting room it was all Mr. Xe. If anything wasn't perfect Mr. Xe was not satisfied. He even gave me a shirt for free that he felt wasn't perfect even though I thought it looked fine! In one case I didn't exactly like how my pocket was sitting, so he zoomed me over to his tailor on his motorbike. There, in contrast to the sweatshop Yali had going on, the tailor had his own home extension where he worked that was well-lit, pleasant, and covered with vegetation. Mr. Xe had great pride in his business and in his product, and you could see it in the way that he treated his customers and the way he treated his employees (although he definitely dug into them pretty good when things weren't perfect).

Case #2 -- Mr. Kim

Cafe des Amis, or Mr. Kim's place as I like to call it, was rated highly in the Lonely Planet guide and also by fellow travelers that we had spoken with. The highlight it seemed, was that the owner cooked for you whatever he felt like for the day.

When we arrived we were immediately greeted by Mr. Kim himself before even stepping foot into the restaurant. He then rushed us to our table and pulled out his signature book where he showed us all the people that had come from New York and read the highlights aloud to us. He was particularly proud of Justin Timbalake's high praises.

As Mr. Kim talked our ear off the food started to come out. Mr. Kim explained that he was the #1 taster in the South Vietnam army during the war (I think this is supposed to be a good thing). He seemed very proud of that. Each dish that came out he, or one of the waitstaff, showed us exactly how to prepare it before eating it, which was great because otherwise I probably would have eaten everything completely wrong. At one point Mr. Kim was so excited for me to try something that he literally spoon fed me. I'm pretty sure this was the first time I'd been spoon fed since mommy was flying the plane, a little awkward maybe, but an experience nonetheless. Eventually Mr. Kim met with the other tables and gave us some privacy, but it was clear that Mr. Kim loved his product and loved his customers.

These are two of the best experiences I had in Vietnam due to these characters, and I would recommend both of these places to anyone traveling to Vietnam. Larger businesses in the US, and particularly web-based businesses often do not have the customer face-time and ability to give personalized attention that these owners gave, but I think it is a good lesson that if you can channel this passion and customer-centric approach in whatever business you are running you are sure to have happy customers who become advocates for your business.

Vietnam -- Off the beaten path?

For those of you who have been hitting that refresh button time after time again in anticipation of my next post that has been long coming, I assure you all is well. Thanks to 3 final exams this weekend I had little time to devote to anything but. I am happy to say now that I have completed them and am currently typing from the friendly confines of the Singapore Airlines airport lounge.



This evening I am flying to Vietnam for two weeks with my girlfriend, frequenting a few cities in the north. I would put myself in the upper middle class of experienced travelers (class referring to the intensity of travel and not the expense of travel). Although I have never traveled for months on end through the rural towns of India on my own, I have been to places and tried things that many have not (goat head soup on the streets of Kashgar in the Xinjiang province of China to name the one I'm probably most fond of).




So I question, is Vietnam still considered off the beaten path? Over the last few weeks when telling people it seems that half don't believe I'm going there, and the other half make it sound like its going to Munich as they talk about their trip to Myanmar. I guess it doesn't really matter, but I'm throwing the question out there anyway. I think it really comes down to perspective.

Stay tuned for interesting thoughts from Vietnam. I promise not to waste any of your time with pointless posts updating you about getting off the airplane. In the meantime, check out the video, although I'm biased I really think this is pretty fantastic and is an interesting perspective on Xinjiang (the Northwest province in China that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan, and a few other central Asian countries). Also, the commentary on You Tube is pretty engaging.

Corporate gift matching for the small business community

It's not uncommon for an employer to match corporate donations that their employees make. It is uncommon, however, for corporations to match the donations of their customers. This is exactly what Advanta has decided to do.

Through an innovative program called Kiva B4B, the business credit card company Advanta is offering to match up to $200 per month that their customers donate to Kiva.org using their credit card. I wrote about Kiva.org a couple weeks back. It is a fantastic micro finance distribution organization that allows a person to donate specifically to a small business owner in an emerging market. Once the business owner pays back the loan the money is distributed back into your kiva.org account for you to re-donate or withdraw.

The way the Advanta program works is that Advanta matches your donation, up to $200 per month, that you make on the card. When the small business owner pays the loan back, Advanta gets their money back. Since the default rate on kiva.org is only .1%, the costs that Advanta is incurring are the .1% in defaulted loans plus the spread on the loans (the loans are extended over a 1 year period). By capping the loan amount at $200 per month Advanta is able to offer this innovative program at minimal cost.

Advanta has uncovered on a plausible viral marketing play in an industry (small business credit cards) that has yet to see anything truly "viral". The latest trend in the business card space has been development of small business owner online communities. American Express led the way with http://www.openforum.com/. The most recent entrant has been Bank of America with Small Business Online Community (don't you think they could have been more creative with the name?). Other players in the industry have similar community sites. The idea behind these sites is to generate a community support network among small business owners and make the community a central source of resources and information, in an effort to build the company's brand in being knowledgeable and supportive to the community of small business owners. Although once novel in concept, I question the amount of use that these sites are getting, and the true branding benefit of the sites. Quickly going to the discussion boards of any of these sites shows that the content is posted primarily by hired hands and there are relatively few views of any of the articles. From an acquisition sense they even have less effect.

Advanta has taken a different direction with their community play, one that is both novel and works in a branding sense, and, I would argue, has more of a potential to drive acquisition than the sites the competition has offered. By taking the community idea in a new direction -- an international business owner community that is able to provide opportunities to those less fortunate -- Advanta has hit on community and on the growing trend of social entrepreneurship. To support this, Advanta has incorporated an amazing website as well as a full Kiva B4B community with forums. Linking to the site loads a video that illustrates the idea behind Kiva B4B by providing a split business owner screen (the site is also developed this way). The left side of the screen is the business owner that is giving, and on the right is the business owner that is benefiting.

Hats off to Advanta for coming up with something truly new in the small business credit card industry that really does benefit society while driving revenue for the corporation.