Actually, the service I had wasn’t bad. But they insisted on sending me weekly notices that a domain was expiring, starting 60 days out from the expiration date. It got annoying, and there is, according to them, no way to disable this “feature.”

The only one I’ve found so far is Expensify.

Their claims that this is what they’ve done for 10 years and it’s worked is fine; it worked for them. When Jack Welch made Six Sigma all the management rage in the mid 1990’s, everyone followed that too. Did it make businesses more profitable or better? For some, sure. For others, it was a waste of time.

Do I agree with the points in the book? Yes and no. I think some of the points are very general. Are meetings toxic? No agenda, pointless meetings are, sure. Should you not write a functional specifications document for your software? If you’re the only one building it, maybe you don’t need it, but if you’re in an organization with stakeholders and employees…you’re going to want to listen to their needs and get sign off on what you’re doing.

Ask 10 successful business leaders what works for them, you’ll get 10 different answers. Put those 10 in a room, they’ll agree on three general ideas that make businesses work better. Implement those three ideas, and maybe only half of one works for you.

My philosophy? Take it all in with a grain of salt, and adapt the ideas as needed to work best for your company or situation.

I had just created a QR Code generator for iPhone, called “QR+Emoji”, and it’s on sale on AppStore now (http://itunes.com/apps/digdogsoftware).

The best part of the app is, you can put Apple’s emoji icon on top of the QR Code, and still able to be decoded by other scanners.

If you’re interested, I would love to give you the promote code to try.

I’d like to take the opportunity to point out that registered users have the choice of embedding either a shortened qrstuff.com URL in their QR code, or having the URL encoded in its native form as entered.

I found in the early days that quite a few anonymous users were entering URL’s that were either so long that they created an overly dense code that was difficult for a lot of smartphones to read, or were entering malformed URL’s that weren’t able to be navigated by phone based browsers.

In the interests of making it easier (and more reliable) for one-off casual users I brought in the mandatory URL shortening for anonymous users.

Yes, it can be simply subverted by entering the URL as TEXT, but I consider there’s more advantages than disadvantages in using shortened URL’s for inexperienced users.

My experience has shown that anyone who’s QR code deployment due diligence indicates that a shortened URL is not appropriate will have no hesitation in becoming a registered user.

I would also point out that QR codes generated by registered users of http://www.qrstuff.com continue to be fully functional even after their account registration expires.

Cheers
Greg