Meir on Crossing The Line

 

“Our secret weapon is
no alternative.”

–Golda Meir (1898–1978)
Russian-born former Prime Minister of Israel

John and Abigail Adams had been more concerned with themselves and work/life balance than creating a democracy (if you’ve not seen the HBO miniseries – great stuff)?

What if… Abraham Lincoln (born on 2/12… coincidence? maybe) had quit trying after having a business go under and losing his first local legislative race (and then 3 congressional races and 2 senatorial races)?

What if… Martin Luther King didn’t have a dream and played it safe (and didn’t travel over 6 million miles giving more than 2500 speeches). What if he thought he was too young to have an impact (he did everything he did in a life of only 39 years)?

What if… Gandhi, Teresa, Roosevelt, Ford, Disney, Walton, Gates, Winfrey, Jobs, Stewart, and Ash hadn’t stepped up and worked hard. (What if the thousands of people who supported them hadn’t?) What if your police, military, firefighters didn’t?

What if… No one pushed it, risked it, and pushed it again (and again)?

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Updates in Google Offers Beta

Google Offer’s Beta in Portland started on June 1 and there have been 5 deals in total to this point. Here is a summary of the deals to date:
Date Co./URL Deal % off Purchase

Window

 Avail. Sold
6/1 Floyd’s Coffee $3 for $10 work of food 70% 15 hrs 2000 1709
6/2 Uptown Billiards $10 for $200 worth of Pool 50% 15 hrs 500 95
6/3 Karam Lebansese $8 for $16 of Lebanese Food 50% 15 hrs 500 0
6/4 Celebrity Tan $10 for $39 Spray Tan 74% 39 hrs NA 157
6/5 Portland Pedicab $45 for a $90 3 brewery pub tour 50% 23 hrs 700 15 but still open

 


 
Other than the first deal at Floyd’s the volume has been very low to moderate. On the ground anecdotal evidence indicated that Floyd’s was not that busy so it is not unlikely that being the first deal, that many of the offers purchased were by those in the industry assessing Google’s product. I guess Floyd’s won’t mind. Rocky Agrawal also noted that “the early ones get benefit of local press. All 4 tv stations and newspapers covered the story.”

In a conversation with one of the participants they shared with some interesting factoids:

– They were paying Google 50% of the proceeds. “Same as Groupon”

– The rep servicing the account did visit but is stationed in Los Angeles NOT in Portland

Replicating Groupon’s success will not be quick and it will not be easy for Google. Not only do you need a sales force but you need a great list of subscribers and popular businesses willing to give incredible discounts. Clearly Google is not anywhere near there yet if you take the sales number as an indicator. How long it will take will be interesting to see.

Android: New Eclipse plug-in

At the Google I/O conference a month ago, we demonstrated the next version of the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin. Today we’re happy to announce that version 11 is done and available for download!

ADT 11 focuses on editor improvements. First, it offers several new visual refactoring operations, such as “Extract Include” and “Extract Style,” which help automatically extract duplicated layout fragments and style attributes into reusable layouts, styles, and themes.

Second, the visual layout editor now supports fragments, palette configurations, and improved support for custom views.

Last, XML editing has been improved with new quick fixes, code completion in more file types and many “go to declaration” enhancements.
 


 
ADT 11 packs a long list of new features and enhancements. Please visit our ADT page for more details. For an in-depth demo, check out the video of our Android Development Tools session at Google I/O, below.

Please note that the visual layout editor depends on a layout rendering library that ships with each version of the platform component in the SDK. We are currently working on a number of improvements to this library as well, which we plan to release soon for all platform versions. When we release the updates, some new features in ADT 11 will be “unlocked” – such as support for ListView previewing – so keep an eye on this blog for further announcements.