Category: Ideas

Things we’ll say to our grandkids

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In the Oct. Wired magazine they had a small blurb about things we’ll say to our grandkids.  Some of the good ones were:

  • Back in my day, we only needed 140 characters
  • There used to be so much snow up here, you could strap a board to your feet and slide all the way down
  • TV contests gave cash to whoever could store the most data in their head
  • Well, the screens were bigger, but they only showed the movies at certain times of day
  • You used to keep the files on your computer, and you had to go back to the same computer to access them!

I thought it was an interesting topic.  Some more i thought of:

  • Even though they were bigger, our cell phones were only for making calls
  • It seems strange, but new artists didn’t pay us to listen to their music.  In fact, we had to buy the music from them
  • When i was a kid, when we looked at cars we used to think “the bigger the better”
  • People used to think that being tan was cool
  • When kids were born, first of all they didn’t grab a clone for storage but also they had nold_school_cellphoneo way of not only knowing what hair color or muscle mass they kid would have and some patents didn’t even know if they were having a boy or a girl
  • We had these things called “TV channels” and we had to order all the channels or none of them.  We only had a few hundred of them and you couldn’t search for anything on your TV.
  • We used to go to watch the football/baseball game in person. I know it’s crazy but they used to have huge stadiums to watch the game with your own eyes.

What can you think of?

Techtacky

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This is an interesting chart that i found on Seth Godin’s blog here:

Techtacky

As he says: “The challenge is in designing structures and transparency that will attract the good guys while burying or repelling those that seek the new technology (because they can’t find anywhere else to go). In other words, you either need to move the top left to the top right (not easy, but possible*), or educate the bottom left of the grid in how to contribute to the culture (really difficult indeed). The best new media (like blogs and possibly twitter) open doors to people who didn’t used to have a voice. The worst ones (like blogs and possibly twitter) merely create new venues for scams and senseless yelling.”

People like to bemoan new technologies but it’s just lazy to criticize the entire sector.  Some innovations move you ahead (upper right) and some introduce new problems (lower right)

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Do What You Want

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There are a lot of times in the world where people tell me what to do. Things like, “I 0444_20innovaneed the deck by tonight.” or “Can you meet me on Sunday to talk about the deal?” Sometimes i like doing it and sometimes i don’t. Here’s what i do know though: I always like doing what i believe in and i always hate doing what i don’t think is right.

This is why i love stories about people who were told they were wrong and they persevered and proved their naysayers wrong. Three stories stick out in my head:

Steve Jobs got forced out of Apple because he had a crazy idea that hardware can be beautiful. Years later he came back to prove that he was right 20 years before.  Now he’s dominating the music industry, the largest shareholder of the largest media company (Disney) and revolutionizing the mobile technology industry

In-N-Out Burger was a fast-food joint just like all the others in the 50’s. Ray Kroc wanted to buy it and franchise it. That was the thing to do.  McDonald’s was doing it, so was Taco Bell and Wendy’s and everyone else. But Harry Synder (the founder) of In-N-Out told Ray to pound salt.  He had a different idea. Instead of “lower costs and increase sales” it was “do one thing and do it as well as you can.” That one thing was the In-N-Out burger.  He never sold. The Synder family has purchased every In-N-Out with cash.  He wanted to know every meat distributor by his first name. That’s why the #1 requested meal backstage at the Oscars is In-N-Out and why there’s over an hour wait at a place where burgers are $2.

toystory_woodyJohn Lasseter lost his job at Disney back in ‘86. He was fired by an old line animator who said there was no future in computer animation. Lasseter slept under his desk, and a decade later delivered Pixar’s first hit, “Toy Story”.  After story he and Pixar have gone for 10 for 10.  Nothing is a sure thing in media.  And John is 10 for 10.

All of these guys did it their way and the world is a better place because of it. We can only hope that we have the conviction and passion and talent of them in our own lives.

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Spying on Myself and LifeTracker

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Picture 3Fred Wilson had a post this weekend about MyWare and his love of it. I couldn’t agree more as i’m a huge proponent of tracking my own activity. For instance,

Fred wrote that he likes to keep this data because, “I am interested in this sector of implicit behavior data. I believe that publishing the things I do on the web will allow web services to get smarter about me and give me better experiences.” I keep track for different reasons.  I actually like to keep data about myself. I find it interesting and i use to remember events of my life.

But i see it going even further.  What i wrote was:

When i look at the web, i see people trying to capture experiences. They capture photos on flickr, videos on youtube, and notes with people on email. Their life is being tracked but not in a comprehensive way.

I could imagine a site – call it “Lifetracker.com” which tracks all the things you do. You plug in last.fm, gmail (or other email), google voice, flickr/picassa, twitter, credit card (mint), youtube and other web services. I then matches 3 things: the data, the contacts, and the time. It creates a timeline for you and marks who you’ve been interacting with and when. There’s an API so each new web service you start using you can plug into it.

There are several benefits: (1) as you mentioned, you can give this data to services for recommendations; (2) you can search your life. If google is web search, twitter is real-time search, this would be “me search”; (3) just like we don’t remember phone numbers anymore b/c we put them into our phone to retrieve any time we want, we can start throwing information into lifetracker such as meeting notes, audio recordings of phone calls, etc. so we don’t have to write stuff down and remember it. Use the cloud as a memory storage instead of your brain

I see this coming and it’s really exciting to think about it.

I do think it will happen.  What do you think?

Ze Frank Video

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Last night i watched this video of Ze Frank (below).  He’s a kooky guy but totally entertaining. I do like that he takes common elements of the internet and uses them to better connect people and to create social happenings and actual events and items.   Instead of people trying to create products and platforms, he’s actually trying to create content in innovative ways – which i find both interesting and refreshing.  I think some of the things he posted in here were just awesome.

Picture 8

First, he found this song on the internet that a dad was singing for his daughter called “I’m going to whoop somebody’s ass”.  He took the song asked his fans to sign along and interact. The fans did that and more.  This song spawned countless numbers of remixes. A video was created. A video was story boarded by a member of the “audience”, then another member offered portrait sketches to anyone who would help fill in the video. The video was made.  The remix appeared in a movie, in a car commercial and countless other places and suddenly the creator – a unsuspecting PhD-turned-preacher nammed Ray, now finds the trajectory of his life shifted, as he is inundated with countless versions of his song, in audio and even video format.  Awesome.  (below is a video remix of Ray’s song)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGtefy_Uqw]

Ze does a lot with songs.  Another intance, he created a song for a woman who wrote in that she was scared of the dark and he made up a song for her.  You can hear that song by clicking on the image below

Picture 2Another fun thing that he did was called “youngme / nowme” where people take picturs of themselves when they were young and recreate those pictures now.  It’s hilarious to see what people have done.  Some are simple, some are very involved.  In both cases, they are fun to look at.  He’s got a whole site with the submissions here 2gfdyuszhp

Picture 3Picture 5

Picture 6

There are lots of examples of cool things Ze has done in his talk.  These are just a few.  I always enjoy his creativity and if you have some time, it’s worth checking out.

A Breakfast with Nolan Bushnell

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Creativity by Nolan
Image by pescatello via Flickr

Last Saturday i was part of the METal group that had breakfast with Nolan Bushnell.  It was a really thought provoking.  My favorite part was the beginning of the speech which he came out and said:

Ideas don’t mean shit.  Everyone has good ideas.  Some better than others.  Only over time and work can you own an idea.  Just having an idea doesn’t account for a thing, but if you spend a year making an idea a reality only then can you claim an ownership of it.

Prior to the breakfast, i had never heard of Nolan.  If you don’t know who he is, let me list some of his accomplishments:

  • Founded the company Atari in 1972 and grew it to $2 billion in annual sales in 1982 and at the time was the fastest-growing company in the history of American business.
  • Founded Chucky Cheese in 1977 and turned over day-to-day operations in 1981
  • Founded in 1984 Etak which was the first company to digitize the maps of the world, as part of the first commercial automotive navigation system; the maps ultimately provided the backbone for Google maps, mapquest.com, and other navigation systems; it was sold to Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s. In May 2000 the company, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tele Atlas.

Let’s just say he’s quite a badass.  At the breakfast he talked about those past ventures and some of the businesses he’s involved with – specifically bring social games back to an arcade-like area and transforming the educational system.

One piece he did talk about is how to stimulate creativity within a company.  He mentioned that he has a system to do this.  Saying:

With every company i’m involved with, I get the group of “thought leaders” together in a room. I then ask them to metaphorically to “keep one foot on base” and come up with what the 2-year product line should be. These are the logical products that a smart company should invest in.  I typically like to redo the 2 year roadmap every 4 months.

After i get the “one foot on base” ideas, then I ask people for their wild and crazy ideas. Each person must supply one. I’m a Nazi about getting each and every person to submit at least one off-the-wall idea.

Then we take a break, play football and drink a beer and go to bed.

The next day we get back together and i ask the group how they’d implement their wild & crazy idea. Doing so tends to lend credibility to a crazy idea and makes them actually possible. I have found that more good ideas and companies come from these crazy ideas than the  2-year product roadmaps

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Recording Life

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I just read a great article by Clive Thompson called “Head for Detail” about Gordon Bell‘s latest experieement.  Please just read the first 2 paragraphs.  It’s about Gordon and how he is recording everything he’s doing (video, audio, emails, web, everything).  He’s been doing it for the past 14 years and is able to bring up almost eveyrthing.  Clive writes about Bell, saying:

He[Bell] had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics–Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather–Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

This really resonated with me as i am already trying to record my life. I have photos up on Flickr, i have my ideas going to my blog, i have my mundane thoughts going to Twitter, my videos going to YouTube, and my friend interactions recorded on Facebook.  I’m already on the web but just in the totality that Bell is.  Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper it’s gone from $233,000 for a gigabyte in 1980 to less than $1 today.  Soon there will be enough storage in your cell phone for your entire life to be stored.  I do this because i want to remember. I want my memories to be accesible all the time and reading the article made me realize how inefficent i’ve been in capturing them.

I really like articles like this becaues they make you think about where the world is going and wonder how human interactions and functions will change.  It touches on how humans will change when we no longer have to remember stuff.  I already don’t remember phone numbers beceuase of your cell phone. What if you don’t have to remember people’s names and interactions and you free you mind to be more creative.  Just imagine – that’s what i’m doing now….

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More Dean Kamen

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As many readers know, i’m a huge Dean Kamen fan. I think he’s one of the most important Americans alive.  He’s a true thinker and doer in every since of the word.  He sets goals and attacks them with passion and intelligence.

There’s a new article in the Telegraph UK about him.

It talks about some of his old inventions (150 medical patents and, of course, The Segway) and some of his new ones such as the iBot (wheelchair that stands), the Power Arm (robotic arm for people missing the limb), an electric car that uses the Sterling Engine. It also mentions:

Kamen’s latest project may well be his most ambitious yet: he wants to bring electricity and clean water to the Third World. His plan is not the creation of centralised infrastructure for power grids and sewage treatment, but a small-scale and, relatively, cheap solution. ‘Like, how about a device that a couple of people can haul into a village that can turn any source of water – which is typically toxic these days, that kills two million kids a year – into a thousand litres of water a day. How about if we could carry something into a village that could give people a way to make electricity?’

After 12 years working on these two problems, the engineers at Deka now have their solutions on show at the workshops in Manchester. The first is the ‘Slingshot’, a large box about the size of an office photocopier, sheathed in black protective foam, that can cleanse water of any contaminant from radionuclides to sewage, and run for years at a time without maintenance. The second is another metal box, five feet square, connected to a bottle of compressed gas, which emits a low murmur of humming energy. This is a Stirling engine, similar to the one installed in his electric car, but large and efficient enough to electrify an entire village, which can be driven by any locally available source of heat. Both devices have already been proved amazingly effective: one six-month test has used a Stirling engine to provide electric light to a village in Bangladesh, powered by burning the methane from a pit filled with cow dung; Slingshot has undergone similar tests in a settlement in rural Guatemala. But Kamen has yet to find a commercial partner to manufacture either of the devices for the customers that need them most. ‘The big companies,’ he says, ‘long ago figured out – the people in the world that have no water and have no electricity have no money.’ He’s tried the United Nations, too, but discovered a Catch-22: non-governmental organisations won’t buy the devices until they’re in full production.

The article also talks about his fancy and cool toys. For instance he owns a small island….

Dean Kamen on one of his inventions, the Segwa...

Image via Wikipedia

But there’s also North Dumpling Island, three acres of gravel and sand in Long Island Sound, home to a lighthouse with a library and wine cellar that Kamen bought for $2.5 million in 1986. Soon afterwards, he announced his intention to erect a wind turbine there – and when New York State authorities objected, he declared that North Dumpling would become an independent nation, with a territorial limit of 200 inches. He now likes to refer to himself as Lord Dumpling, and will tell anyone who will listen about his fiefdom’s currency (the 250,000 Dumpling note features a pen-and-ink portrait of Kamen himself, wearing a bow tie and a cap with a propeller on it), newspaper (The North Dumpling Times) and customs regulations (a printed visa form includes spaces to provide distinguishing marks of both the applicant’s face and buttocks). Kamen appointed friends and family to positions in the Dumpling cabinet, including Ministers of Brunch and Nepotism, and now keeps a copy of the artificially yellowed North Dumpling Constitution behind glass on an upstairs wall at Westwind.

Although he’s often labelled a failure because of the limited success of the Segway, it’s clear he remains an optimistic and driven guy.  Saying: “I’m more than happy to let history answer the question of whether my ideas are stupid, or important.”  Considering his inventions are already helping every person who needs an insulin pump, I’m pretty sure History will look back at him pretty damn favorably

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Sports Guy Mailbag

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I’m in to reposting these days so i thought i’d post some good questions from readers today in The Sports Guy mailbag article:

Q: Shouldn’t Elizabeth Perkins have faced statutory rape charges in “Big”?

Q: So you’re looking for the four-way version of paper-rock-scissors that makes the most sense? I think I found it: blow-booze-weed-sleep. Yes, booze will defeat blow and weed will defeat booze. Sleep can beat weed and of course, blow beats sleep. Granted I don’t behave this way EVERY day.
— Vaughn, Philly

Q: My friend almost got into an altercation with a guy who had a hook instead of a hand. He contends that having a hook for a hand would be an advantage in a bar fight (for the obvious reasons); but I contend that because the prosthesis included the guy’s forearm, it would be a disadvantage as arm speed and dexterity were reduced with the lack of arm muscle. What are your thoughts?
— Adam, Washington, D.C.

Q: My friends and I were discussing the two-faced lady in the Southwest Airlines commercial that you are so fond of. Well, say one of her faces is eating a banana and the other is eating a corn dog. Would the corn dog and banana touch, or do the faces have two separate throats? They probably share a throat, right?

Nothing else captures America quite like a Sports Guy mailbag.  I love it.

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Nathan Myhrvold – Pretty Badass

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I just watched this video about Nathan who is quite an incredible guy who spends 18 minutes describing what he does. It’s a lot of very scientific stuff like:

  • Archeology – digitizing Easter Island statues and the pyramids
  • Inventing new nuclear reactors – which are more efficient and better than the current designs
  • Inventing meta-reactors which are really real invisibility cloaks
  • Bio-medical research – is studying the eyes
  • Building radio-telescopes and funding the SETI project. If you want the movie Contact, he describes that all the characters are based on real-life folks. He’s the creepy rich guy
  • Cooking – took a sabatical from Microsoft to study cooking in France and occasionally works at a Seattle restaurant
  • BBQ – he won the world championship BBQ prize
  • Paleontology – he’s discovered a T-Rex in a badlands

It’s just a video about him and how he loves to do a million things. As he says, the talk is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” But that’s how he operates. One thing that stands out is that he seems to be one of the bigger badasses alive. I’m happy that people like them are out there and trying to discover the past mysteries of the world and invent new ones. Pretty interesting stuff…

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