Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

We recently installed a zBoost cell phone signal booster in the office after reading John Biggs’ review of it at the New York Times. I’ve been trying to get a cell phone repeater/amplifier in the office for at least a year, because our office is essentially a big Faraday cage but all the products I could find had very mixed reviews, widely varying prices, and were sold by a random mix of companies. The only seemingly non-snakeoil company we could find was SpotWave but their products seemed to be very, very expensive*. We took a gamble on the zBoost product, installed it right after the winter holidays and it’s done an amazing job of solving our cell phone reception problems. Jason reports that it’s practically doubled his Motorola Q’s battery life (Verizon service). I can comfortably take and make calls on my cell phone sitting at my desk (Cingular service) — no more needing to step outside and battle with the noise of traffic. For anyone considering getting one of these things, I highly recommend the zBoost product. We bought ours from here at Wi-Ex for $399.

(On a side note, I happened to pass by SpotWave’s booth at CES this year and chatted with them and they have recently released a single band cell phone amplifier product for the small businesses like zBoost’s. They confirmed that zBoost’s product was effective, but raised some concerns about whether it was fully compliant with cell phone company and FCC regulations… I’m not how concerned we should be about that, but at this point, we’d have to be doing something very wrong to make me give the thing up!)

More of my notes on Blurb, this time the spotlight’s on BookSmart, their mostly excellent book layout software…

• I don’t like how Booksmart creates a working copy of all of my photographs (it puts them in C:\Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\My Documents\BookSmartData with every album and photograph having its own GUID… kind of hacky if you ask me). Booksmart doesn’t have it own tools for correcting the contrast/brightness/etc on photographs so once you layout your photographs, it’s a real pain to go back and make these corrections. Because Booksmart makes its own copy, making corrections involves using some third party software (in my case Picasa), adding the corrected photograph to the album and doing layout for that photograph again. Another problem with this “working copy” approach is that the “get pictures” operation in BookSmart, when I’m working with my camera’s original source images (3-4MB each) takes way too long because BookSmart is making it’s own copies of everything. To make BookSmart’s “get pictures” operation reasonable, I had to export downsampled versions of my images (getting them to around 1mb per image) and use those instead. I would much rather have used the original images since I’m trying to maximize the quality. I guess there’s a certain security that BookSmart and its developers get by making its own working copy, but I’d much prefer BookSmart not make copies of my images until it absolutely has to (ie not until it comes time to upload my book).
• BookSmart should have its photo editing tools or it should be tightly integrated with software that has its own photo editing tools. Basically, I want this in BookSmart:
  
  Some of Google Picasa’s photo correction tools
• Please don’t make AutoFlow the default option! It’s a neat idea, but the first time I used it the results were terrible (lots of cropped faces, feet, etc.) and I don’t think I’d touch it again unless I knew it had been significantly re-worked. As it stands, everytime I create a new album, I’m reminded of one of the few disappointing experiences I had with BookSmart
• I’d like it if the panes at the left side that show layout template options and the working set of pictures could be expanded and contracted to any size of my choosing. When you are laying out a big book, small things like being able to view three or even four photographs per row can make a big difference. Maybe this is possible on a bigger screen — I’ve thus far only used the software on my 1024×768 laptop screen, but there’s no reason this shouldn’t be possible on a smaller screen
• A slider to enlarge or shrink the size of thumbnails would be really nice a la Apple iPhoto (and now Picasa and Windows Vista). I occasionally use the ability to click on a thumbnail and see a larger version of the photograph, and that worked OK, but the slider bar that other programs have is a lot more natural.
• Make it so that I can right click on a page of my album and choose a different layout from the right click menu instead of having to scroll up and down through the window of templates and choose one there. Again, putting together a big book, it was tedious to have to switch contexts to the left hand side of the screen everytime I wanted to change the layout of the page I was working on.
• Preview modes and edit modes are pretty nearly identical, but preview mode serves an important purpose. It lets me clear other controls away and just flip the pages of my album. But whenever I used Preview mode, I found myself wanting to double click on a page and start editing it. Seems like this should be possible and I can’t speak for other people, but I repeatedly wanted to be able to do this.
• A note for both preview mode and edit mode: it’s nice that I can scroll in and out at will using the slider, but I’d also like an option that maximizes the current page or pages to the size of the pane that has the actual album pages in it. It was annoying to always be fiddling with that slider when what I often wanted to do was just maximize the current page view.
• I wish I could set enlargement sizes for a photograph using percentages in addition to being able to use the slider bar (which suffices in most cases). There are some cases where I want two photographs to be scaled up or down by the exact same amount and doing this with the slider bar is tedious and, ultimately, not possible.

Those are all of the thoughts that I can remember from the time that I spent with BookSmart this weekend. Of course, all the time I spent with Blurb this weekend may have been a waste since I received an e-mail from Blurb’s CEO over the weekend (which in itself was impressive…) letting me know that they’ll soon be rolling out the option of 11×13 books… which means I’m going to be waiting until the new format is available before doing anymore of my book work. 🙂

Some covers of books that I’m working on:

(this is the one that I threw together in 30 minutes to test the service out)

I wrote about my initial discovery of Blurb a week and a half ago. Shortly after I wrote that post, I spent 30 minutes with Blurb’s BookSmart software putting together an album of one of the events from my sister’s wedding. The process of putting the album together was pretty painless and the software exceeded my expectations. Earlier this week, less than week after I placed my order, I received my first Blurb book. Pretty impressive! The hardback book that I had ordered had a beautiful glossy sleeve on it and inside was a well bound book with high quality paper and printing. The quality of photo prints was well beyond the typical dithered fare I’ve seen from vendors like Ofoto and Shutterfly and Qoop. My Blurb book didn’t have the depth to them of printed photographs found in expensive coffee table books, but I was pretty happy and several others I showed the book to were impressed with the photo quality (including our designer at SnapStream, Joel — and he worked in print for a couple of years so his opinion was more than of a layperson). I think I have two wishlist items after going through the full cycle with Blurb once. 1) I want to be able to make larger books — 8×10 just doesn’t satisfy me and 2) I wish Blurb did something for color correction. For color correction, in my Blurb book, I had too many photographs that came out dark. They looked fine on my screen, but printed, they looked dark. So now that I know to pay closer attention to this, I think I’ll be OK, but I’ll still have to specially light correct for my Blurb books in Picasa (what I use to manage my photographs), export those photographs (quite a chore considering my first project is going to involve choosing from the 8,000+ photographs taken at my sister’s wedding), and then import them into BookSmart.

So even though I’m looking for more (I’m always looking for more!), I love the Blurb service and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be using it *alot*.

Forbes says he is, so it must be true.

Ooooh, I really like the new design for Google Groups. It was a great idea for them to thread stuff a la Gmail. Great job!

I read yesterday’s NYTimes article about Widgets and I don’t understand what the hubbub is all about. Widgets are simply a new way of extending web-based services to the desktop and webpages. The most interesting part of widgets, which is unfortunately ignored in the article, is that they represent a new paradigm for user interaction in the browser and on the desktop. The other interesting part of widgets are the web services behind them, but that’s obviously a story that’s already been well covered (heard of Web 2.0? :-)) The suggestion that people will suddenly start paying subscription fees for widgets is silly — yes, people might start paying for services and those services might include widgets, yes. Widgets being the driving factor being those subscription fees… personally, I don’t think so.

I was checking out the schedule for NAB this afternoon and I made the interesting discovery of their “Technologies for Worship” special exhibit:

The Technologies for Worship Pavilion is the one stop solution for church attendees. See the newest in audio, video, broadcast, computer and lighting technologies from top quality manufacturers. Take part in hands-on training, witness exciting product demonstrations and network with industry professionals who can help with your next product purchase, sermon series or building project.

Innovative stuff from the New York Times… An obituary video marking Art Buchwald’s death. I watched it for a few minutes and it’s a great time capsule. But I think I’d find it more interesting to see videos obituaries like this from everyday people as opposed to a famous guy like Art Buchwald.

I just came across the Design Goes Mainstream lecture series. It features lectures from:

January 24 – 7:00 pm
Donald Strum
Principal, Michael Graves Design Group (these are the guys that have been responsible for Target’s identity/commercials and a lot of their in-store products for the past couple of years)

January 31 – 7:00 pm
Lars Engman
University College Director, HDK, School of Design and Crafts at Göteborg
Formerly Design Director, IKEA

and

February 7 – 7:00 pm
Byron Merritt
Creative Director, Consumer Experience, Nike Global Brand Design
Formerly Practice Leader, IDEO

Sounds like a great lineup of speakers not to mention a great topic. If you’re in Houston and plan on attending, let me know.