reDesign

Last summer, Virgin America ran an incredible deal for air travel. I bought too many and need to get rid of some of them.

These are great vouchers that are good for any city in Virgin’s route map. They are good for last minute trips and are in Main Cabin Select, which includes extra legroom, unlimited free food and alcohol, unlimited premium movies and priority security and boarding.

As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Virgin and fly them whenever I can.

Here are the high level terms:

• Good for last minute trips. I’ve used some of my vouchers for trips that otherwise would cost $2,000.
• Must complete all travel by June 15.
• Only valid in Main Cabin Select.
• You are responsible for taxes. For U.S. trips, this is about $14 for a non-stop. Cabo, Cancun and Puerto Vallarta taxes are about $90.

I’m asking $400 each. (Which is roughly what I paid, plus transaction costs.) You can pay me by paypal and I will send you the code that you can use to redeem on Virgin’s Web site.

If you are a friend and are coming to visit SF, you also get a place to stay in my guest room.

Interested? Email me at redesign@agrawals.org.

Some of you undoubtedly noticed that I didn’t write up my views on Groupon’s earnings.

It’s not because Groupon suddenly proved that I’ve been wrong for the past year. To the contrary, Groupon’s earnings report reinforced everything I believe about the company. Since earnings, I’ve bought even more puts against the company. I believe that the markets continue to misread the company and that the company takes very deliberate actions to confuse the markets. There are a number of intricacies of accounting that come into play. (In this case, unlike in the past, Groupon isn’t doing anything wrong.)

The primary reason I didn’t write up my analysis is that it doesn’t help small businesses or entrepreneurs. It would primarily help professional money managers and hedge funds.

My goal all along has been to help small businesses and entrepreneurs. The byproduct of that has been helping professional money managers. But professional money managers can afford to pay for my analysis; many of them value it and already do. It’s counterproductive for me to give that analysis away.

This situation illustrates the two markets for financial news: the consumer market and the professional market. Over the past year, a number of people have told me that I’m providing professional-grade analysis in the consumer media market.

Unfortunately, the two markets also pay vastly differently. It’s incredibly hard to make meaningful money in consumer media. You need a lot of scale. But if you have unique information in the professional markets, it’s worth a lot of money.

Tiering of information is very common. Bloomberg and Reuters are two of the world’s highest quality news organizations. But they fund their news operations with the massive profits they make from their professional products. I was talking to someone earlier this week who told me, “If there’s one thing we can thank Wall Street bankers for, it’s funding two high quality news sources.”

There’s another challenge with writing sophisticated financial analysis for the consumer press: many people don’t understand it. Then I have to deal with comments and personal attacks from people who have no clue what I’m talking about. That provides a negative value for me. When I’m talking to hedge funds and mutual funds, at least I know they understand the core of my argument. (Even if they don’t always agree.)

Going forward, I’ll continue writing about business models and elements of the story that affect small businesses and entrepreneurs. I want to help both of those groups succeed.

I have a bet with Alex Lawrence that is a derivative of my bet with Paul Kedrosky. If I win my bet with Kedrosky on 5/15, I win the bet with Lawrence. This means that at the end of trading on 5/15, Groupon is worth less than $6 billion, the price that Google reportedly offered for Groupon.

Stakes: loser buys dinner at restaurant of winner’s choice when we’re in the same city.

Here are some more PR tips for startups:

• Be out there. Reporters often get story ideas or thoughts for sources by doing Google searches or looking through blogs. If you have a strong presence elsewhere, it increased the odds that a reporter will contact you.
• Follow up. If you’ve engaged with a reporter, be sure to offer help along the way. When I was in New Orleans recently, I wanted to do a piece on how cell networks deal with large surges in demand. Verizon loaned me several devices. After I had a day to play with them, Verizon’s PR team checked in to make sure the devices were working.
• Details matter. Verizon PR knew that I was going to be testing the devices at Jazz Fest. They pre-loaded the Jazz Fest app on both devices. That was a thoughtful touch that I definitely noticed.
• Don’t email links to the exclusive you just gave a competitor. That’s a pretty surefire way to ensure you won’t get coverage.
• Pay attention to what’s going on in other news. If Facebook updates their S-1 on the day you had planned to talk about your product, you might want to re-consider your launch. It may not seem fair, but that’s life. Chances are that your story won’t see the light of day.
• Pay attention to reporters’ schedules. If there are specific reporters you are targeting, follow them on Twitter. I’ll tweet out when I’m traveling or on vacation. Those are generally not the best times to reach out.
• Pay attention to reporters’ own quirks. Many people tweet out their pet peeves about PR people or what they look for in stories. Be on the lookout for those.

Since the mid-90s, I’ve been a frequent traveler. I’ve flown more than a million miles and stayed the equivalent of several years in hotel rooms. All of this can take a big toll on friendships and relationships.

I recently came up with a new approach to help me stay connected to friends and family: I committed to hosting a monthly wine and cheese gathering.

This does a number of things for me:

• I get a fun evening with friends.
• It makes it easy to meet up with a lot of people at once.
• It forces me to clean my place at least once a month.
• It forces me to unpack my suitcase at least once a month. Too often, I’ve lived out of a suitcase, even when I was actually “home.”

Having this outlet is also good for business as it helps ward off loneliness when on the road.

At once a month, it’s not a significant time commitment and the benefit is well worth it.

I also try to time it so friends and business associates who are visiting from out of town can see my friends and connect with Silicon Valley.

Because it’s in my home, I don’t post the details. But if you’re a regular reader and are visiting SF, shoot me a note and I’ll see if I can extend an invite.

Back in the day, I used to like to tinker with software and set configurations and such. The picture above is me working on my Commodore 64 a long, long time go. Back then, I rocked BASIC. I even wrote a stock portfolio app that I submitted for publication in RUN magazine. (What a kid was doing writing a stock portfolio app… well, I was a dork.)

Now, I just want stuff to work. Out of the box. I don’t want to tinker. I have a life that I want to live and that doesn’t involve searching support forums or calling tech support.

To further that goal, I’m launching a bi-weekly column featuring products and services that just work. The column will run bi-weekly on VentureBeat. (Assuming I can find enough products to feature.)

Here are some high-level guidelines on what I’m looking for:

• Must be consumer-focused.
• Hardware, software and Web apps are fine. Bonus points for seamlessly blending all of them.
• Must be shipping or soon-to-be shipping.
• Bonus points for elegantly handling network connectivity.
• Ideally, it makes the complicated simple.
• An ordinary user can go from unboxing to primary use cases within 10 minutes. (I know I’m not an ordinary user, but I can play one when I’m testing products.)
• Bonus points for elegant visual design.
• If it’s a location-based product, I need to be able to use it near my home in San Francisco.

Here are examples of things that are likely to disqualify a product:

• Requiring users to enter things like hexadecimal codes or entering IP addresses like 192.168.0.1.
• Burying essential instructions for operation in a thick user manual.
• Requiring users to install software from a CD and providing no alternatives for downloads.

This isn’t designed to be the traditional product review. It will look closely at great products and what makes them great. It doesn’t mean I won’t criticize the product, but the point is to encourage great products and help designers learn from great designers.

Based on my experience, my sense is that products from companies like Apple, Square and fitbit generally qualify. Products from companies like Cisco (except the dearly departed Flip), Microsoft and Comcast wouldn’t.

Got a product like that? Shoot me a note: redesign@agrawals.org. Please don’t ship stuff to me without an OK — my apartment is tiny.

I have this bet with Paul Kedrosky:

• If Groupon’s market cap falls below $6 billion on any day on or before June 3, I win.
• If Groupon’s market cap stays above $6 billion until after June 3, Paul wins.

Market cap is measured as the market cap at the end of trading on any day, as reported by Google Finance. Intraday dips don’t count.

$6 billion is the price that Google reportedly offered for Groupon.

Stakes: loser buys dinner at restaurant of winner’s choice when we’re in the same city.