Sanford Dickert, Social Engineer

Have we short-changed ourselves by removing the draft?

2012-01-15T10:56:00.003-05:00

About a month ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about the perceived state of younger workers. The refrain I heard was how the new employees were not prepared and often seemed to want to extend their college days into the work life.

Two weeks later, one of my mentors was discussing how he watches the new crop of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley and how they tend to be incredibly cutthroat, eschewing concepts of honesty and loyalty and integrity in favor of libertarianism and capitalism.

And then this last Friday, I was having a discussion with Emma Vites, founder of The Apprentice Project, on what were the challenges I faced when hiring new graduates for roles in Engineering and Sales and what would be a solution to any of the perceived shortcomings I might have seen.

In all three of these conversations, something had been bouncing in the back of my head - something about the maturing of a boy to a man. In the past, our civilisation has always had some form of ritual to help understand the transition from boys to men and (I assume since I am not a woman) from girls to women. I remember reading about the original purpose for the Jewish tradition of the bar-mitzvah where a boy demonstrates to his community that he is ready to be responsible for his own actions and will carry on the Commandments under Jewish law. By becoming a man in this fashion, the boy is now party and responsible for keeping the Commandments - which are paramount in the Jewish Community life. Violation of these Commandments could have dire outcomes in terms of being separated from the family and the community at large.

Going back 100 years, this kind of ostracism would be almost tantamount to exile since Jewish communities were disbursed around the globe, so acceptance in the community was incredibly important to have a successful life.

In other cultures, the act of "becoming a man" is often attributed to some physical act - and often with some form of overcoming fear through combat, physical trial or ability to participate in more dangerous "adult" acts - like battle or war. Heck, even in the movie Avatar, the idea of becoming accepted by the Na'vi, one had to overcome the will of the flying Ikran (the flying pterodactls) and make it their own to become one of the Na'vi. The idea of becoming part of the community through learning the norms and through some form of trial is common to all societies.

Should we bring back the draft?

So, what has happened in "Western" societies? We have moved from feudalism where landowners could force their residents to fight on the landowners behalf - all because they were making sure their family was safe to armies on behalf of nation-states where to be part of the nation-state, you had to serve in the military to protect the interests of the nation-state, to today - where money and law and commerce are the "weapons" of the realm and physical trials or military service - which teaches/trains for a secular cultural norm are seen as efforts for others to serve the country, but not often the other channels to success - unless you are very lucky - and quite political.

I think about the lessons/fears/experiences that our military men - who have either chosen to become part of the military for honor and love of country - or have chosen the path to improve their lot in life because of the economic issues that plague their lives.

Years ago, I did not think I could ever be part of the military - simply because, in my high school and college years, I would rail against rules that seemed arbitrary or somewhat prescriptive and would not convince me that doing this act would be "the best way to go". Today, after spending time with other friends that have had military service and hearing the good and the bad of the service, I can float the idea that I believe all people should serve some form of military service - even me.

Israelis and Military Service

Being a Jew and a part-time New Yorker, I am often intrigued to meet Israelis - in many cases, they are brash, gregarious, incredibly driven and often more in control of their personal worlds than others I meet. Theirs is not a world of questioning and faffing about, they tend to have a very strong analytical sense and a strong passion based on the sensibilities they have learned from their two years of military service.

Oh - do not get me wrong. I think some of the things that the Israelis do are absolutely bone-headed. But, I will suggest that the maturity level of the men who have seen battle or some form of conflict tends to recognize the sanctity of human life - and the importance of loyalty, honor and integrity amoungst their comrades. Rarely do I see Israelis screw Israelis (and this is a gross generalisation) because of an almost pathological social agreement with their countrymen.

Do I attribute this social norm, maturity to military service? I might - and I wish I had read Startup Nation to really delve into this. But my experiences in Israel in the 90s and my continued interactions with Israelis (who are insanely difficult to manage, but have an energy that is often hard to match) give me some thought to this.

Do I attribute the lack of this Administrations long-term foreign policy strategy with regard to the rising China, the Arab Spring and the problems of the Eurozone on a generation who had the option of military service and did not feel the pain of possible death of themselves, their friends or their children? Do I attribute the growth of religious fervor in our country to provide a societal norm over the one that our Founding Fathers presented to us to the lack of the draft?

I pose the question - with some thoughtful introspection.

Dell Hell 2011 - the problem of telephone sales in the UK

2011-10-31T10:42:00.002-05:00

Taking a page out of Jeff's Dell Hell post, I thought I might share one of my pet peeves with Dell - especially in the UK.

One of the things I most hate about Indian call centres is the lack of understanding of the sales process. The call centre seems to have to operate on a strict chain of command, and the sense of nail-dragging and absolute frustration I get when I have the call centre person on the phone reading through the script or trying to not answer the question I have asked.

In this episode of trying to make a purchase through Dell phone sales, I spoke to someone weeks ago about purchasing a couple of 23" or 24" monitors. I asked for a price quote to be EMAILED to me such that I could get authorization. Sadly, the email did not come - because the supervisor had to call me first to tell me the quote - and then I would get the email.

Because of that delay, I could not purchase the monitors (I had to travel for a couple of weeks).

Then, as I returned to London, I decided to give it a go again. This time, I found the email and contacted the rep again. I told them that, in the intervening weeks, the price quote I had gotten had been improved and could they offer me a better quote. Within an hour, I got a couple of quotes - at the prior price with the wrong color monitor. I then resent the emails back to them requiring a rejigger of the pricing - and to have the quote re-emailed to me. I was informed that they were going to have their supervisor call me. Unfortunately, I normally do not answer "Private Number" phone calls - so when he called, I chose not to pick up. I emailed again asking for a price quote in EMAIL, and again he tried to call.

A week later, I finally had the time to email again - and informed them that I needed a response as soon as possible. And once again, they CALLED me from a Private Number, which this time, I decided to take.

When the call centre rep got on the line, she began to explain to me how they would not be able to give me a response until tomorrow when the supervisor would call me. At that point, I was LIVID. I mean, did they want the sale or not? I started trying to get more details on why it was so hard to get a discount price quote emailed to me - and sadly, it took a number of directed questions ("Okay, is there a reason why you can not email me a quote before I speak to your supervisor, yes or no?") to get a shallow understanding.

But did I get an email? Well - I am waiting since the call centre rep did say I would get the discounted price quote for the monitors by the end of the business day - but she made sure to inform me that the delivery would not be next-day. I informed her that the other quote I got was, and I hope that they made the discount intriguing. Let's see what happens.

Can I ask Dell a simple question? Why do you make it so hard to purchase, instead of easy? Just a couple of questions:

Why do you have to have a supervisor call me? Why just provide the price quote - and then follow up?
Why do your call centre people always sound like they are reading from a script and not being proactive in their engagement? Especially when I spend time with Apple and find I walk away from that experience with nothing but joy?

For all those Dell managers out there - the Dell Offer # is 91867318 and the Customer # is GB11886331.

Influence, Authority or Word-of-Mouth?

2011-10-30T18:41:00.001-05:00

For the past week, I have been watching a bunch of folks discuss the changes to Klout's algorithm and have been amused at the concerns people have had. I should tell you that my Klout score has dropped from an average of 57 to an average of 49 - with variations in between.

And whilst I work as the CTO of PeerIndex (the competitive offering to Klout), I am bemused by the hub-bub.

I hand it to Joe and the Klout team for building an effective business model for a Perks-based Groupon. In my estimation, the business model goes something like this:

Create a ranking mechanism based on actions within the social web - primarily in twitter, but include other signals from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Define influence as "causing an action in others in your network" and link it primarily to tweets, RTs, and shares.
Create a Perks program that requires others to have to compare their Klout rank to an arbitrary threshold (one chosen by Klout with a partner) to suggest that if you have a rank higher, you are an "Influencer" and if lower, you are not influential enough - and target the social media engagers.
People who get the Perk are thrilled and may be happy enough to tweet, blog or post about the Perk - with Klout branding and using the influencer's network.
People who don't get the Perk are upset and comment on how it is not an accurate measure of their "influence" and either complain on the blogs, feeds or whatnot or track their score to see how to improve it - or both.
More Perks means more chances to get freebies - and more chances for social media people to react - either with glee or jealousy.
Klout ensures it has the channel to the individual social media influencers (by requiring the email address initially) and then triggers when a Perk is possibly available to them.

Resulting in:

A private Klout-engaged email mailing list for potential "influencers"
Brands paying for Klout's marketing expenses when Klout takes care of the logistics and fulfillment
A growing desire and ownership of the Klout score (e.g., "If I get my score higher, I will get Perks!")

Now, with their increasing growth, Klout has now removed the requirement to have their branding all over the packaging (thanks Steve Garfield) and even I got a Perk from one of the campaigns.

But I liked Robert Scoble's discussion from last week over what is Klout selling? As in, is it being poorly pitched (click the link for the audio)?

Expertise versus Causes Action

When I first joined PeerIndex, I spent an evening with a gentleman who wanted to discuss with me the concerns he had about ranking individuals by their social media actions. "How could you estimate my influence on any topic? You know nothing about my education, my work, my writings, nothing."

And he is right. And neither Klout nor PeerIndex suggests that. Heck, see Klout's newest popup when you join - it clearly says "a higher score means you are driving more online action."

At PeerIndex, our PI Score you see in the Yellow Box has a similar metric - designed to suggest people who are great at driving online action - not that they are more famous or influential than anyone else. The difference in in the Topic PeerIndex scores.

As a proxy for expertise, we use your engagement in a particular topic to identify your areas of expertise - even if you do not have a degree in that area. If you are engaged on a topic like "Peer Influence", and you are effective at spreading a message in that community, then we rank you higher than others. If you are engaging within that topic community - have others chat with you, share your link, comment on your blog posts, then we rank you higher. We have been focusing on this segmentation because, in our opinion, helping brands and agencies connect with effective word-of-mouth advocates is not about popularity, but about engagement within their peers.

Word of Mouth Marketing (circa 2005) is Influence Marketing (circa 2011)

What I love about this market today is that we are discussing the concepts that have been requested for time immemorial. But unlike 2005, where we would spend all sorts of time trying to figure out blogger outreach and viral videos, we now have twitter's API, bit.ly URL shorteners with analytics. Facebook social graph and the Big Data tools to engage with the torrent of data that comes from this.

Google has had the corner on the Big Data market for some time for Google AdWords and AdSense, and Facebook is ramping up fast to use its data sources in a similar fashion. And with Hadoop, other companies like ourselves and Klout are crunching through data sets that would have seem impossible or prohibitively costly to manage.

Today, Klout, Kred and PeerIndex are providing metrics for scoring yourself on how effective you are on word-of-mouth marketing - as measured on the social web. Kred is going one step further in allowing you to provide offline influence credentials to add to your Kred score (yes, send your degree to them and you get +1000 Kred points!). But the question that I ask - what are YOU looking for?

You - as in the owner of this exhaust data that is out there in the world? Or you as the brand manager who is looking to improve your engagement with your advocates or simply your customers. What is it you would like to see in this world of Influence / Engagement Marketing?

Kred Presents at PIVOT

2011-10-23T14:33:00.000-05:00

So, last week, I spent a short amount of time at the Crown Plaza while Brian Solis and gang put on the PIVOT Conference. As the CTO of PeerIndex, a provider in the Influencer Marketing space, I was quite interested in hearing about what others were talking about in the influencer space. To that end, I got to spend some quality time with the founder of Kred, a new player in the space that has been focusing on developing a product to compete with the likes of Klout and PeerIndex.

From Jodee's presentation, Kred is made up of two major metrics - Influence and Outreach. The definitions of these metrics are:

Influence is the "ability to inspire action" and the measure of action is based on other people retweeting, responding (@ messaging), liking and following you.
Outreach is the "generosity that you give in responding to others" in the same areas of measure (retweets, responses and other acts of social kindness).

Kred breaks down the score into two segmentations: Global and Community. In the Global measurements, you are given a score by the number of responses to you during the past (which goes back to up to three years) and each social action is weighted by the what particular action occurred. So, someone retweets you, that person gets Outreach points, while you get Influence points.

The Global Influence Score is then applied to the entire listing of the Kred database and everyone is ranked from 1 to 1000. Thus, people's Influence Kred overall is measured against everyone else.

In the Kred Community space, the population of each Kred Community is defined primarily by what their bio says - in particular, what titles, what words are used and so on. There are currently 200 Kred Communities and will grow. But in the case of Influence, all members of the particular Kred Community will be measured against each other and then ranked with a normalized score (from 1 to 1000). In addition, the Kred Community is also ranked as an entity unto itself - allowing for the KC to have its own Influence and Outreach Scores, in comparison to the other KCs.

Outreach is not a normalized score, rather it is an accumulation of actions that a person does to share in the contribution of social interactions. Right now, the scores are in the naughty digits (03, 04, 08) but should grow with each act of social kindness a person shares (oh, I look forward to seeing how @jetblue fares here).

Future Steps
From Jodee's conversion, we can take away that:

Right now, only providing twitter from their past data - in the coming month, will support Facebook and LinkedIn.
Next will be how to add blogs to the mix and how to map the bloggers to their twitter account.
People can generate "offline Kred" by submitting documentation to actions or credibility that can be confirmed in some fashion (e.g. a Presidency gives a person +1000 Kred points)
At present, Kred does not rely on the twitter favoriting feature for affecting the Kred score

As for privacy, Jodee and team are very proud of the four privacy settings for customers on Kred (see below). The only concern I see is there is no way for a person to absolutely remove their data from the Kred database which might be an issue in Europe.

I, for one, welcome their entry into the play. They offer a different take on the model and seem to have a lot more visible data that they can show people such that others can understand why they have the Kred they have.

If you wish to see the raw footage from this event, feel free to catch up at http://bit.ly/kredatpivot.

[Published on behalf of CenterNetworks]

Samsung Galaxy Note - think Apple will have a problem?

2011-09-01T11:24:00.001-05:00

Seems as though Samsung came out with their "tabphone" and it looks cool - but why describe the screen as "HD Super AMOLED"?
Hey Samsung Marketing folk - think of a better way of describing things...

Apple v Samsung - why the hubbub?

2011-08-29T14:10:00.006-05:00

A few friends asked me to clarify what I was talking about on Bloomberg this morning regarding the Samsung v Apple "War" - which I thought was quite a quaint way of putting things.

The basic story is this (for anyone not part of the "technosphere"): Apple has filed a lawsuit against Samsung in various countries - halting the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a number of their smartphones. Apple's claims are that Samsung has violated a number of their patents - which is well outlined here at This Is My Next. It is one hell of a roundup and discusses all of the points that Apple is contending.

Now, this sounds bad for Samsung, but there are a number of issues that Apple was unable to address which include getting the patent infringement cases going in all of the European countries since they did not file patents in all of the countries they would have liked. Additionally, the Dusseldorf court ruled that Samsung could sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be sold everywhere in Europe EXCEPT Germany. And there are hints that Apple came to Germany to fight the patent infringements because of the way the German courts lean.

And then recently, Apple also filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Australia, which Samsung is also fighting - and has voluntarily chosen to delay its launch for a month.

So why all the fighting - especially with two companies that have been joined at the hip for so long? For instance:

Apple relies on Samsung for the memory chips for the Macbook Pros, processors for the iPhones, iPods and iPads and displays for the iPads
Apple had to request from Samsung some help in completing iPad2 orders since LG Display could not effectively manufacture the displays necessary for the iPad2
Even in the pursuit fo the Retina Display performance for the iPad3, Apple had to enlist both LG (the originator for the Retina Display), Samsung and Sharp.

Samsung is currently the world leader in display technology - even if it has not invented NanoLEDs or Retina Display (as LG has). But its Super AMOLED technologies and its manufacturing prowess - and the strongly believed rumor that Samsung is building the Google Nexus Prime phone, is it any wonder why Apple is madly attacking Samsung?

Where Apple is strong; where Samsung is strong

As I discussed on the video, Apple has the benefit of focus - it builds only one type of tablet, one type of phone and a couple of types of iPods and computers. But wait, it does not build them - it designs them - and outsources the design and manufacturing to friends in China, Korea and Japan.

Apple also has the retail channel with the Apple stores - which ensure Apple a solid understanding of the product lifecycle and the challenges the customers have with the product - directly from their Geniuses and their staff. Samsung has tried this (see the Samsung Experience at Columbus Circle in NYC), but as the reviews on the Google page point out - its a showroom, not an engagement retail store.

Samsung is now having to deal with:

11 Android smartphones (and at least another 5 on the way including the Galaxy Q)
4 Windows smartphones
6 Bada smartphones (yeah, I had no idea what bada was either)
3 current tablets and at least four more going to be announced this week which includes the rumored tabphone

Combine all of those separate product offerings and then add on the research and development along with the component companies - and you have the makings of a HUGE conglomerate which might have some difficulties focusing on one particular product.

The benefit that Samsung has is its powerful manufacturing capabilities - and the incredible amount of effort they have put into new technologies like the displays.

Samsung as a company will not have much to fear about the injunctions since they will more than likely fight it out in the courts or find a way to mollify Apple. In addition, Samsung has a large number of companies it supplies to already. And Apple - well, Apple can invest $1B in Sharp to get better displays and not be so dependent on Samsung or LG for display technologies.

Patent Disputes

But the crux of the issue is that Apple feels that Samsung cheated on the design of its products since it had intimate knowledge of the iPad and iPhone and could leverage the designs in their own products. And now Samsung is going the defensive patent infringement route - filing in Germany and Australia. The sad part of this is - a lot of lawyers are going to get rich, customers will get frustrated and someone is going to have to blink.

I wonder how the Oracle/Google fight is turning out?

Too hard on the City for their "Roadmap"? Here are some thoughts...

2011-05-22T22:18:00.008-05:00

So, the past weekend, I have had a number of people talk to me about my post on the Roadmap and how I was quite disappointed. For the most part, people were in agreement with my sentiments and we similarly disappointed in what was published. But one has to wonder, why did the Roadmap so disappoint me?

I should clarify that I was unhappy with the Industry portion of the Roadmap, not the Roadmap in general. But from my own noodling on the issues, I wanted to clarify some of my thinking.

The NYC Administration could not politically afford to do anything
Very simply, Mayor Bloomberg's Administration is running out the clock. The race for the next Mayor will begin and while the business of governing is a nonstop effort, creating new expenditures is not going to be possible in an environment where the Administration is having to close firehouses and fire teachers. Creating a program that requires ANY expenditure would create a howl of frustration from other parts of the City - which would be politically damaging and cause more headache than is needed. Just look at the hullabaloo caused by Rachel's CDO salary.

The NYCEDC is focused on MANY efforts, not just technology
Unfortunately, while I may be a NY Tech enthusiast, the NYCEDC is not necessarily focused on building a tech industry. The programs they foster have to address a number of constituencies including the real estate/developers market (those large corporations pay lots of taxes in those buildings), the finance industry (maybe not as much in taxes), fashion, legal, accounting, etc. Building a tech industry and providing some support for a growing community is not a major priority. I will say I have heard of a gentleman in the EDC that is focused on these issues (I believe his name is Andrew and is an entrepreneur) looking to help in these efforts. But he is one out of 436 employees as of 2010 and I would guess he has little if no budget to work with.

Chief Digital Officer is a liason, not a budgeted organization
Rachel was given a task to help NYC figure out how to leverage social networking/social media to address the mission of the City - serve the constituents. Without a real budget, Rachel has a job of trying to listen, understand and address the many needs but had little authority to cause any of the numerous organizations to do anything. So Rachel did what she could - gathered a great deal of information, suggested ideas on how to make information from the City available via various social channels and used the content given to her by the other NYC organizations to fulfill her responsibility of creating the Roadmap.

Making a citywide wifi network could be hard - and does not make money easily
Since 2005, when Andrew Rasiej suggested wifi-ing up NYC as one of his planks for the Public Advocate campaign, the City hs been trying to get this initiative to happen. NYCWireless has been working this effort for quite come time and they have been able to accomplish little wins, but the City has had chances to make this happen for some time. And, like the earlier statement - how could the City today spend any money on setting up wireless networks?

I am sad that they City did not think of doing this 1) when it had some form of budget surplus in the 2005-2007 years and 2) did not work with a large company or equipment provider to provide the potential network in various neighborhoods throughout the City. In 2005, when I had my students investigate the idea of wifi-ing up the City, it was an expensive proposition - and a challenging one due to the City's population density and buildings. But, if it had been somewhat more modest and delivered Times Square with real coverage, colleges and other gathering spaces and neighborhoods (e.g. in the outer boroughs), that could have been big wins and gains for the community overall.

As for the impact on the City with wifi around the community, I like to think that by enabling access sooner and faster, tourists would be happier; local communities could benefit from access to information and collaborate with each other better; and people would be more informed than they are via MSM alone. And the cost? From my research, a ten-square block could get 100M down/10M up on the local network for under $100K. That sounds like a sound investment in infrastructure for a Digital City.

So, why do you care, Sanford?

One or two friends wondered why I made such a stink on this issue. The real reason is that, during the Mayor's re-election campaign, I was helping with the Coalition of Office Service Providers - to help get startups spaces within the City and was intrigued to see how the Mayor used the election campaign to push forward some changes in the City for startups. But the majority of the content from the EDC in the Roadmap were about those initiatives that we created or driven from that campaign.

This year, as I have talked with the EDC and other City members, I have shown, dropped off and even spent time discussing these issues I mentioned on my previous post to help in this effort. The fact that they did not engage (aside from a phone call) or try to address these issues with a serious effort (from my reading of the report) was the disappointment.

Charlie and I have spoken about this issue - trying to engage the City and the EDC in a way to help tech startups, and he was often more pessimistic than I was. I still want to believe that government can help its citizenry - one of the reason why I get involved in politics.

Maybe this stink is about asking the EDC to think beyond the next election and plan for a more long-term view. Lets truly build this ecosystem and put NYC on the map in a tech way. Here are a couple of more ideas on how to do so:

Offer community space for tech gatherings in building that are owned by the City or with developers in the City. Instead of housing companies, we need common spaces with bandwidth and power for these communities. Years ago, I used to suggest the idea of "mobile incubators" which would enable pop-up workspaces / conference spaces. Look at how New Work City got started. We need places for people to work together and build the communities. We have public parks for playing games, why not public spaces for people to work together?
Provide a tax break to real-estate developers to bring high-speed fiber (or other technology) to buildings throughout the City. Specifically, to places with high population density and leverage the fiber that is still in the City streets. Create an incentive program that rewards first movers with a better incentive (like a tax writeoff of double the cost) and then as others get involved, it drops off to 50% of the cost. I am not a government official, but the enablement of digital technology is similar to the building of our electric grid or water/sewer systems.
Support/foster monthly gathering in areas other than south of 23rd Street to foster connectivity of mentors and other enthusiasts. Specifically, support and attract these people together through engaging programs to educate and collaborate.
Create a "Technology Chamber of Commerce" where providers, companies and individuals can come together to learn who is doing what where. And instead of building from the ground up, you have WeAreNYTech and garysguide and other media channels. Why not work with them and leverage the digital properties that the City holds to drive awareness and visibility?

There are more ideas - and they are available for easy access. Check out the speeches from the before and during the NYTM Organizer election and see what everyone spoke about. It is a crib sheet for what can grow the Industry.

Grading the "Road Map for the Digital City"

2011-05-16T13:47:00.008-05:00

When I got the alert that Rachel and Mayor Mike were announcing the Road Map for the Digital City and the associated Roadmap (PDF) for it, I typed the URL in my browser with the enthusiasm of a starving man to food on the table. After being part of the discussions for the 2008 NY Tech Meetup Organizer election and having echoed my thoughts on the State of NY Tech, (in three separate posts [1], [2], [3]), I wondered if they had considered what was needed for the tech ecosystem.

After reading a lot of boilerplate, I was sadly disappointed.

Yes, there are a lot of services that the City will provide to its citizenry, attempt to offer additional services to the mechanations of city government and yes, will open up their data sources such that people can create interesting and worthwhile applications. And yes, it will expand its presence on various social media channels.

But when it comes to helping the NY Tech industry, the verbiage was incredibly disappointing. Especially after communicating my own concept of the needs for a tech ecosystem to the EDC and seeing snippets of discussion here or there.

The Roadmap Supports NY Tech - sort of

Tucked firmly back in Page 53 of the 68 page document, begins the discussion on how the NYCEDC will help foster NY Tech. These actions include:

NYCEDC Innovation Index - which measures innovation on R&D, Finance, Human Capital, Intellectual Property, High-tech Gross City Product and Entrepreneurship/Employment Dynamic
Streamlining New Business Creation - the Mayor's Office of Operations is currently exploring new ways to further streamline the process of starting a business in NYC
Working ~~with~~for New York City - lessening hurdles to getting vendors to work with the City
Help Getting Government Contracting from the Department of Small Business Services
Making Requests for Proposals for visible by supporting RSS feeds, email alerts and such
Creation of an Applied Science Faculty from leading institutions
Workforce Development though FastTrac and JumpStart, Diversity training from MOME and support of the MOUSE program (via DOITT)
Recruiting Support - a keystone will be "ongoing
outreach and listening sessions with private sector stakeholders including entrepreneurs,
engineering institutions, and investors to analyze needs and evaluate progress."
Industry event support like NYC BigApps and MOME's support of InternetWeek
Financial support for the New York City Entrepreneurial Fund (in partnership with FirstMark Capital)
Development of low-cost workspaces for entrepreneurs with 160 Varick (hosting 35 startups) and Hive @ 55 (for 50 media professionals)

Now, after looking at this list, you may say - "But Sanford, there's a lot there. They solved some things right?"

Actually, no.

Let's go to the boards, shall we?

State of NY Tech 2011

There is a concept in academia called information and communication technology centers (ICTs). I was interested in them after leaving Silicon Valley and living in England and discovered that NYC was a budding environment for one. In 2008, during the crash, I was pointing out that the Tech sector could be the guiding light out of the economic downturn (which Scott Heiferman was saying at the same time). But to get there - we needed to address the issues necessary for building tech businesses in the area.

I listed six particular characteristics that I thought would sincerely benefit NY Tech companies - and mapped out what the state of each was. Today, I will take the same six characteristics and map them out again:

Space (2008 - 1, 2009 - 3.5, 2011 - 4)
As I mentioned in the past, coworking sprang up and has proliferated (New Work City, Wix Lounge, Hive @ 55, GreenSpaces), incubators have grown (DogpatchLabs, 160 Varick, TippingPoint Partners, techstarsNYC), flexible workspaces have grown (General Assembly, WeWork, SunshineSuites, TechSpace, Select Office Suites) and even the fluid nature of the subrental market through mechanisms like LooseCubes have brought up the playing field for startups looking for space. I am certain there are scores more places in the city - a list of them you could find on this google doc (NYC Incubators/Accelerators).

But note - the City offers nothing to help ease or connect entrepreneurs to these locations. Once COSP perished, the funneling to the space ecosystem seems to have diminished. While it is admirable to have these two accelerators in place, it should be known that 160 Varick is due for a rental reset after three years and Hive @ 55 was already in place before this plan.
Platform (2008 - 3, 2009 - 3.5, 2011 - 4.5)
Again, with the press interested in the stories that come about (see the publishing on the NYTM, Entrepreneurs Roundtable, UltraLight Startups) as well as the insane amount of startups for each programming language, framework or product category (my favorite is Fashion 2.0). The visibility of the NY Tech scene has certainly grown and the platforms are still creating the visibility we need. Add TechCrunch Disrupt along with Web 2.0 and you have some intriguing efforts.

The City's contribution is supporting InternetWeek - which they have been doing for some time now. Not seeing something new here. Maybe if the City offered high-level strategy series like a TED or a foocamp for tech leaders at, lets say, Gracie Mansion - now that might be helpful.
Infrastructure (2008 - 3, 2009 - 3, 2011 - 3)
Sorry - it still sucks. After helping Andrew Rasiej with his campaign for Public Advocate and his vision of the City being blanketed with wireless, I still cringe when I am near Bryant Park or Union Square and can not get access to the network. And while NYCWireless is working hard for this, the City barely seems to support the efforts. So while I see the possibilities from the Roadmap, I actually see the same promises given time and time again.

Funny thing - this past March, in Lyon, France - I could easily access their public wifi with little problem - and I could find it almost everywhere I went.

I also think that supporting mobile developers with a focused incubator for developing apps would be a terrific help to growing the mobile community in NYC. Havign a place where Android, iOS, Windows and Palm could gather and caucus - now wouldn't that be a great idea.
Capital (2008 - 3.5, 2009 - 2.5, 2011 - 3)
Right now, when I talk to friends in the City, everyone under the age of 40 is telling me they have a new startup they are creating. And I have personally been in meetings where I watch Wall Street traders licking their lips on the possibility of flogging their equity to their friends so they could make money on their investment in the shortest amount of time. Ask them what they are investing in - and they answer, "the idea". Ask them what the idea is and you get a blank stare.

I truly think angel money is there - but I am worried that brains/experience behind it is missing. Cooler heads (read: survivors of Web 1.0) are also warning of the lack of Series A investors.

How many of these angel companies are unable to raise the next round? And without these Series A people, these many fledgeling startups are going to experience a bad fall. And I mean Fall 2011.

How can the City help? With the NY Entrepreneurs Fund, it is a nice gesture, but not the juice we would need in growing the Series A tier. Why not find ways to attract other experienced VCs into the City and offer some support. And since capital is the lifeblood of any startup, has the City thought of solving the healthcare cost issue for entrepreneurs? Or a tax break for employing startup individuals in the City?
Experience (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 2, 2011 - 3)
Last time I drafted this section, I said: Show me the mentors.

So now I see these new organizations (techstarsNYC, ER Accelerator, etc) and all of them tout their "mentors". And I hear that programs like techstars makes sure there is a mentor to carry the company forward. And Nate has taken office hours one step further with ohours.org.

But when I look at the mentor lists, where are the seasoned entrepreneurs? The ones who have the battle scars that can provide true guidance? That are in the space (or adjacent to it) that might be able to help?

In the Valley, kabals/keiretsus work together to create bigger and better plays (see the Paypal Mafia and their prodigeny of YouTube, Facebook, Slide, Zivity, Yelp - juts to name a few). Where are our mafias? And how could the City help with them? Having more events is not the way - demonstrating the benefit of helping entrepreneurs from others is.

How many office hours has Henry Blodgett put on ohours? Mike Bloomberg? Rachel Sterne? I know that there are not enough hours in the day (trust me I know), but how can others get access to the wisdom that is spilling on the streets in Palo Alto and Menlo Park?
Skills/People (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 3, 2011 - 3.3)
Yes - I think that everyone is now familiar with the concepts behind social media and using the new tools to support that ecosystem is well at hand. But we still have a problem with RAW TALENT or industrial programmers being available to be part of these growing companies. Oh yes, everyone and their father can code HTML and some CSS, but that does not make them an architect. Oh yes, you can plug in a jQuery library and have a nice interface look-and-feel, but that does not make you a UX/UI designer. And as friends of mine know, the academic rigor of having teachers teach knowledge within preparing them for skills development - I think is not the best source of new technical or design talent.

I hate when I hear of people outsourcing because the outsourced talent is cheaper and better than our own. Having an engineering school here will add to the poor of potential talent, but I think the City needs to look long and hard at how people learn after they graduate and how programs like Hackathons, collaborative training efforts like hack/change and collabraCode(); (which I started) are working to grow developers out of others who wish the passion and to given them a sense of success instead of a lonely experience of failure.

I have been preaching the thought of Apprenticeship in the 21st Century - and how apprenticeship is about skill development, business understanding and learning to work with others - gaining skills and becoming even more powerful than before - since the resulting skills and abilities are the apprentices - a melange of many experiences combined with the flavor of their own talents.

City's help with programs like these to expand our Technical Talent in Basic, Intermediate and Advanced programs would be wonderful. No - the very best may not come out of these programs, but the drive for entrepreneurship is not only about being the best - it is about being able to use the tools that will have you create a business and create success for yourself. The founders of Yipit had not prior programming experience, but they had an idea. They struggled through and found a model that worked - helping others through that process is what the City should do.

While I am disappointed in what I got from the City - I am glad they at least tried to make something happen. I think of myself as a NY Tech enthusiast first - fighting for the needs of NY Tech startups. Having city services easier to access - not that exciting to me.

Watch out for HowAboutWe bait-and-switch...

2011-04-29T10:38:00.012-05:00

So - maybe you have heard about HowAboutWe on the web - a NY-based site that seems to be the next "new thing" for meeting people without using the bar scene as their primary source of connections with the opposite sex.

When it came out, I signed up because 1) I am single and would love to find my beshert and 2) I am always up for supporting a NYC venture. So, I signed up, added my profile information and even submitted a proposed date.

Suddenly, the "I'm intrigued" emails started to come in.And I can say that the women who I was getting are nice, but none who inspired me to pay the fee for joining to send an email - which required an upgrade to pay for the service.

And then suddenly, I get this barrage of three emails from one user - tanyak123

Now Tanya is not normally my type, but I wonder - why is she sending me two "I'm intrigued" messages and one personal message. But I can not see the personal message unless I pay for the service. So, curiosity got the best of me and I decide - what the hey - have not had much success on jdate or Match, so lets give it a go.

I google for a discount code on a coupon site (MyDate) and get the six month deal for half-off. I think - wow, great deal.

Then I log in to finally read these emails from Tanya. And what do I discover?

Those "urgent" emails are no longer there. Suddenly - Tanya is not in my inbox. That "urgent" email - gone. Or at least, Tanya is not trying to get ahold of me.

And while I thought it suspicious that Tanya - who cares about her Christianity a great deal - would be so "interested" in me, I must admit - it was tantalizing to investigate.

So, I must applaud HowAboutWe on their excellent conversion tactic - tantalize us with someone we might want to meet - and then suddenly have them disappear off the list.

Enjoy the game at your leisure (or peril) depending how you look at it.

SuckerPunch - it IS a good comic book movie damnit...

2011-04-02T14:34:00.007-05:00

Last weekend, the movie SuckerPunch came out - and got resoundingly panned by critics around the US. I had been in London the past week, so I could not see it when it launched.

So, I decided to go see it myself while it was still in the IMAX theater - even after RottenTomatoes had given it a 20% rating from the critics. From the critical reviews, it sounded like Zack Snyder had done some misogynistic fantasy film that was making violence sexy with people walking around in flimsy negligee - with no story or plot.

I have to seriously disagree. While I may be the demographic that Zack may have been designing this show for - it truly was a "tour de force" in terms of imagination and storytelling. Granted, the story may have seemed to serve the need for Zack to show off his amazing cinematography, I truly appreciated the story that was being told - especially when you consider the entirety of the story itself.

I thought the direction and style was excellent - and all of the effects were a step above anything I have seen. Zack did push the envelope - and I would say that this story is better than "The Watchmen". I would say that the audience for "The Watchmen" will enjoy this movie - and should disregard the nay-sayers.

I remember how amazing "The Matrix" was back when it first came out. It caused me to purchase a DVD player and the disc way back then. I think SuckerPunch and the style/effects/story is quite a beautiful story and a sad one. I wish I could tell you the plot, but then you would miss out on the true story behind it. All I would say is that the major plot twist reminded me of the 1985 season of Dallas.

And - to Zack: you did a great job. You and your team (actors, designers, developers all) can be proud of a wonderful piece of art. I sincerely hope that others tell you the same thing in kind.

UPDATE: to prove my own point, looks like the filmmakers released the first six minutes of the movie on trailer (plus some sizzle toward the end). Worth the six minutes of your time:

Liveblogging Eric Reis from The Learn Startup Methodology at NYU

2011-03-31T15:39:00.005-05:00

All the academic research suggest that there are traits stubborn, charisma, reality distortion field, raw intelligence, salesmanship, ability to see things that are not there.

What Eric likes to call "Success theater"

Traits that make you likely to be successful as an entrepreneur -are almost diametrically opposed to the earlier effort. Perseverance myth: never hear the stories of the entrepreneurs that persevered into the ground.

Media Coverage - Always focus on the biggest, but they are outliers. Learn more from failure than success.

Learning is the most important part of entrepreneurship - to learn is to fail something. When you realize that you do not know something is not fun. Living in the RDF is a lot more fun than selling to the world.

Lean Startup - idea that you should get funding for the napkin idea is poor. The value is in the execution. The successful entrepreneur was the one that had silly ideas. They have a structured way in changing in the face of information, the pivot. VCs have seen the same movies.

Lean Startup like Lean Manufacturing
Originally programmers were taught waterfall process - now lean startup methodology is a systematic process to conduct scientific approach to the process of building new innovative companies. Integrate product, marketing, business, etc into one machine.

Broader concepts: iterative process - customer contact. Originally, an engineer's "role" was to build code, had their own vision and built it out. Not, it is about validated learning: strictly are we learning how to build a sustainable business. Continuous deployment for hypothesis testing.

Past experience at IMVU was our assumption of what customers wanted: try to get customers in to listen in focus groups. We would tell them what to do and solve our problems. It should have been a synthesis between our vision and the behaviors if what customers will do.

Experimenting on customers to see what was happening. Grand total budget of $5 a day. Independent controlled trial - our notion of what constitutes a great product, we were making the wrong product.

How did you change the product? We originally focused on optimization - customers were interested in using avatars in making new friends, not going to show this new "avatar" to their "real" friends. Editor assumption: the users wanted to be sure the app was "cool" before applying their social capital to showing it to other friends.

Most engineers/entrepreneurs don't want to admit to learning.

People are generally apathetic - when you have a small number of customers - the customers are willing to sort through the noise and as you pivot, they can either follow or disappear with limited impact. Minimum visible product - build measure learn pivot.

How do you create a business that relies on code?
Want to run a software company - need to learn how to code. Going to recruit a technical cofounder need to have a way to communicate. You can iterate yourself.

How do you get great people to work with me for free?

Vision / Strategy / Product - Changing product is not pivoting. Changing strategies is the pivot. When you start a company, you usually confuse the three.

Is Lean Startup Methodology essentially crowd sourcing?
Mistake : ship it and see what happens.
Need a commitment to iterate. Mechanism for determining innovation - when to pivot?
When things are working - you have a great growth.
Don't forget that metrics are people too. Metrics are humans - and you can find insights into understanding why the people were using the app.
How do you get the commitment to iterate? Cast a spell around the engineers so they stay in the reality distortion field and I stay in the reality. Being completely 100% transparent and share with the team and everyone is part of the discovery - then we can get people to be excited about the search.

MVPs hoe do you determine the most viable product? General purpose advice is not easy to answer. If you can not measure the people's response, then you do not have a viable product. What do I really need to learn and work back from that...

In pivoting - you never throw the entire old idea out. The good idea is always found in the experience of the "bad" idea.

An incredibly passionate video of Tara on Entrepreneurship

2011-03-30T14:47:00.008-05:00

One of my friends, Tara Hunt, is on her own entrepreneurial quest - and got a chance to speak at the TEDxConcordia event quite recently. The video below is 24 minutes of incredibly passionate, authentic, true-to-form advice from Tara for all.

And yes, this could be a way for Tara to get visibility for her startup - but with insights like these, I think it is just fine to pass on the video to you.

Tara Hunt: The Unclear Path

It's about taking the Unclear Path of entrepreneurship - the rollercoaster, the love of it, the heartbreak and the lifestyle. It's about being just delusional enough and just audacious enough to pursue that dream.

Reid Hoffman @SXSWi - Web 3.0 and the Ten Rules of Entrepreneurship

2011-03-16T16:32:00.002-05:00

I humbly apologize for the shaking - but the content is all there.

Enjoy!

A worthy successor to Yahoo! and Google Groups - GroupSpaces

2011-02-28T13:13:00.008-05:00

This weekend, I was reconnected with a company that I met during my September Seedcamp visit in London who, as many other companies in the "group communication" space have before, asked to catch up to discuss some of the successes we had experienced at eGroups during our growth phase.

This time, I promised to catch up when he was here in NYC, and sat down with him to discuss some of the issues that I believed are important to a group manager and how to frame the product discussion if they were trying to find their growth.

After the first deep dive, I realized that David (the CEO of GroupSpaces) really had a functional handle on the product. Both he and his co-founder were group organizers back in uni (British for "college") and were frustrated with google Groups, Yahoo! Groups and even Facebook event management. So, four years ago - they started building GroupSpaces and started addressing their own needs. Just the two of them - and they began to build out an incredibly robust platform for group managers. So he showed me the product in its current form.

I was honestly blown away.

I am not kidding - after running numerous groups and having to connect and coordinate different platforms and datafeeds between bulk-email providers, my membership roles, event planning tools, creating subgroups with specific permissions (meaning I would have to have special sub groups on the Google or Yahoo platforms) - when I started diving into GroupSpaces, I realized I am moving off of Google and Yahoo! Groups for any of my active groups.

Real Power at the Hands of the Group Manager

One of the things that made me smile as I began to use the toolset found within GroupSpaces was the ease of integrating my membership roles to the different applications that are found within the service. Listed are:

Membership Management - which is incredibly intuitive and easy to use
Email management - not only for list communication, but also for a small bulk-email set that looks like a trimmed down version of every email templating software I have seen to date. In addition, also supports basic click-thru and open tracking along with bounces.
Event management - imagine if you had the best of Evite, EventBrite and Facebook events controlled from a single interface. You have found the tool for that at GroupSpaces.
Templating the GroupSpaces for your group is a breeze with their tool set. Again, it is almost as if they looked at how Ning did the effort, threw in a little weebly and created a much more effective tool set.
Payments - allowing groups to create payment mechanisms for their events through a simplified interface
and a whole lot more.

Now, from looking at this product and beginning to play with it - I am blown away. I have not see anything come this close to an effective group communication platform since one of the advocacy platforms that got scooped up by Convio back in 2006.

If you are an existing group and are frustrated with the limitations of your group site / community system - I am giving a VERY hearty recommendation to you to consider using the GroupSpaces platform.

Does it Cost?

Its a freemium model (Fred Wilson, are you listening?) - for the basic package which is quite excellent. But the next level up is only $15/mo and gives you 5000 email addresses you can mail to. Considering that most bulk-mail services cost the same for half that number of email addresses, the cost is rapidly covered right there.

If I was going to say what would be the better platform for small businesses or non-profits who are getting tired of exhorbant fees from platform providers and consultants, GroupSpaces is the way to go.

AN IDEA: What is squareSpace had a deal with GroupSpaces? Could be a deal made in heaven! As the yenta, I want to name the baby.

Social Media Week 2011 - #SMWSanity Live Blog

2011-02-08T15:45:00.006-05:00

Trying to follow here on the #SMWSanity panel:

Moderator: Craig Minassian, Rally Producer and President Minassin Media
Steve Grimes, SVP COMEDY CENTRAL Digital
Don Steele, VP Digital Marketing, MTVN Entertainment

Opens with a recap video of the sequence of the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Steve tells us that Comedy Central had no idea for doing the effort - and they had no concept/warning outside of the day of the announcement. Trying to plan the event was somewhat difficult since it was all amorphous. But Steven wanted to get an iPhone App from the beginning - and was told it takes 6 months to get the app approved. Whoops!

Realized they had to work with the various social media/app players. Connected and worked with foursquare, Facebook, etc.

Don: question - how to inform people? Instead of selling - address their needs (where to park, where the traffic was, etc) and knew they needed to have an email list AND an SMS list. Had 125K people join a new email list; 300K join the Facebook group.

Everything they had to do had to inform - not to sell.

Steve: since there was two “events”, everything had to be doubled. RTRFear was to be a Bizarro Glen Beck event; RTRSanity was to be a more serious affair.

Craig discusses the normal modes for rallying could not happen.

Don: when they cal from Comedy Central, people usually get back to us. We simply wanted to execute perfectly. We did not know who was going to be there, which guests, how to share pictures, etc. Best practices were learned from connecting to people at the major companies (e.g., Foursquare, Facebook) to learn how to do it better. Our fans were telling us what to do - and we needed to ride the wave.

Steve: the Facebook numbers were actually true to the numbers - kept trying to figure out the discount metric. They guess that 150K at the Mall and another 150K trying to get there was demonstrating the numbers/RSVPs were quite good.

Craig: content come from?

Steve: have great people at CC, but looked to the community and to the Glen Beck event to riff off that.

Craig: did you have enough time to be able to modify your strategy?

Steve: you are thinking we had a strategy…

Craig: marketing effort - but the teams were working on the shows as well. How did you market something that did not know the “damn product”?

Don: we marketed to what the audience wanted. We were watching trends on twitter, people were searching for stuff. We had to supply that demand. Even when we sold merchandise, we had links on the stuff to lead to the social media efforts.

Lets look at concerts, SxSW, Bono - and contacted people who had done this before. Needed an app that could engage a “checkin”. Don did not know the API calls, but these people could.

Craig: on the ground, had lots of volunteers - through the social media effort. Question: did the audience stay?

Steve: the audience is still there. Since the rally the ratings (TV and digital) have gone up. Other things have continued to increase the growth, but the rally helped grow this out. Colbert saw this was a way to get more people engaged. Now, the writers of the Daily Show have to make a single funny “tweet” every day - something they would not have asked six months earlier.

Don: Lessons learned - the audience feels engaged (e.g, badges). People are going to be there if they are there in Social Media. Now, people in house are now seeing the conversation on Facebook and twitter as a stream to pay attention to.

Steve: tone has changed, social media has become the #1 bullet point. How is social media going to be part of the show? tosh 2.0 has seen most of its audience on Facebook.

Questions

Don: Meetup came up and tried to get us to get more engaged, and when we saw people beginning to create their own, we began to figure out how to use the Meetup efforts effectively.

Steve: we were not sure if the event was even worthy of being on TV - but as we saw the rise of the meme validated the need for the show. We were worried that there was not going to be enough people - two weeks before, we got it done rapidly and told people on the Monday before the event.

Craig: we were having trouble getting the space, Colbert was working the field insanely (too a hiatus to work on it). Everyone thought CC was being cagey about details - when they really did not know the details.

Q: how was the event growing internally? How was the DC Parks - were they causing roadblocks? A: essentially the CC Digital effort. The conservative blogs attacked, but the DC people were somewhat confused how to handle the event was difficult because it was so amorphous.

Q: what if it was not so enthusiastic? A: we knew by Sept 17 - and we were already on the path for other efforts (Night of Too Many Stars). When Meetup was calling about the response, we knew it was insane. Not a single network spot, not a single ad for this event - all was handled by the shows themselves. We were amazed as everyone else. We thought it would be 50K people - never expected 250K.

Q: beyond just a FB account - is CC getting ready to make business decision to get a community manager position? Is that just an intern thing or??? A: there is no one answer - we operate less like a network, more like an aggregator. What is the right answer for tosh may not be for Daily Show. Less to do about FB, 4sq, etc - more about the writers and developers and thinking about how to bring the elements within the shows. Not looking at any one platform - trying to look across the space and look to see what is possible before every show - and having a sense of what is possible and how the development does it. Now - the social media efforts are not an intern, we are now more responsible for questions. Short answer on hiring: no. We have 40-50 people already - too important for an intern - now everyone on the team has to be thinking of the social implications on what they do.

Q: what would you not do? A: it all just came together - everything just came together and worked. Tried hard to get the cell phone repeaters was out of our hands. The rapid response and building was what happened internally so well.

Evangelizing Yourself from Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess)

2011-01-24T16:35:00.004-05:00

While few would say that I have difficulty in meeting new people, I would say that Whitney's slide-deck (found when reading Tony's NWC 2.0 post recently) moved me. And, since my Blogger account is connected to my tumblr account, why not share across the network.

Enjoy. I did.

Evangelizing Yourself

View more webinars from Whitney Hess.

Finding Your Passion - from 1998 Stanford Daily

2011-01-22T14:56:00.007-05:00

In the past few days, I have been rediscovering some of my older website pages (like Lessons Learned) and managing to recover some wisdom I found back at Stanford.

This one is twelve years old, and is Stanford-centric, but has nuggets that again I find incredibly applicable today. You can find it at the Stanford Daily archives and I republish it here.

Editorial Notebook: Finding your passion

A PROFESSOR OF mine once said, "Don't let your academics stand in the way of your education." In 1989, I came to Stanford to pursue an electrical engineering degree thinking all that mattered was homework, tests and grades. But in the process, I learned far more about life than I expected to learn. Here are some of the unanticipated lessons that my education has included over the last nine years:
Stanford University is a business and not simply an oasis of pure, unadulterated learning. Politics are very important - in virtually every office and department. Use these facts and you will find success both here and in the real world.
Don't sweat the small stuff - and it is all small stuff. Maybe the ASSU Senate or the Faculty Senate could learn a thing or two from this old cliche.
Treat secretaries like presidents and presidents like friends - everyone deserves respect and most people feel lonely on a pedestal. You will be amazed at the returns you receive.
As the joke goes, it's not your research topic, but your thesis adviser that determines if and when you will graduate. To determine your true completion date for your thesis, always multiply your projected time to completion by 2.5.
Take one of the dance division's dance classes. No matter which one you choose, you will learn poise, rhythm and a joy of movement that no homework set can match. Out of all the programs at Stanford, it is the one in which you will continue to appreciate long after you graduate. And don't fret if you aren't completely proficient after a month, a quarter or even a year. It took you a whole year to learn how to walk - and you worked on that day after day.
Get uncomfortable and walk in another person's shoes. Check out a new social event put on by another ethnic group. Learn about another culture other than your own. You might feel like you don't belong, but learn from the experience and you will grow as a person.
Realize that life is about relationships. Relationships aren't just boyfriend / girlfriend or husband / wife, they also include student / adviser, employee / employer, company / partner. Cherish and respect each and every of them.
Your biggest accomplishment at Stanford will more than likely be the smallest act you perform - a hug, a heart-to-heart or a helping hand - at the time you least expect it. Practice helping make the world a better place, one small act at a time.
Reality is your own self-perception. Be proactive, take a chance and make your own reality. People react to you and if you change, you will be amazed at how your world will too - and often for the better.
Be true to yourself. Your greatest satisfaction will come from being who you are and growing from it. You might gain success by emulating others, but seldom will you find true happiness and satisfaction.
Learn from your heroes - they are often humble people who rose from obscurity (or graduate school) to make a difference in the world. They were not the ones who set out to be great - they were people who simply followed their passions and success found them.
Find your passion, know your values, be yourself and live with love - the rest will follow.
- Sanford M. Dickert

Lessons That I Still Try to Learn

2011-01-20T17:39:00.005-05:00

Recently, I was cleaning out some old files and discovered one of my pages that came from a job I did back in 1997. I had created a website at my school and called the page "Lessons Learned".

Today, I was looking at it and realized that, no matter how smart you are - these lessons are always good to remember and go over - again and again. Not sure who wrote them first, but they sound good to me again.

Lessons to Be Learned

Put yourself in other's shoes
Listen
See the "good" in all others
Assess the situation before charging ahead (Ready, Aim, Fire)
Find ways to develop relationships/trust outside of "normal" business conditions
Write more things down and sooner (strawman)
Answer questions first then explain your answer - and only if someone asks
Gage "level" of audience to properly tailor your message
Don't be so sensitive - don't take things personally
Give status updates on important initiatives
Strive to keep decision-makers abreast of key developments
Keep your eye on high-leverage items always (80/20 rule)
Don't get distracted by multiple projects/opportunities
Finish some projects before starting new ones
Try to leverage the skills/abilities of others
Don't try to do everything yourself
Bring your business cards everywhere
Be on time for meetings

What are some of the lessons you remember on a daily basis? Share them please.

GI Bill for Programmers: 1000 by November 2011

2011-01-09T16:38:00.008-05:00

Over the past few days, I have enjoyed watching people discuss the need for building more programmers in our area. With Charlie throwing down the gauntlet for 250, Fred picking it up to 1000 and Nate offering his HoPE Manifesto, there seems to be a growing understanding for the need to grow our talent pool, instead of importing it - or fighting amoungst the other industries that pick it up.

Charlie mentioned the NYCEDC's initiative to work with the existing academic groups to improve and enhance the engineering and programming talent - which I applaud for the effort, but worry about the implementation. As Charlie says, because of the City's own (and necessary bureaucracy), it has to be careful to thread the needle properly (I have gone through this gauntlet with the COSp effort over the past two years).

But discussing a need for growing 250 or 1000 developers does not make it happen. We need a plan to create these developers - and we can discuss how either working in collaboration with government and academia - or working with the practical experts in the field (like at RubyNuby or NYCPython) - or both.

Collaborative Programming Education
About two years ago, I had asked the nextNY community if they would be interested in coaching their own - sort of an apprentice program that would help grow our own programmers. I began the effort to create a program that would emulate the effort I had created at Cooper Union in 2007 which resulted in six projects that could potentially become startups in their own right.

Interestingly enough - all of the students had no prior knowledge of the language they were using (Ruby), no prior work with collaborative technologies (e.g., wikis, blogs, etc) and were required to learn the language and server infrastructure between themselves. Instead of grading the students on how well they learned the language or implemented the data structures or RoR framework - they were graded on the progress of their development. And, little did I know, they were using the Lean Startup Methodology in their efforts.

Now - to be clear - these students already knew how to program in some other language (either C or Java) but had been instructed on academically measurable content (e.g., data structures). But what was different about this effort were the students created their own requirements, their own deliverables, learned the language and the framework between themselves, tested their own code and delivered working products - all while holding an insane class schedule as required by seniors at Cooper Union.

Some of the positives that came out of the efforts - most of the students that I kept in touch with would tell me that that class was the one that gave them the greatest uplift in terms of the "work world" because of the focus on delivering and learning on their own - instead of the standard "learn, homework, regurgitate, test and dump" process. And, it is my understanding that a majority of the students are part of more entrepreneurial efforts today.

Proposal: GI Bill for 1000 Programmers
In 2009, I mused whether or not programmers were the civil engineers of the 21st Century and got a lot of feedback that was positive. I wondered if the GI Bill - which repaid our soldiers for their civic service with a better education could be used in this case. Something like Americore?

Maybe the NYCEDC or the Kaufmann Institute could offer a financial incentive though arrangements with other corporates in the NYC area that funds an educational program that ensures some monies are paid to the participants of the training - like they do on their internship programs.

Maybe this program could offer corporates the chance to offer different non critical path programming projects to students within the program that, after ten weeks, can be delivered and managed by the programmers in the class.

Maybe this program could offer more experienced programmers a chance to lecture and work alongside the novice programmers - imparting some of their experience and knowledge - and developing a community of developers (like I see Pivotal Labs do with other companies).

Maybe this program can offer - like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig - a program that tracks programming skill performance and allows for the graduates and participants of this program to grow their skill sets and help flesh out the 1000 developers we are looking for.

This does not require a large expense - with everyone with their own laptops, cloud computing bringing costs down, and office space in the city available - we could easily create a learning program much like GirlsDevelopIT at NewWorkCity. The costs would be potentially for the administration and educators - but could be at a reasonable cost - since a large amount of the revenue could come from the business support that corporates could provide for their non critical-path needs. From what I understand, the amount of money that corporates regularly pay for what most startup people do would easily provide revenue for supporting the program in the long run.

And - the last part - is making sure we create commitments and use the gamification that all of the newest startups talk about. I mean - commiting to your goals, finding partners and growing your skills. Just like a workout partner, a diet partner, a swimming partner, whatever - partnering with others that are pursuing the same effort will improve commitment and delivery than single individual learners ever could.

I have seen this work. I had this work when I joined Accenture and helped our start group leapfrog over the other groups by completing our Accent on C in 1.5 weeks versus the normal 3 weeks (and insane late nights); I've seen this work in pair programming and I saw this work at Cooper Union. It will take time and effort - but we can do it.

I created the page on the nextNY site called Commit to Code - which could be the start of this paired effort. If you are interested - sign up. Let's begin to create this effort.

Discussing Social Media at Renaissance Weekend

2010-12-29T10:17:00.006-05:00

Just had my first morning at RenWkd and discovered I was added to the Social Media Rush panel. So, in being on the panel, I noted a number of perceptions that I wanted to record and respond to while the responses were hot.

So how do we access our customers?

Funny thing - I would avoid using the language of customer or client - and consider the people who are speaking about you and/or your brand as evangelists and/or fans. We all have the experience of someone commenting/complaining about some product/brand/service at a time that they are no where near any media outlet.

Companies and corporations are discovering (or rediscovering) that branding is about making a personal relationship with their enthusiasts/evangelists. Technology has made the cost of communication a lot less expensive - and the access to the medium (through PCs, Internet, mobile phones and sites like Facebook) very easy. But the real power is the reduction of friction from information going across a community. When people like content, when they can benefit from sharing the content - the technology makes the sharing a very low social cost. Thus, information spreads much faster because the barriers to information are much more permeable.

Why are people doing the "I just had eggs for breakfast" tweets?

While there are some who are aiming for some level of notoriety with these amusing tweets, I argue that these tweets are often the first foray into learning how to "speak" social media. Remember, you did not instantly know how to walk or speak your language. Learning another language is also a great analogy to "speaking" social media.

I have heard numerous times "I tried twitter, but just did not understand why it was such a big deal." I would suggest that a technology - as a technology - is not the end-all/be-all. Technology is like any other tool - when we have a need for using it, we develop our skills in using it. And just like any other tool/skill - you must start out small to learn how to use it and if you can use it. I suggest that these silly tweets/posts are more about learning and experiencing rather than ego and amusement.

Isn't social media more about damage control than engagement?

I would agree that social media's entry into the corporate consciousness has been (especially from 2004-2008) about damage control. Stories like "Dell Hell" and the Comcast Repairman Video turned the attention of the mainstream media to social media and the power of using these low-cost, easily shared pieces of media that could impact brands in a dangerous fashion (see Dell's stock price soon after Jeff's post).

But today, since people have access to these tools - and can have an impact on brands - especially when people are unhappy, brands are now focusing on being in a relationship with their enthusiasts who can be there when the negative conversations are about to begin. Likening this to a sports fan, once you have their minds or their commitment (e.g., bumper sticker, tattoo, etc) - rarely will you see them stand against the brand and often defend their brand in the face of facts and personal cost. I would suggest the Republican ability to distract people from their problems in support of policies against their personal good (see What's Wrong with Kansas?) is very similar.

Anything else?

One thing I forgot to point out is what I coined "the Infinite Memory of Google". Remember that everything you do on the web, in email, on mobile phones and twitter - all gets stored somewhere, in some fashion. This social record - social exhaust - does not dissipate with a stiff breeze. Rather, it takes time and other content that becomes relevant to cause the content to lose relevance and fade into the background. The challenge - how to address the bad content when you can not erase these digital footprints. The answer - understand the problem and learn how to address it with proactive engagement and positive commentary.

As we prepare for Blizzard 2010 part 2...or is it part 3?

2010-12-26T11:22:00.004-05:00

Just some quick reading on the reasons why "climate change" and "global warming" are real issues, not ones made up by others:

Snowpocalypse and the Climate Change Debate: Blogs, Scientists, Facts Defend "Global Warming" As Blizzard Rages - published in Feb 2010 about the debate and the discussion on the reasons for the heavy snowstorms and torrential rainfalls we have been having
November 2010 1st or 2nd warmest on record; ZombieSat saga ends - Dr. Masters at Weather Underground (weather site) discusses the average temperature of Nov 2010 and the state of the Arctic Ice
The Lomborg Deception: Debunking the claims of the climate-change skeptic - a good article on the insanity from a recent climate-change skeptic's publication

I do not know what we can do - but again, we have a need for understanding how we are impacting the global system, not just our own.

Overheard on the ad:tech Showroom Floor (funny)

2010-11-04T14:13:00.002-05:00

Sorry - but I actually heard about half of this said at the Jaavits this year. Why does everyone think "cloud" is the only way to go?

h/t to Dalia from cozywallet

Afterthoughts on the Rally for Sanity

2010-10-30T17:44:00.003-05:00

So, on the retrun bus with my compatriots from the DL21C and I must say, I was quite fortunate to get this bus and this ride - on our return trip, we ended up picking up four stranded HuffPo travelers who could not make it back to their buses. Stories of lack of organization, leaving late, arriving late were rampant. The refugees were still happy since the event itself was one that they felt part of even though it was not all they expected.

So, what was your thought Sanford?
I got there an hour and a half earlier and the Rally was entertained with replays of snippets of both Stewart and Colbert talking about their respective rallies. It was entertaining, but continually cramped. You could see that the place was laid out by someone, but no real staffing on managing the space itself.

When the event started with a countdown, it was an unusual start - The Roots and John Legend performed for over 40 minutes - which was definitely not what was expected. Then we got further entertained by the boys from Mythbusters with a couple of crowd experiments which included the world's largest wave and meat orchestra. By five to one, I was getting worried - and then John Stewart showed up.

The Chilean mine bit was kind of funny - but the storyline seemed kind of out of place. As the remainder of the event trammeled through the next two hours, I realized a couple of things:

there was an interesting diversity of people at the event, heavily weighed toward the younger demographic or educated demographic or Progressive Democrats
I think John and the event planners did not plan on the number of people that actually arrived. I think they were expecting half of the audience, especially based on the overflow of people on the steps of the Smithsonian and the takeover of the streets past 7th (some reports told me as far back as 12th - which could not hear because of the limited number of speakers and sound areas.
if you were coming to hear some form of partisan speech, it would be an incredible disappointment. I am certain that George Will will comment on how the Progressive Democrats were looking for a rallying cry, and did not see one here. But I think there was a reason...

Stewart and Colbert and friends were following the thread of satire in response to the Glenn Beck performance on the Mall months ago. I think John was essentially trying to ask for a rally that was simply fun - and avoidance of the media mess that causes the partisanship or amplifies it for the same of the media machine.

Stewart said on one of his shows, "Take it Down a Bit" - which I think was his intent. The jokes were there, but the choice of music, the lack of political partisanship and soaring rhetoric was intent. It was as if John Stewart had a large backyard and brought a couple of his friends to lay and act - as you might have seen at the Stewarts back in the 70s as John was growing up.

He got some of his friends to perform, he got his buddies to perform comedy and he got to stand up at the head of the table and give a little sermon. This is what the rally was - never that it was a political rally.

Only thing I wish he had done: wish he had told everyone to go out and vote on November 2nd. With that size of an audience, it would have been the perfect coda.

Now, this is a way to sanity...

2010-10-30T05:28:00.002-05:00

As the alarm rang at 4:30am, I remembered the call just six and a half hours earlier from Ben Kallos saying, "Sanford, you're on the bus!" The DL21C hired a bus for getting some of us down to the Rally to Restore Sanity - a different kind of event that makes grown men (and women) proud to be Americans.

On line in front of the Amtrak station at 5:15am, we sauntered onto the bus, grabbed our seats and began to reconnect with people we may have seen in other Democratic events. I caught up with a friend from four years ago who was surprised to see me on the bus - since I had been in California all this time. We caught up on war stories and laughing about Tickle Me Elmo dolls.

As I asked for the power plug, the head of the group said, "So, are you going to blog about the trip?" Well, since we have wifi and power on the bus, why the heck not? Pictures to come and stories to be told.

Stay tuned.

Searching for a Career - is this an outmoded concept?

2010-10-29T15:13:00.005-05:00

In the past month, since I stepped away from the Product Development for the Texai, I have been entertaining conversations on "searching for a career". Around the time of Yom Kippur, I met my natural mother's best friend - a gentleman that has had on order of 20 careers in his lifetime.

He was married three times, has two kids, is into real estate, financial instruments, clothing, sales - you name it. And I was surprised by his incredible candor about his life. He said that every time he was working, he always was looking to "settle down" and build a career, but circumstances and the economy often had another spin on his life and would have to change and rebuild once again.

I have had a very diverse career in the past 15 years, and I am still trying to explain my career path. I often joke that my mother has had a hard time explaining what it is I truly do. Or WHY I do it.

Daring to Make a Difference

Back in high school, I wrote a speech that advised my listeners to "dare to be different, dare to excel and dare to make a difference". My reasoning was a simple premise - which I find eloquently summed up in this poem: "Our Deepest Fear":

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

This quote is often perceived as a religious quote because it suggests a divine power and that we should show "his" glory. But I have always taken it, and other quotes, as statements for people to stand up and take a chance in life that they would not normally do.

A career is a very safe path - one of predictability and normalcy. Which - I have no beef with. But, for my life, I believe in making a difference where ever I go. In every role - whether as a consultant or as an employee, it is my responsibility to help the company succeed - to drive value from our transaction (they pay me, I deliver services).

Our services are of varying value - and the marketplace of jobs, roles, companies, businesses and organizations are always in flux. At the present time, our population is growing, the number of college grads are expanding, and the efficiency of technology ensures that fewer people can accomplish the work that it took two to three times the people to accomplish - and the economy can not support the current unemployment (close to 22% by rough, unofficial estimates).

So, are we looking for something that is an anachronism of a time when skilled manual labor was best when local, and the delivery of products and services from afar were of such low quality, that we would laugh at a sticker that said "Made in China" or "Made in Japan".

T-Shaped Managers or Lateral Employees

When I drafted my recent bio, I had to find a way to explain that I am skilled in more than a single silo of work - I handle product management, marketing and sales - and often lead software development teams. How do you place that into a single box?

One person suggested the role I play is more T-shaped than siloed - especially since after so many years playing in different companies (especially smaller ones), I have had to play in many roles. So, am I a sales guy with technical chops? A marketing technologist? An engineer with a social skill-set? A CTO? A consultant?

Being lateral - or not being afraid of going somewhere where I have not had experience is often confused with lack of focus. But as I mentioned in my speech, it is about "daring to make a difference". When you have to accomplish something with limited resources, limited time, limited money - but it has to get done - how does one NOT try to get involved?

And when you find passion - it becomes FLOW

As I was bringing this post to a close, I saw this tweet from my friend Whitney Hess on her new-found love:

Read about my new adventure in life and business with @loosecubes:http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2010/10/29/loosecubes-and-the-future-of-work/

And within her blog post, she had some wisdom that she imparted:

In two years and two months of independent consulting, I had never before: a) worked on-site with a client for more than one day; b) worked on a single client project for five days in a row; c) worked at New Work City for five days in a row. And despite catching the cold that was going around on Day 2, it was the most fun I’ve ever had doing client work — and I’ve had a lot of fun doing client work.
This felt different. Calling Loosecubes a “client” just felt wrong.
At the end of each day, after 10+ hours in a small, stuffy room together, we went home to write each other love notes about how much fun we were having. I was sad to see the week end. Friday night we all went out for beers with a few NWC peeps. Yes, we wanted to spend more time together. Saturday night I invited Campbell to join me for the Food & Wine Festival’s grand dessert tasting. We laughed the night away with chocolate and wine, and as we stumbled out hours later to catch cabs home, she stopped me on the street and admitted that she wanted me to be a permanent part of Loosecubes. And I admitted that I wanted it, too. It was like falling in love.
The whole following week, I was walking around in a daze. I asked my closest friends, friends with startups, if they’ve ever felt high all of the time. “You’ve caught the bug,” they all said. They were right.

How does one call finding you passion a "career"? How does one call finding that fit a "career"?

Are you searching for a career? Or are you truly searching for a passion?

Liveblogging The New Rule of Engagement at PIVOT

2010-10-19T10:33:00.008-05:00

People powered participation

Participatory web requires need new thinking.

We are weaving a new global brain. visualcomplexity.com

Death of the Grand Gesture. How do companies

You build authentic networks BEFORE you need them. Example TEDxVolcano

Tummler - someone who catalyzes others to action. Hired to bring the community to life. Check out tummlervision.com

Marketing lives in every department and is responsible for the customer advocacy.

Sam Decker: CMO, Bazaarvoice - listening and observing.
Three ideas to Avoid a Slimecano - @samdecker, @bazaarvoice.
How do you get the entire team to engage?
Reputation economy blurs the lines. No longer a funnel - a wild interaction between all of the groups. People, Publishers, Manufacturer and Retailer.

Customer Oxygen - makes the customer voice pervasive in every function every day.
Participation chain - turns engagement into value
Customer writes a review, then asks and answers questions, then writes a story about a brand - along this path they are generating content which then drives people to buy for you.

Change the thought - change it to be about squeezing participation, not

Social Commerce Rockstars increase participation and use content throughout the business.

Social Commerce Rockstar maturity curve - content and data usage - participation strategies. Move from Karaoke Star - along content, becomes a One Hit Wonder, along participation, Garage Band - best to move to Rockstar.

Tells a story of Land of Nod tables - and how they went directly to the bad reviewers and gave them replacements and letter.

Wendy Lea, CEO, Get Satisfaction - how to observe and get your customers to connect to each other.

Get Satisfaction is in the business of community love.

"Marketing is the New Customer Service" - but Scott Wax says "Customer Service should be the new Marketing"

Peter Merholtz - Adaptive Path
Engage - building in Experience from the Start
Designing from the Outside In - demonstrates ClearRx and how it came to be.

Points out the appropriate way to deliver experiences:

Systems
Procedures
Touchpoints
Interactions
Experiences

Building from the Inside Out - from what they had to the next iteration. Whereas Target using the ClearRX experience is going from the Outside In. What is the desired experience and the tangible vision.

Importance of getting all of the people at the table as soon as possible. Must draw widely from cross-functional teams. Design can be an activity that an organization embraces that everyone can be involved in. Use design to make tangible the early ideas.

An experience mindset requires honest empathy. Hardest thing most organization can deal with.

At worst, a gullet is the number one: a customer is one who gulps crap and craps cash.
Sheep - Docile and gullible, stories and messaging with preferences!
Homo economicus - highly rations, maximizes utility, quantity
Robot - task oriented, goal driven, efficiency

Empathy is the combination of emotional, intellectual and functional.

An experience mindset means nothing stands alone - systems basis: continuous improvement

Discusses United Airlines - empower the employees to do what is right for the employees.

Customer Experience is not something that an organization buys, it is a mindset the organization adopts.

Taking Your Lumps - Social Smack
Social Smack is doing for brands is the same as foursquare for locations. What is the consumer sentiment? What message is being sent though the social network.

Humanization of this brand.

This is the era of InSourcing - can not outsource passion. Brands need to engage the consumers - embrace the negative, humanize the brand

Deb: need to have awareness of the relationship with the customer - you can fight and make up - letting go of control.

Michelle Benat - CEO of RumbaFish (social commerce platform) - speed, reach and impact of these campaigns
Social Media analytics: Broadway style

Think of the Mary Poppins song for each one:

Listening and Engagement - go fly a kite with them.
Focus on Outcomes you Understand - talk about things that are real to you.
Measure what Matters to You
Influence That - discounts/deals and loyalty - that you value them - and that they are unique

Ariana Huffington at PIVOT

2010-10-18T16:25:00.011-05:00

Listening to Ariana Huffington - decided to liveblog.

She loves the Chivas commercial

Salk says we are moving from Epoch A to Epoch B where we are moving from competing & survival to meaning and collaboration.

Example: the stopping of reporters to go to the Rally in Washington. They have to be agnostic on "sanity". Can't we just have a lively debate? There is a rational, sane way to disagree - while there are others

Highest meaning of journalism is to ferret out the truth - and not always the middle ground. The earth is round - to interview Flat Eartgers does not make us better journalists. It makes us obsolete in terms of where journalism is going. The Millennials are relying on their friends for content /news. And, as Craig Neumark says "Trust is the New Black".

Everything is getting recalibrated. We need to be able to earn trust.

You can not enter into the same river twice. WiLL.I.AM said we used to consume news from the couch. Now, we are consuming news galloping, leaning forward, sharing news. People do not want to just consume news - they want to share news and see what people are reading. Recommends seeing "Waiting for Superman".

Marriage is for a certain time, but divorce is forever. - Nora Ephron

Q&A with Chris Shipley:
Ariana discusses the stealth mode for you NOT to sharer all of your reading habits.

Calls us "Gen Y-ers" - reminds us to bear witness on the stories. Entire section called Third World America and you can see how people are connecting and becoming a central hub. Leading us to our citizen journalism project.

Says that the skilled journalists will come together with the citizen journalists - best of traditional media with the best of the new. Certain skills that traditional journalist have that are very important and the younger journalsts energy.

Curation which is another word for aggregation - we curate and aggregate. For example - HuffPo believes that the Afghanistan War is a silly war and she is providing content that supports that point of view.

Engaged community

Have you read Gary Stiengards book on Third World America - she has not been able to read anything.
Feels a little like Cassandra - tried to warn the Greeks. She feels that she needs to tell people that we need to course correct before we become a Third World America.

Read section five from page 199 on - we need to have the middle class. The explosion of creativity and community os what will potentially save us.

We've Got Time - Howard Got Laid Off.com - unemployed are using social media more than others.

One of the biggest problems - we are a sleep deprived nation. One of the future uses of social media will be to convince others to unplug and disconnect. Recharge your devices elsewhere. At HuffPo, we are really focused on sleep - you will be more happier, joyful, less likely to be divorced.

What are your thoughts on Wikileaks?
Everything HuffPo does on line is about transparency and once they become members of the government, they become opaque.
People want to know the truth, and the challenge is that we do not want to jeopardize our national security. When young men and women are dying because political people are being too cowardly, then we need someone to stand up for our transparency.

Liveblog of Kirkpatrick at Girls in Tech NY

2010-10-13T18:27:00.010-05:00

Updated: 1:38am EST

---
Came a little bit late...

Saverin made two fatal errors - business (he should be in charge) and the advertising, and he did not move to Palo Alto. The first accidental billionaire is Saverin - worth 1.5B and worked for Facebook for FB - part time.

Mark/Jobs are not about the money - but about the creation of an idea and bring it to reality. He is motivated to make something to happen. He still wants to play down advertising. Trying to avoid the potential offense of excessive advertising. He had an idea - wanted to build products that were about sharing and transparency.

Why had FB succeeded where MySpace has failed - MySpace never followed up - not technology driven. MySpace was driven as a media company. Single biggest reason - technical mindset. Zuckerberg continually changes Facebook to avoid people coming up his tailpipe. FB was about solutions not about dating like Friendster and MySpace.

That Facebook stumbled into "real identity" is one of their greatest successes. To this day - the only place you place your real names.

Can only connect with people on Facebook with your real friends and real names. An enormous asset. Can not get good usage out of Facebook if you are not using your real names.

How do recreate the intimacy of the original Facebook? Are Facebook Groups doing that? now - the majority of users do not use it to the friends they intimately know. Root of a lot of the privacy problems is that people are not using Facebook the way it is intended (for your friends).

When you friend someone on Facebook - you are empowering them with your data. Baby Boomers feel that it is impolite to not accept friends requests. Additionally Facebook Groups should embrace this as a positive change. It will not leak out to the people you may not want them to see.

You should be able to reconstruct your original Facebook experience.
Zuckerberg suggests you are a single identity - it is almost an ethical question that you should be different in different contexts.

What are the negative aspects of Facebook? It is such a new landscape - we don't really know how to use it. It has grown insanely fast and we do not completely unrstand or can control it. Part of the problem is that propel use it cavalierly and cause danger with the cavalier effort. We are living in a very disclosed environment - but most of us on the planet do not live in a real democratic country. Story about Egypt where the police is watching Facebook to crackdown on Mubarak haters.

David doubts that when Facebook becomes a public company - how the company behaves may be very different.

Where do you see the competition of google and Facebook going? Same as old media has - time/attention is now on Facebook. For a long time, google was the number one place now no longer. Facebook has a lot of direct information to target ads better than google's ad inference. Now - with bing and Facebook, bing has the social information that improves search - google needs to figure out the social aspect.

Only thing that would differentiate Google Me is how you will control groups and group controls. Single biggest reason for Facebook Groups. Another big thing for Facebook is the Android operating system - they need competition on the mobile platforms.

The smartphone revolution is driven by Facebook - people use it for email but the single biggest thing people are using on smart phones is Facebook.

Sorkin had known as much about Facebook as he did about carburetors.

Questions:
Still a number of other social networks out there - do you see a backlash to other networks / vertical networks? Or do you see Facebook support subnetworks?
We are seeing the backlash - now there is a backlash. Now there is a lot of support for criticizing Facebook. No evidence of people leaving Facebook to join other networks. Facebook sees that there will be a migration and wants to become a platform - take the entity information and the social graph and become a distribution platform, but is not a specific destination site. Leverage the Facebook platform and create a solution of your own. Now, you can show your newsfeed outside of your page on Facebook.

You have seen Facebook staying out of the B2B environment - do you think it will continue to change?
It will continue to change (Zuckerberg's driver). You can use the new groups functionality to have many of the features for business.

What effects has Facebook has had on the world?
These people have been unbelievably open. The Facebook Effect is about the effects on politics, business, media, marketing and so on. Facebook's single most important quality is the broadcast ability to others that we never had before. The algorithm has decided who to show it and where to show it. It is changing how people work now. YouTube is a huge part of this - hugmoungous power shift from the top to the bottom. Just saw how the GAP just took down their new logo just after four days. In other countries, this power is amazing.

In politics, there is a discussion how Facebook supported the grouping of young people around Obama. Strange little examples - a kid in Florida fought against a new law that would have taken away funding from humanities students to science students and after 1000s of students joining the group ended up causing the state senator to cancel the law.

David in 2008 had the idea of doing the book on Facebook and at the time, there was little interest. Wrote an article in 2006 which was about why Facebook matters. Built a relationship with Zuckerberg and tracking the growth. Movie is a weird sort of distraction.

Q: Given that you wrote this book, you have been knighted as a resource on these topics - how do you think this positions you?
A: At the moment, because of the movie, his visibility has increased. Too bad that Mark feels so uncomfortable presenting to the public. They (Facebook) love that David handles it. Wait until they get hammered by global regulation - Zuckerberg does not have any problem with these topics - he is such an intellectual. He is not thinking of the cash out, he is thinking of the impact.
Hard not to have enormous admiration for Mark Zuckerberg due to his impact.

NYTech Meetup - October 2010

2010-10-12T18:07:00.012-05:00

Been some time since I live-blogged, so here it goes:

Andrew Raisej kicks off with an announcement of WeGovernment - things that are useful for their civic lives. Introduces the Deputy Mayor - MediaNYC2020 - series of initiatives. Establishment of business incubators, creation of a media lab for commercialization of new technologies, launch of the BigApps competition.

BigApps accomplish transparency in government, innovative ideas, improve efficiencies of city government, and provides developers and programmers the content needed for new apps. Doubling the datasets, winners will meet the mayor and get $20K in prizes. http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6301114

Brandon Kessler - ChallengePost - describing the NYC Big Apps 2.0 - use at least one dataset and make it available to the public. Submission deadline - Jan 12, 2011.

One Minute Presentations
Ari presents HowMutch - www.howmutch.com - learn about how much people would pay for various product offerings?

Shen presents UpGo - apps.facebook.com/whatsupgo - visualizer for your friends. Create a custom group and then using friends plus event makes a great experience. Some curates the experience.

Galvanize to share/hide/gifts - using some GPS/LBS service to place a gift in a physical location - using geocaching and awards points to the give giver and the finder.

Hitmaker a "new way of sharing music" - foursquare with songs. Allows someone to promote a song via twitter and Facebook. On the iTunes Apps store.

Five Minute Presentations
Songza - www.songza.com - create your own web station. Built on your friends and your music. Reminds me of Pandora. Share music - can have friends add music (ingredients) to the station. "Coolest websites are the ones which lets you broadcast yourself".

PalmWillow - www.palmwillow.com - Tal launching the site where Carla (17 year old intern) introing the site. Social networking community - share outfits with their friends and share with their friends - look at all of the brands. Demonstrates what looks like a clipart app.

Introspectr - www.introspectr.com - search engine across all of your accounts on the web. Leveraging all of the content within your accounts across the web (e.g. twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc). Search tool looks at titles and content. Indexes the full-text as well.

Catch a Fire - www.catchafire.org - allows professionals to connect with non-profits that need volunteer skills and efforts. Allows you to create your profile which helps in the matching.

Solvate - www.solvate.com - connecting freelancers.
Three rules: play the field, don't be afraid to ask for it, get a good deal (10x Solvate) - allows for one hour conversation with freelancers.

Nate discusses GroupMe and Fast Society - discussing the concerns of having competition - all that matters is how you execute on your plan.

GroupMe - www.groupme.com - group text messaging or conference calling. Can create a web-based chat and use the SMS to feed it. Introduces the iPhone app which leverages the native iPhone contacts.

Fast Society - www.fastsociety.com - looks like they create short-lived groups. "Even the projector wants to get down!" [Ed note: this guy gets the most inspirational speaker] "We combed through thousands and thousands of songs to find the BEST pause music out there."

Q/A of the Five Minute Demos:

Introspectr - "what are you doing next?" - Expand out to more services beyond twitter, Facebook and Gmail.
Catchafire - "how do you make money?" - We charge the non-profits for posting their projects ($200).
PlumWillow - "have you thought of creating a sister site for Halloween" - we are doing something along that line.
GroupMe - "you are generating a lot of phone numbers. Any problem with that?" We can address the number scarcity.
Catchafire - "Do you need your 501.c3 status to use Catchafire?" - No.
Songza - "can I go to any place in NY and choose a playlist?" - In cooperation with the venue own, yes. But right now - no.
Solvate/FastSociety - "what if people falsify their profile?" - We perform reference checks.
Nate - "what's the difference between FastSociety and GroupMe?" - GroupMe is persistent and FastSociety. FastSociety is for partying.

Per evening sponsor - David Tisch - Director of NYC techstars - applications are due November 21st.

After break - move onto additional companies:

Five Minute Presentations with Direct Q/As
Hashable - www.hashable.com - makes introductions over twitter and provides reference page for the recipients of the intro. Can also use email - hashable formats the email into Bio cards. Now creating a game to generate leaderboards. Now introducing people via #justmet - add to your twitter announcement (e.g. #justmet @first-twitter-name @second-twitter-name) and hashable will make the connections.

[Ed Note: looks like how to make connections to people you have not connected by]

Q: taxonomy of hashtags - sometimes there have been things that have been incorrectly "sucked in"
Q: what problem are you trying to solve? A: LinkedIn
Q: why wouldn't I introduce myself? A: You could - depends on your relationships.
Q: how can I use hashable in a private context? A: Don't do it over twitter. Could do a single or double opt-in
Q: can you DM to make the intros? A: Not yet. Email you can do privately. hashable tells you that the recipients have connected.
Q: have you thought about creating groups for leaderboards? A: yes - we have recently created another board for the West Coast, looking into creating cohorts

Tracelytics - www.tracelytics.com - application performance analytics tool - tells you how/why your website is performing badly.
Q: do you need any GEMS? A: you install a couple of packages and then you collect the information and then we convert it into other
Q: what languages? A: PHP, ruby, python - and they are planning on open-sourcing the instrumentation for the interfaces

Two more companies presented - Membased and twilio. Unfortunately, the laptop died in the midst of the blogpost. Sorry.

Remote Presence - after the novelty, effective presence happens.

2010-09-05T05:54:00.007-05:00

Today's articles (both video and print) in the NYTimes presented a number of perspectives on remote presence. In the main article, Markoff does a great overview of the different plays within the remote presence space. As you can see in the video that accompanies it, the use of our remote presence system (RPS) at Mozilla demonstrates just one of a number of effective uses of an RPS.

In the Pogue and Bilton video as well as the Bilton post, however, the story of remote presence effectiveness seems lost while the novelty of the RPS roaming the halls is made primary - which loses the intent behind remote presence.

Framing the RPS in a different way

Imagine if you were a 7" tall individual, starting a job at a new office. Imagine the looks that people might given you as you appeared in the conference rooms, cafeteria or around the corner. Without an initial introduction, the surprise by coworkers is not at all surprising. Now, imagine if you suddenly walked around the corner and came face-to-face with this:

You too may have a strange reaction to a moving screen with someone's face on it.
Unless you were made aware of the system being around, you too would be surprised. But, as our field studies (and others) have shown, after a short time, people quickly get over the surprised and quickly become acclimated to the remote presence. Often, within an hour in a meeting, most people treat it as a surrogate of the person piloting the system, reacting to the new abilities (or handicaps) of the system. The sudden shock is quickly lost and the strengths and weaknesses of the system become apparent to everyone.

At Willow Garage, the focus has always been on creating a rich presence in a remote location - both for the pilot and for the participants (locals). As we drafted as part of our principles for remote presence, the treatment of the RPS is about treating the system as if it is the original person. The idea is not to treat the RPS as a piece of furniture, but to treat the pilot with the same level of respect while operating a RPS as you would if they were there in person.

As RPS becomes more visible in the workplace, new social norms will form - just as it did with texting, Blackberries, video conferencing. We are very social creatures and will eventually create the norms that will make the limitations of the technology fade away and create the rich communication experiences we desire.

Update: ever wonder how writers come up with story ideas? After the Big Bang Theory came out with the Shelbot, I remembered this lovely video of Sergey Brin using the Texai and it being called the BrinBot:

Thoughts on Remote Presence and the Texai

2010-08-08T19:04:00.008-05:00

First of all - I wanted to thank Nate Westheimer and Brandon Diamond for allowing me to present at the NY Tech Meetup last week. To say it was a sudden surprise is an understatement since the original plan was to show a video of the Texai in action, rather than a live demonstration.For your info, the Texai is described at the Willow Garage website and will have some announcements in the near future. For initial discussions, feel free to watch the montage of the Texai.

For clarification sake, when you see me piloting the Texai, I am dialing in from my apartment in New York City to the office in Menlo Park, CA. When Dallas is dialing in to the office, he is dialing in from Seymour, Indiana.

New York Tech Meetup - August 2010

2010-08-03T18:19:00.006-05:00

eventros - a mobile app (iPhone) - can find people at an event via twitter tags and content you placed on the event. Will be activating foursquare, Meetup and geoloco in the near future.

Market Publique - vintage clothing ecommerce site with heavy photos and curated. Only allow "real" Vintage clothing providers. The editors of the site judge the applications, very easy site to manage your inventory and solutions.

TurnTo builds social shopping stores. Nice widget that allows you to mouse-over the different products and get feedback from visitors or friends. Finds some friends who have shopped and what they bought. If the person has not agreed to be references, but you are a friend, Turn2 allows you to request the friend if you can see them. Easy signup, allows for commenting, and allows you to push out to Facebook and twitter.

Response to Clay's book - Sam Lessin founder of drop.io - rails against the basic thread.

indaba - demonstrates the newest version of the site. Founder gives a discussion on the state of music. Leveraging one identity on the indaba Music Platform. Demoing an amazing online mixer at the demo site. Integrated with iTunes and an individual sales tool. Connecting with iTunes, MySpace and others.

Philo makes television interactive. Allows your devices to "checkin" with shows. What your friends are watching in real time. Once you are checked in, now you are interacting with all of your friends and viewers that are watching what you are watching. Incorporating "game mechanics" - virtual scavenger hunt. Demonstrates a badge by typing "omg" on Philo and gets a "Jesus Badge".

twilio evangelist demonstrates how to make a quick conference call using XML. Then is able to quickly script code to show the caller's numbers and then calls everyone back. SHows OpenVBX which allows for a VBX solution provider. Excellent product turntpdemo.

Now this makes me sick...

2010-07-06T17:24:00.004-05:00

Sent to me by a Florida friend. He visited the beaches on July 4th and this is what he found.

Very sad...

Can someone tell Charlie the emperor has few clothes?

2010-02-19T02:39:00.004-05:00

Okay.

Enough all ready.

I am a little tired of the hype.

I do not mean the hype of a blind date, a new car or even a new gee-whiz-I-gotta-have-it Apple product.

I mean the PR hype of NYC's bubbling tech scene.

I am sorry - but please. Will someone inform Charlie and Fred that a Powerpoint presentation and a full office hours does not solve the problems of an making a vibrant and long-lasting tech scene?

Oh - and I am certainly not pleased with the way the NYC government is enabling entrepreneurship - I think their reticence to solve other issues like tax liabilities/costs, spaces, infrastructure support and education beyond simple business plans is sorely lacking. But, what about the things that really support ICT hubs?

Waitaminute? Aren't you a NY Tech Evangelist?
Yes - yes, I am. But, as with all of my companies, I am always focused on discussing what is real and what is hype. And while I appreciate the stores of the past in NY (which I love and feel closely connected to - since my whole family are from Brooklyn and Queens, while I make do with Miami), the current tech scene in NY is still with issues.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my focus have been on fast evolving, innovative software companies - not companies that use software to enable themselves (e.g. a fashion magazine, an ecommerce site), what is a challenge is thinking about how we are able to build the fertile ground for this.

People always show Silicon Valley as a model of what is the best in an ICT hub - with its rich ecosystem of companies, academic partnerships, infrastructure - both technological and financial, and the associated human resources that come with these support mechanisms (factoid: 50% of every Stanford graduate lives within 50 miles of the campus). But, 100 years ago - it was not so.

Stanford and the area around it was a college looking for a focus - and President Terman provided it with support from his academic perch and provide companies with support though talented engineers (though his own recruiting efforts), academic programs and degrees (I am a proud recipient of his Engineers Degree - between the Masters and the PhD) and financial support when able to (stories of Hewlett and Packard and Terman seem to be a story somewhere).

Stanford was the seed crystal that helped improve the fertile ground that became Silicon Valley. Coupled with Berkeley and CalTech - the West Coast has focused on technology building/enablement for over a century. Where has New York been in this area?

1999 was a great year for New York Tech? How about NY Tech hype.
In this article on Read/Write Web, they comment on Fred Wilson's Powerpoint presentation and the beginning of Silicon Alley. He says:

1999 was the year that "all hell broke loose" in New York City for the Internet wave; major offline companies flocked to the Web, and dozens of smaller Internet startups went public or were acquired. According to Wilson, over 500 startups were founded in New York between 1999 and 2000; New York was the place to be, and everything was looking up without a hint of the impending dot-com crash. Wilson jokes that the peak of this era was epitomized in a television interview with Calacanis in which he suggested Harvard students take whatever remaining money they had and use it to start a tech company.

Yes - of course Jason said something like this - he was the Founder of The Silicon Alley Reporter, a newspaper reliant on building businesses at that time. And, with PE types moving to create their own tulips to flip and make money off of at the height of the frothy stock market, of course this was the peak. But I come back to the basic issue I have spoken about time and time again: where is the support? Where is the infrastructure? Where are the resources?

What are you babbling on about Sanford?
Actually, at the end of the Read/Write Web article, I was pleased to see Charlie discussing something that I hoped he would have included in his diatribe on the NYC City Council complaint:

"What I'd love to see is for the [New York] scene to more fully develop the bench players needed to support more startups: like product managers, interface designers, etc," says O'Donnell. "And for the educational institutions to catch up and start producing students that have skills that local startups can use."

Okay. Now here is something I can get behind. Build up talent in these areas that help create software products with speed and alacrity.

One of the reasons why I keep speaking about SPICES is that these are the components that make us create the ICT hubs we really want. If I go through them again - there have been some moderate gains in some areas (Charlie points out the Open Forum and the increase in angel activity in this post, and space growth in Sunshine Suites, New Work City, Soho Space and Hive@55), but the two that I think are STILL missing are the two strongest contributors to a thriving tech scene empowered by software innovation. As I wrote in this post about a New York Tech Revival:

Experience (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 2)
Show me the mentors. As in, I go to every NYTech Meetup every month - and I see bunches of people wanting to be entrepreneurs and people looking to connect to mentors. Who are the mentors? Who has been training the next crop of winners? In the music industry, this happens almost magically (though the economic rationale is there).

In the Valley, kabals/keiretsus work together to create bigger and better plays (see the Paypal Mafia and their prodigeny of YouTube, Facebook, Slide, Zivity, Yelp - juts to name a few).

Stop locking them behind panelist's tables and waiting for the mics. Give real entrepreneurs your TIME - like Paul is doing at Y-Combinator, Steve is doing at DreamIt Ventures. They are giving a lot of time - not just one event a month. Give to get.
Skills/People (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 3)
I think due to the economic downturn and the need to retool and relearn, I think people are learning new skills with new technologies (if they can) since the value is going up the chain, not treading water at the base of the pyramid. The difficulty I see is the the educational system is not teaching people how to be skilled in continual learning. Not the idea of the "one answer", but the fact that every problem has multiple answers and every solution can be right.

Apprenticeship teaches people how to work with others - and learn from others - gaining skills and becoming even more powerful than before - since the resulting skills and abilities are the apprentices - a melange of many experiences combined with the flavor of their own talents.

Crow about needing access and education - learn from Naomi Wolff
Charlie/Fred - with your megaphones - convince the city to put money into these two efforts: find the mentors and enable them to share their wisdom - not just in parcels, put in energy beyond the once-in-a-blue-moon sightings.

Get the city to find a college that will proactively create a technical program to teach and train technical people in software development and programming. Teach them to learn how to manage a agile product development process - with customers/users at the center, not just engineers showing off their technical skills.

Then - I will feel we have begin more confident with NYC Tech.

Are you listening Mayor Bloomberg? City Council Member Quinn? David S. Rose?

Read more about my assessment 18 months ago on the NY Tech Scene at http://bit.ly/stateofnytech and my vision for NY Tech Meetup on my Manifesto at bit.ly/9s0R

Snowy South means no Global Warming? Sorry - wrong answer...

2010-02-14T21:20:00.005-05:00

So, I have been listening to so many people talking about that the insane snows we have been seeing this year are evidence that global warming is not truly happening. You can read blogs and articles on these suppositions all over:

But there are two basic principles that should really define the debate: snow happens when there is moisture in the air (high humidity) and the ambient temperature is below freezing. Since the Northern Hemisphere is in the winter zone (furthest away from the sun), there will be plenty of days where there are freezing temperatures (even in Florida and other southern states).

The difference is the amount of humidity that is in the air and how long it is staying in the air. With El Nino spinning off warm humid air, and the increasingly warm temperatures in the atmosphere due to the changing global climate, is there any surprise that there are big snowstorms?

And, to put a finer point on it - listen to the Washington Post:

In most places, winter is clearly growing shorter and less intense. We can tell, because Arctic sea ice is melting, because the glaciers on Greenland are shrinking and because a thousand other signals send the same message. Here in the mountains of the Northeast, for instance, lakes freeze later than they used to, and sometimes not at all: Lake Champlain remained open in winter only three times during the 19th century, but it did so 18 times between 1970 and 2007.
But rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren't trivial -- global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of "extreme events" such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century.

Get off your a**es, Members of Congress, and solve this problem instead of letting our Repugs blow more hot air into the problem.

Additional source: Snowstorms Bring up New Global Warming Debate from Hollywood Today

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #3

2010-02-02T15:13:00.008-05:00

Last weekend, Dallas and Curt worked insanely into the night with our friends at Function and had a late-night delivery of the first 20 Texai into the office. As you can see on the homepage of Willow Garage, they were all sitting there - waiting for the chargers and such.

As you can see in this thread of photos, the Texai Team did an excellent job building them out. We had a timeframe of 3 months, and delivered the final seven four days later. One thing that was funny was when we delivered the first 20 - Dallas and Curt had worked so late in the night that they decided to do some fun photos that could be the Jobs/Woz style. But, we like to think of them as Woz/Woz.

Instead of Birthday Wishes, Can You Help Haiti?

2010-01-16T21:15:00.006-05:00

With my birthday fast approaching, and I find myself away from my friends in New York due to a project assignment - I thought, how could I best impact the world with my birthday (if not with a party)?

One of my clients (knockknock.biz) just joined with their competitors to do a fundraiser to support the Red Cross efforts in Haiti.

I remember the earthquake from 1989 - 7.1 in San Francisco is not the same as 7.3 in Haiti. I grew up in South Florida and worked with people from Haiti. My life - while separated by distance - is not far from this experience.

So, instead of throwing a party and thanking everyone for their well-wishes - I would ask you to make a donation. To The American Red Cross - and specifically, to the Haiti Relief and Development Fund.

A beer would cost $5-$8, a wine would cost $6-$10. Think of that when you think of making a difference this week.

Thanks for helping. I know it will help.

Please donate here.

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #2

2010-01-15T18:54:00.006-05:00

So, in the past month or so, progress has moved inexorably forward on Texas Alpha (or TA for short). Since the last report, our design partner (Function) has been hard at work making sure that all of the parts were in.

Off-the-Shelf Parts and Bad Timelines
One of the important aspects on this project has been to make sure the TAs were seen as "modifyable" - allowing anyone with an Allen wrench and some confidence to switch out parts and connect them to the robot whenever possible. The idea is to see what users would do with the robot, once given the source code (found here) and the physical system.

The method to do this was to use off-the-shelf parts while we made the custom parts from other outside sources. The funny thing is: you'd expect the custom parts to take much longer than the catalog parts. That is not the case, as we discovered. We had to wait insane amounts of time - and people seemed not to know what one hand was doing from the other. Suffice it to say, next time - we might be considering other components for our next TA build.

From the Ground Up

Once we got the parts in house, the build of the subassemblies has been fast and furious. As you can see from the slideshow, we have at least two of the TAs built and are replicating them quite rapidly. The funniest part of this effort is the fact that we might not have enough storage for all 25 of the TAs in the office as we are building them. But, we have a number of eager people wanting to work with them in the Bay Area - and beyond.

Dallas, Curt and our intern Tom Grimes (from Purdue) along with the other members of the Texas/WG/Function team have been cranking the Allen wrenches, and building parts left and right. And the software is becoming more of a reality with feedback from our growing test customer base.

Why are you writing about this?
Well - one of the things I am interested in - is hearing your thoughts on this new robot. Now, to be clear, the concept is not new. Take a look at IvanAnywhere, a hilarious and functional system being used by a software engineer for SQL Anywhere in Canada. And you can see a low-cost, fully-operational system called the TiLR (pronounced Tyler) which is being tested and was in use by google's Lunar X Prize Team for remote collaboration amongst groups. And another player in San Jose with HeadThere has been showing their product for some time. And another team in North Carolina called SuperDroid has developed a similar-looking telepresence robot called the RP2W (okay, sounds almost like watching Star Wars, yeah?).

But my question to you is: what do you think? Why do you think this technology has not made it in the marketplace today? I mean, most of these solutions are almost two years old - and I assume that the concept of a movable video system/screen is not new and revolutionary. Why hasn't this concept taken off beforehand?

And with the scores of videoconferencing companies out there - why hasn't videoconferencing evolved further than a separate room or a webcam with grainy pictures?

Any thoughts? Any insights? All are welcome. And, if you yourself know someone who is interested in the project - please send them to me as well. It is sanford AT willow garage dot - well, you know.

Give me back my TEXTS! #palm #pre

2010-01-05T19:25:00.000-05:00

After almost eight months, I have had to grow accustomed to my Palm Pre, with the slow WebOS operating system, the cracked screen and the chipped edges (read my thoughts on issues and problems with the Pre). My friends always say, "Sanford - you can easily just get it replaced. Your camera has never worked, just get a new one." Or, just wait until the google Nexus One Phone gets released on Sprint (which I have been thinking about over and over again).

I would happily fix my phone - if it weren't for the fact that I can not get my text messages off the phone! (Makes me think of acting like Mel Gibson in Ransom and screaming "GIVE ME BACK MY ~~SON~~ TEXTS!")

I mean really(!), we are in 2010.

Just because the original concept of texting was short-lived, IM messages that were disposable, today - texting has become almost as important as email. Keeping telephone numbers, conversation threads, other important facts - all stored in the threads of text messages.

I have already spoken to the Palm Development Team about this, and this was the answer I got:

Hi Sanford -- I did check with the team on this, and given what we have in place today it's not possible to do. The only kind of work-around (and it isn't much) is to do a 'copy all' in the edit menu of each transcript, then mail it to yourself. You still can't get them back in to the app easily. (you could probably send them to yourself from an SMS bridge from your computer)

We are in the process of reworking our data models that would enable this, but that is still some time out from being deployed -- my apologies!

Unfortunately, that is not a resolution to the problem. It is more of a frustration than a resolution. I saw Jamie's frustration in his post (read his tirade here "Dear Palm, it's just not working out.) I am astonished at the fact that, even with a Linux distro, there is not a simple way to grab the texts in some form of tar-ball and migrate them from one phone to another. Or what about a simple CSV file of the texts? Why did the data model not take this into consideration?

Texts are not disposable!

In the 15 years I have owned a cell phone, and in the last ten where I have been almost tied directly to SMS though my time in England and Europe, I have retained so many text messages like old emails - simply because of the quaint aspect of the message, the information stored within them, or what have you. Texts are no different than email - just shorter and less likely to be spam.

Why can texts be treated as first-class citizens in the realm of the Internet? Please?

BTW - I have been building videos on the slowness of the Pre Calendar app (interacting with google Calendar), the dog-slow nature of the Pre Email client, the lack of camera (STILL!) and the general sluggishness in using the global search for friend's names when wanting to dial (though, the release of 1.3.5.1 seems to have speed up this every so often). And, my favorite new act - my phone suddenly dies after being put into airplane mode(!). Oooooh - this is exciting!

Texas Alpha Robot - Report #1

2009-12-04T20:51:00.004-05:00

So - the last couple of weeks have been an insane whirlwind - Winter Holidays coming and with them, the crush of customers to my eCommerce site knockknock.biz. With programming issues from a long-departed former development team, my guys spent a tremendous amount of time and effort resolving issues and building the tools that have quashed most, if not all of the bugs we found with our code launch in the past few months.

But, in the past four weeks, I have been traveling back to my old haunts in Palo Alto, on a completely different, yet eerily familiar space. And, after a stopover with the family on Thanksgiving, I find myself knee-deep into robotics once again. But before this takes a strange turn, let me start from the beginning of this chapter.

"Sanford, check this out!"
About a month ago, I got a call from a friend of mine who was looking for some help in developing a new robotic product. He had showed it to me weeks earlier, and I was having way too much fun with it (see me instantiated in it on the first version).

Texas, as it is known in the office, is not a new idea - a teleoperated, telepresence robot that allows a person who is equipped with nothing but a webcam, a computer and a decent connection to the Internet (sippy straw ISPs need not play).

The two engineers behind Texas are Dallas Goecker and Curt Meyers, both engineers from Purdue University (my alma mater!) and both are insane enthusiasts of BattleBots. They happen to work at Willow Garage in Menlo Park, a research group working on "open-source robotics". Their mission, which might sound a little idealistic
to some, is to create the platform for Personal Robotics (PRs - like PCs. Get it?)

A better way of understanding the concept is to think of the analogies between the two spaces (computing and robotics). Here is the dictionary of the breakdown:

PR2 (the robotic platform that is being built by WG) is analogous to the Macintosh
ROS (the robotic operating system) is analogous to the PC-DOS or DOS (disk operating system)
Texas (the simplified platform) is analogous to the Apple I demonstrated at the Homebrew Club by Woz and Jobs (but with less risk in the parts)

Make sense?

Better yet, watch the video below for a better understanding.

So, what does this mean? Well, I am back to my old haunt of being a product manager, focusing on delivery of a working system for customers and evolving the system for the near future. We are a small team, but working incredibly hard on this system for the next number of months - and I will have further notes as the system evolves over time.

"How can I help?"
So, you might be thinking - "Wow! That's cool! How can I get one?" Well, not sure yet - but I would love to hear if you have any great ideas on how to use the Texas in situations that it would be beneficial. The company is always willing to learn (it is a research lab) and I am always here to make it into something.

Catch up with me and tell me whatcha think.

Enjoying the Kodak Zi8 - thanks Kodak

2009-11-02T09:58:00.003-05:00

Last week, I was at the #140conf in LA and was handing out all sorts of swag from Knock Knock, my client who I am the Digital Director. As I was heading out, I had some remaining big pieces (our Complete Manual to the Things that Might Kill You, our Bottled Water Bag, etc.) and decided to give them to Chief Blogger from Kodak as well as her coworker, Tina.

As I was leaving, they grabbed me and surreptitiously handed me a Kodak bag which had a Kodak Zi8 camera within! All I was asked to do was to post up some videos for people to see. And so, to keep with the promise, I include the following video I shot with the camera. Tell me what you think!

Tech meet Press, Press meet Tech and What's a Product Manager?

2009-10-14T09:54:00.004-05:00

Last night, the nexyNY Digital crowd got a chance to converse with members of the Fourth Estate (or me, depending on their poor fortune). Charlie O'Donnell put together the "Meet the Startups" touting "100 CEOs and founders of NY Tech Startups in one room". Since I was not representing a tech company this time around, I went as a stringer blogger to gather some info and names of new companies that deserve some visibility.

To start off with, I must thank all who spoke with me and gave me a short 30 second pitch - and will list them below. I also asked two questions, based on the recent discussion on tech companies and product managers in NYC brought up by Fred Wilson at the Clickable Cafe from a couple of weeks ago.

It was asserted that there is a dearth of "product managers" in New York City and a growth of this community (and skill set) would be a positive indicator of NY Tech growth. So, aside from meeting the founders - I asked about their tech staff and their "product management" staff.

Requisite Company Mentions
As promised, I wanted to mention the companies I met last night. All were excellent discussions - albeit incredibly fast...

Market Publique - online market place for vintage clothing (must be at least 20 years old)
MyItThings - online user-generated fashion magazine
Mobile Commons - SMS/telephone advocacy tools
UpSkil.com - a new career education site (cheaper but better than UoP)
foursquare - mobile, location-based notification and community tool
centrl - mobile, location- and social-network-based community tool
boomerater - user-generated portal/magazine for baby-boomers into a number of vericals
Funnel Scope - travel search engine with twitter API connection to converse with friends on trip decisions
Asian in NY - a "craigslist for Asian community members" or a gumtree in the US for the Asian community
Kidmondo - online baby journals
cookstr - online receipes
MeetingWave - faciliatating connecting in person with your contacts (Meetup meets LinkedIn)
Cloud Contacts - scanning of your business cards into a single dataset
Convos - one-stop group communication and management platform
OMGPOP - online multi-player games for teens
Unigo - online publisher using student-generated content on universities
Gate Guru - iPhone app for information on airports (similar to SeatGuru for airplanes)
SquareSpace - SaaS web CMS with extensive tools
kgb_web - an upcoming "Pandora for Content" - recommendation engine for all forms of content (with many other incarnations)
Instinctiv - a smart-phone music player with stronger recommendation tools by tracking your on-device actions (e.g. skip, fast-forward, etc)
Stratus Security - API access management and billing toolset

Now, in the course of the discussions with these companies - there were a couple of observations I made:

Over 80% of these companies would not be considered "tech companies" - specifically a company that is a tech product that is solving a business need. Rather, most of these companies were media or service companies that were startups - using tech as one of their differentiator. Most of these companies either outsourced or "had a tech guy" on their founding team.
Of the other 20% of the companies, the product management work was being handled by the founder, the CEO (and or CTO) or (in the rare case of kgbweb) a separate Sr VP of Products.
"Product management" was understood as "owning the product", but the strengths of the owner was the driving factor of what the responsibilities were of the PM.
One person who discussed with me about his company also mentioned that as a former Product Manager of a major bank, he could not find "product management" jobs in NYC when he went looking.

Why the concern?
One of the comments Fred made at the Clickable event was the need for more product managers in NYC to help create startups. Being a former Valley guy (Silicon Valley, not SoCal!), I was a product manager for a number of companies and knew the community of members during my time there. PMs were the "CEOs" of their products - either by market or by channel. Their responsibility was to the P&L of their product line and responsible for:

sales performance (how the sales team performed with direct authority over them),
market penetration (what percentage of the market did they own)
marketing message and communication (how did the market understand the product)
product features and enhancements (to expand their market offering)
product delivery and testing (working with engineering/production to deliver the product on time)
customer acceptance and service (all about retention and up-to-the-minute status on product service)

Depending on the company, these responsibilities had different priorities based on internal resources. But, if you note the list above, these are also the responsibilities of a small business owner - just at a very different scale or vocabulary.

During Web 1.0 in the Valley, the strongest CEOs tended to be the PMs of other companies because they could easily generate the direction for these areas - not simply one person for each. By being strong in a number of these areas and being able to tie them together into a coherent product and company strategy is one of the keys to a successful company. The challenge: how do you make companies that need such product managers that are also (eventually) rewarded for being the CEOs of small startups in the future?

New York City needs a SuperHappyDevHouse!

2009-10-10T16:02:00.005-05:00

This afternoon, as I returned to New Work City from watching the winners of the Yahoo! Open Hack Day, I was thinking - why is this one fo the first efforts to gather developers together in a community setting to do development? What happened to the semi-regular efforts that go on in other development groups?

I know of various tech meetups like NYCPython, NYC PHP Meetup, and other groups that connect here at NWC, but something I have been craving is a form of community that I saw happening in Silicon Valley in the way of SuperHappyDevHouse originally started at an old college friend's home, David Weekly (of pbwiki fame).

Long ago (34 events ago), Dave and some of his friends rented a house in the foothills along Highway 280 (about 10 miles north of Stanford). After causing a police action to occur at their home, they took a page out of the storied LAN house concept and began to take out their regular furniture and bring in long tables and set up chairs throughout the house. Then they'd set up wifi and power throughout (beefing up the power distro and the Internet connection) and invite a few hundred friends over to hack away at whatever they were doing.

Toward the end of the day, they would set up a screen and have the different developers who were working on projects, show off their wares to the other people in the event.

Granted, this was series of developer/testosterone driven events - but it gave this community of developers a chance to connect, socialize and perfect their skills (or skillz) through regular events.

At the Millenium Hotel today, I saw a glimpse of this here in NYC - where developers were amoungst their peers making a mark on their own work - after a night of hacking on the 8th floor of the hotel. Granted, Bre and the Makerbot (or Makerbox, I mistakenly call it at times) crowd might have been the rowdiest of the crew (with their new News Toast concept), the energy in this group was supportive and enthusiastic. Showing your warez to your peers after working with other peers - and getting applause for great work - this is the positive reinforcement that developers and creative types need to push through the tougher slog there is in being a minority within a larger community.

Much like how religions draw strength from regular gatherings and remembrance of teachings long ago, events like this can help foster strength, resilience and depth amongst the community to continue what is necessary here in New York - a skills-base of developers and creators who want to make things and continue to become successful.

We need this kind of effort - this kind of regular event. Not once a year, but once a month - like SHDH. Reading the post from Fred Wilson on how New York was getting cred for having google have it's second largest office in NYC and Microsoft having its large office here as well - this is not a measure of their contribution to the community of developers - this is a mark of their acknowledgment that media dollars are here in NYC - and developers here are often sales engineers, not originators of new solutions or services.

Yahoo's effort in doing Hack Day here (as well in other locations like Chicago, South Carolina and London) is about the outreach and connection to the communities. With their libraries (like YUI 3.0) and their new YQL service, they are engaging in a grassroots effort to build up the community. It is about lifting all boats, not just about the ones nearest Sunnyvale, that will increase marketshare and technology adoption.

I ring out a clarion call for others who wish to make this a common occurrence here in NYC - and would like to make another one happen in January 2010.

Anyone interested?

(Thanks to Chris Yeh and his team for putting in the investment and time into making this event so successful.)

Afterthoughts on Fred Wilson's presentation...

2009-09-29T18:38:00.003-05:00

Sitting at New Work City, listening to the USTREAM of Fred's and Chris' presentation and enjoying the discussion on why New York is coming into its own.

I love Fred's topic of twelve factors that make New York a powerhouse. But I also loved the discussion of needing a "firewall" around the East Coast to maintain a place here in the region to avoid the leaps from the East Coast (read: Facebook, Cotweet, Napster, etc) to the West Coast.

NOTE: I want to focus that we are talking about software-based applications/community tools - primarily focused on media.

NY Talent/Staff Issues

There is always a knock on New York in terms of the availability of staff and/or talent - and the argument of google's second largest office is in Gotham (but their staff is for Ad Sales with an engineering staff to support them) and Microsoft's office (similar story with engineering support for their sales teams). But I think there is a problem that the path to building skilled software engineers (programmers) since the curriculum is often not geared for product development. This is why I speak of working on building a better curriculum program for building real product developers.

The real issue is that the MONEY is in the Valley - and here in NYC we have how many VCs and angel investors? I know the discussion is always about:

Union Square Ventures
DFJ Gotham
Ascend Ventures
NY Angels
RRE
FirstMark Capital
First Round Capital
Betaworks
Zelkova Ventures (whoops!)

and then? I know there is a lot of funds in New York, but where are they - for this community?

The refrain I hear is after the first group listed here - there is not much more to go after. Oh yes, there are others - but how to find them...

Wishing you a Happy and Healthy New Year

2009-09-19T11:34:00.003-05:00

My roommate Alana sent this to me, and I wanted to share it with you:

Dearest Friends,

I wish you all a wonderful 5770, and beyond. May this year bring you all that's good that you truly need and deserve. Most importantly may you live up to your Potential and achieve what you most desire - in your career, relationship, family-life, travel goals perhaps...

May health, happiness, good news and sweet times be with you throughout the year.

May you have much to smile about. And I hope that I am blessed to see you all more often in the year to come.

Thoughts on eating less meat/animal protein

2009-09-07T09:48:00.002-05:00

About seven weeks ago, one of my business partners handed me a book - The China Study - which discusses the occurrence of "affluent diseases" in particular parts of the world and how diet is strongly correlated to them. Affluent diseases as in cancer, MS, diabetes, heart disease and so on.

In addition, a friend of mine took me to see Food Inc. at an art theater by NWC which also discussed how agrofarming and the consolidation of the food industry has brought about dangerous change to our food supply - particularly with regard to animal products.

So, seven weeks ago, I decided to see if I could go along with the diets suggested by The China Study - a reduction of animal products in my diet which included dairy and meat. I would increase my intake of plant-based foods and increase my intake of whole-grain and sprouted grain products, instead of refined flour or sugars.

The impact of this diet on my life has been remarkable.

Since the diet, I have seen:

My weight drop ten pounds and my stomach bloating disappear
My sleeping habits have been incredibly improved and with more energy to do other things
My cholesterol - which was being managed by my Lipitor to 150, now down to 87
My mental faculties have been improved and enhanced - clarity in terms of remembering things from long ago and processing speed in terms of problem solving speed above my normal state

Now, I do enjoy some meat or dairy products now and then - but I try to keep it to once a week in terms of meat (though I am on 2.5 weeks without it now) and dairy very seldom (though I had a slice of pizza a couple of days ago).

I am now finding that learning a programming language and architecture, which would have been more of a challenge to me in the past, is incredibly easy and accessible. I keep discovering some past thoughts and concepts that I once focused on before - and completely forgot - are returning with alacrity and vibrancy.

It has been interesting - since I did not think I could do a vegan/vegetarian diet - especially after being such a fan of meat for so long. But the challenge has been not as great as I thought - especially when you begin to realize that fiber is a major component to our health, and not the Metamucil we see on TV all the time. Plant fiber and whole grains turn out to be better than any vitamin or pharmaceutical product one could provide.

Is being a vegetarian right for you?
Not sure. You might think it something to try - and I would avoid the crazy diets and such. Just enjoy the noodles and vegetables you are finding in the supermarket. Entire empires and countries (like India and China) subsist off of these diets and, if given access to the quality and quantity we in the States are enjoying through our organic channels, I think the benefits of long life, old age with clarity and reduced chance of affluent diseases is reason enough to engage it.

Do I consider myself vegetarian - no. I still look forward to my sirloin or some other fine piece of steak. But nowadays, I carefully choose that piece of meat - if only because I know that 5% of your diet can be animal protein - and that is just fine with me.

Fast Forward to 2015: RIP Telcos, Long live brand networks

2009-09-06T16:54:00.003-05:00

Was having an interesting lunch today with a friend who founded power.com and we were talking about our intentions to migrate over to google Voice with our cell numbers as soon as google offered it. It was funny, because as we were discussing this, it brought me back to a discussion I had with David Isenberg back when I was running Interoute's IP network.

This was back in 2002 when we were in the last throws of the implosion of the telecommunications industry from the first Web 1.0 cycle, and I had been hired to lead the IP products for Interoute because of my combination of skills in hardware, software and networking. My only exposure to telco land was back in 1995-96 when I built out the first self-service interface for Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) called PICASSO (it stood for something, can not remember the entire acronym).

I built a team, deployed what is now known as application-aware throttling (e.g. net neutrality) and generally got an incredible lay of the land from the point of view of telcos, service providers and our customers. What has become increasingly obvious to me in the past seven years is how easy it is becoming to build networks on top of our old infrastructure, and how the telcos will more than likely become subsidiaries of larger service companies who will build businesses on top of the infrastructure overall.

google's Infrastructure Team
In 2004, I was being interviewed by google for a role to negotiate pricing for dark fiber and colocation space in Latin America. An article by CNET at the time also questioned whether or not google was going into the telco business. A year earlier, I had been speaking with the head of google's Network Infrastructure (who used to be Yahoo's Head of Network Infrastructure) about how to monetize their IP network because of the ease of use of new network technologies and the expansion of the peering nodes that were beginning to be publicly available. Combine the fact that google was a source of more data and could offer it's downstream to other network users that could ride google's network for a much lower cost (since bandwidth prices are all determined by commitment rate).

Additionally, when I ran the IP Product team, we focused on working with the application and hardware providers - speaking with Sony Playstation, Nintendo, and Microsoft XBox about building a private network for their customers to connect to and be assures a specific latency (since that matters in interactive gaming). In every case, the gaming arms of the corporates were not interested in a dedicated network (at that time) since the last mile was the real killer in latency. Instead of being the fastest network, we were hamstrung by the least common denominator (or slowest link in the chain).

Today, google is running it's own global network - a full four years after the start of the effort - more than likely lighting up fiber across the world and colocation centers everywhere. Microsoft has more than likely gotten into the business - and, if AT&T has not hamstrung Apple, they are doing so as well. I know the biggest complaint about the iPhone is not the applications or lack of multi-threading, but the AT&T network not providing the quality of service needed for the phone to operate at its peak.

I know that Sony has dabbled in the business (at Interoute, my team and I built the SoNET for Sony which was a white-label ISP for their camera). So all of the application players are looking for ways of providing network service without dependency on telco service providers.

Arrival of the brand networks
While this might seem silly proclaiming this to be next paradigm (after describing SoNET), I believe that in the next couple of years, we will see a birth of brand networks - IP networks riding on fiber in the gigabit Ethernet and 10G Ethernet range riding on wavelengths of light, instead of the SONET and other optical carrier components that still make up the infrastructure of the large backbone networks of today.

google (if they are able to) will more than likely launch for the first - due to their large bandwidth capability and their value propositions. No one prior to google - or prior to the ubiquity of IP networks - would ever dream of challenging the telco community.

Why? Because the communications networks have been dominated by the POTS network (plain old telephone service) and getting into the physical central office (what the Telecommunications Act of 1986 was supposed to facilitate). Back then, accessing the Central Offices (think of them as the off ramps from the telecommunications superhighway) was supposed to enable new, innovative services across the network.

Now, if you add:

with the ubiquity of soft-switches and VoIP - which used to be dominated by real telephone switches in the central offices - at more and more peering points (not owned by telcos),
combined with the incredible reach of the Internet Protocol across every network (e.g. mobile networks, DSL, cable, etc),
augmented by the network reach through WiFi, WiMAX, EVDO, 3G, 4G and other wireless network protocols and meshing capabilities,
accelerated by the ever decreasing cost and complexity of managing world-wide IP networks, and
the economics of bandwidth pricing (greater volume means lower prices) from the legacy backbone providers

a brand network becomes even more attractive to companies that rely on them - like google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and so on.

Why I think I am right
I believe this is going to happen in the next three years because of a couple of things:

google Android and Chrome - both are OS platforms for small devices
google Voice and number portability - essentially making google the "central office" for all people who switch to google Voice
The google Network and the ubiquitous reach it has across the world - which means no other network can be without access to the google network, and
AT&T's efforts to crush google in the courts and in Washington DC (as described in this WIRED article)

I would also add the telco's insistence on the need for network neutrality (which essentially means the ability to block packets from specific sources on their network) so they have a tool to beat back google's dominance. The telcos want the ability to selectively filter packets so you would not experience performance degregation when going to your favorite sites - but when a google Voice call is being connected, a performance lag could occur since the google packets would be downgraded in priority for delivery.

When google becomes the network - watch the telcos fall. I assume this will be led by any of the telcos that are generating a significant portion of their revenue by POTS service and have not fully diversified into the IP space. If Apple does the same thing - either through a partnership with google on their fiber or their own purchasing spree - then more networks will begin to fall.

My guestimate on the timeline will be:

2010 - google Voice is on all platforms and networks with number portability
2011 - AT&T pushing very hard to block google's monopolistic tendencies
2012 - google announces google Network - in concert with cable companies and other backbone providers like Sprint
2013 - first of the networks begin to close down (likely T-Mobile in the US)
2014 - google announces deal with Apple to offer Apple iPhone Network for any iPhone on any network
2015 - google purchases Sprint and/or regional providers to manage/maintain the google Network as well as the original POTS/VoIP network

I know my telco friends are going to comment on the last mile/first mile argument - that the telco network that is providing your IP service will always be the weak link in the chain. But, I would argue that google, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and other handset providers are making that no longer a problem.

On my Palm Pre, I use any wifi network I want to access the world - for uploads, downloads, whatever. I know that when Skype and google put the google Voice on my Pre, I will be using it more than the Phone app - since the Phone app is so much not connected to my life than google Voice or Skype currently is. My Pre will become just another multipurpose computer with a network adapter that accesses any and all networks - and will not be locked to one network or another.

Will this be better than what I have now?
Not sure about this one. I hope so - since google and the other companies are about providing quality of service on their apps - since I would switch in a heartbeat if they did not work for me. Vendor lock is not in their DNA, service loyalty and innovation is.

Need help in naming an event - got some ideas?

2009-09-02T15:31:00.006-05:00

In July, a bunch of people on the nextNY email list were discussing an event that happened in San Francisco:

This was all over the news here (bay area) last week:

http://www.jobnob.com/blog/2009/05/jobnob-san-francisco-happy-hour-be...

Basically Jobnob was hosting a happy hour calling unemployed people to come and join startups, but, without pay. So many people showed up that they couldn't get much done and the startups there were overwhelmed. This of course surprised most people. Something to think about."

Moreover, there are laid off people on severance who will lose their severance if they take a paying job. Some of these individuals may be interested in "sweat-for-equity" positions at startups (I've spoken to a few).

Should NYC have an "unpaid" job fair trying to connect these people with startups similar to the one out in San Francisco?

I'm not suggesting it makes sense for laid off people to take unpaid jobs instead of looking for their next paying job, but could be an opportunity for those on severance looking to contribute to a promising early stage NYC startup.

Just a thought.

So - a group of us got together and have been working to make this happen. The challenge is - how to name the event effectively.

Details for Naming
Usually, when I collaborate with a company - I talk about the target customers they are aiming for to help attract the correct people to a product (in this case, an event).

We are planning on having 100 companies take tables at the event, and having no more than 6 people per table at one time. We are expecting a wide turnout - guestimating around 3000 seekers.

The offer (similar to what the Levin Institute is doing) is a 10 week, 10 hour per week commitment to each side of the relationship - where the professional is giving the company a trial period of experience - so that both sides get an understanding of the skills and opportunites of each other.

Our key words that we are speaking toward are respect, relationships and professionalism. We break them down as follows:

Respect for individuals and companies - since both are hard hit in these times
Relationships - because every business engagement is a relationship
Professionalism - because this is about being professional on both sides of the table

Our target audiences are the professionals that are looking for opportunities and the companies/startups/non-profits that are interested in engaging talent for the purposes of growing themselves and the skilled talent.

We have come up with a couple of names - but I am trying to come up with the right one - and we are stuck (or at least I am). Each of these names have the same tag line - Connecting Skilled Professionals with Opportunities:

unpaidjobfair.com
cultivatenewyork.org
positionaudition.com
linkupnyc.org

I like one of them in particular, but I could use your help in figuring out which is better and which we should choose.

Please comment below and I will follow up.

Thanks!

P.S. You can see the notes of our efforts here: http://bit.ly/k8zk7

New York poised for a tech revival? If we address some issues...

2009-09-01T14:50:00.005-05:00

So, Miko Mercer's tweet led me to a couple of posts by Chris Dixon (New York City is poised for a tech revival) and Fred Wilson (The NY Startup Scene) and the ever running discussion on how the NYC Tech scene could be the epicenter of the next tech boom.

Sorry, but I think we have some issues that STILL need to be addressed - and I could say that green shoots are still growing in the concrete sidewalks that makeup NYC.

Last year in December, when we were having the New York Tech Meetup Organizer election, I spent a couple of weekends drafting my thoughts on the success of various epicenters and how NYC fared on them. Borrowing from a friend (Mike Lewis) and an old EE software program, I came up with a SPICES metric:

Space
Appropriately priced, appropriately equipped, easy access to transport for talented tech workers
Platform
Where people can congregate, get noticed, increase awareness beyond their small community
Infrastructure
The actual stuff that is used for performing technology acts - power, telecoms, hardware (or virtual hardware in software's case), facilities for manufacturing and research
Capital
Money, money, money that is not based solely on a definite rate of return - but has a likelihood of return
Experience
Mentorship of the aspiring by the people who have succeeded (or failed) in the past - forwarding understanding and wisdom to others
Skills/People
The raw skills that people have within themselves and in clusters - where ongoing interaction increases skill level and value - often though of as a "educational" requirement, but I liken more to an apprenticeship

Last year, when I was contemplating my run for NYTM Organizer, I ran this analysis over my read of the City and what we needed to do. Here is my quick assessment of the State of NYC Tech for 2009 (with my own scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is weak, 5 is strong):

Space (2008 - 1, 2009 - 3.5)
Advent of other workspaces like New Work City, 160 Varick, RTV SmartSpace, Hive@55 and the existing spaces that are already serving various players (e.g. Sunshine Suites, eMerge, TechSpace, etc) are serving the need better (especially with the advent of the COSP). Couple that with the glut in grey spaces (sublets in existing office space) - entrepreneurs are finding locations to work easier and easier.
Platform (2008 - 3, 2009 - 3.5)
Along with the NYTM, Graham's UltraLight Startups event, Murat's Entrepreneurship event, the Techaviv event have been offering more visibility for companies to the community at large, but the events are not driving the real need for entrepreneurs - money and partnerships. A platform should be providing a filtering mechanism with guidance and leadership - kind of in the way Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka do in their discussions of companies. With a trusted gatekeeper evaluating companies (like they do at various showcase events in the West Coast), there is a great probability of the entrepreneurs getting funding and business.

Personally, whichever platform event figures out how to tie what they are doing to the media establishment here in the City, they will be the future of the NYC platform.
Infrastructure (2008 - 3, 2009 - 3)
My disappointment is that metro wifi and really high speed bandwidth is not a priority in the city. I sit next to one of the founders of NYCWireless and often see/hear the frustration that we have in getting the kinds of speeds we would need to really exceed - not just succeed.

To win in mobile, we need more infrastructure for learning how to build mobile devices and apps - iPhone is a decent play because of the Apps Store - but where is the infrastructure to work on Palm Pre, google Android, the new Symbian? Couple the tech with the media content that is generated here - and then add the incredible finance industry and the understanding of payments/banking - we could be providing an insane infrastructure.
Capital (2008 - 3.5, 2009 - 2.5)
With the economic tsunami and the financial companies that were part of the detritus, there is still a great deal of cash/capital that is accessible. But, the people with the cash want a short-term return, not interested in true, long-term investment. And if they are interested in a long-term investment, they do not know how to evaluate technology plays without validators. And without experienced players (beyond Kevin and Dwight and Scott and so on), the validators are few and far in between. Risk capital is about taking a risk - and working with someone on a level that they can perform. Value investing for the betterment of infrastructure and community - that is something I believe we are still lacking.
Experience (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 2)
Show me the mentors. As in, I go to every NYTech Meetup every month - and I see loads of entrepreneurs and people looking to connect to mentors. Who are the mentors? Who has been training the next crop of winners? In the music industry, this happens almost magically (though the economic rationale is there). In the Valley, kabals/keiretsus work together to create bigger and better plays (see the Paypal Mafia and their prodigeny of YouTube, Facebook, Slide, Zivity, Yelp - juts to name a few).
Skills/People (2008 - 2.5, 2009 - 3)
I think due to the economic downturn and the need to retool and relearn, I think people are learning new skills with new technologies (if they can) since the value is going up the chain, not treading water at the base of the pyramid. The difficulty I see is the the educational system is not teaching people how to be skilled in continual learning. Not the idea of the "one answer", but the fact that every problem has multiple answers and every solution can be right.

Apprenticeship teaches people how to work with others - and learn from others - gaining skills and becoming even more powerful than before - since the resulting skills and abilities are the apprentices - a melange of many experiences combined with the flavor of their own talents.

I think if the NY Tech Meetup and other efforts from the Mayor are more than simple press events (e.g. MediaNY2020, NYCSeed, etc) or political plays - and the Mayor takes leadership in this, I believe we could see a true powerhouse in the City.

Mayor Bloomberg needs to support the concept of "risk capital" and provide the right incentives for this to occur. The Mayor need to support the growth of these programs to build more entreprenuership from the inventors and apprentices of this City.

But, it requires commitment, and patience. No more calls at the end of the day - investments take time to mature.

Are programmers our future civil engineers of the 21st Century?

2009-08-07T21:25:00.008-05:00

In the past few years, my career has been one of continual exploration and discovery, figuring out one problem after another, being incredibly grateful for all of the benefits my parents and teachers have given me over the years.

In the early 90s, I was fortunate enough to be at Stanford University in a class called "The Designer in Society" by Professor Bernard Roth. Dr. Roth, or Bernie as called by friends and students, provides this course to graduate students alone. It is somewhat innocuous in its course description:

215. The Designer in Society — Open to all graduate students. Participants’ career objectives and psychological orientation are compared with existing social values and conditions. Emphasis is on assisting individuals in assessing their roles in society. Readings on political, social, and humanistic thought are related to technology and design. Experiential, in-class exercises, and term project. Attendance mandatory. Enrollment limited to 24.

It was in this course that Bernie introduced us to books that were not focused on dynamic, kinematics or typical mechanical engineering content. It was here that I was introduced to Samuel Florman's book, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. In a look back at the profession of engineering, in his opening chapter, he writes:

In May 1902, the fifty-year old American Society of Civil Engineers held its annual convention in Washington, DC. Robert Moore, the newly elected president, gave a welcoming address entitled, "The Engineer of the Twentieth Century". He began by eulogizing the engineers of the past for making human life "not only longer, but richer and better worth living." Then he acclaimed the achievements of his contemporaries and fellow members. Finally, he warmed to his chosen topic, the engineer of the coming era:

"And in the future, even more than in the present, will the secrets of power be in his keeping, and more and more will he be a leader and benefactor of men. That his place in the esteem of his fellows and of the world will keep pace with his growing capacity and widening achievement is as certain as that effect will follow cause."

What a flush of pleasure they must have felt, those engineers of 1902, to hear themselves described as benefactors of mankind. What a quickening of the pulse there must have been as they listened to their leader predict success and glory for them in the years ahead. [...] But beneath those sedate facades they could not have helped but feel the stirrings of a fierce joy.

In his book, Florman talks about the Golden Age of Engineering, where during the century between 1850 and 1950, the engineers of society saw their mission as a lofty mission - one where they could make a difference in society. Their works - whether they were bridges, roads, buildings, schools, telegraph, airplanes, whatever - were helping benefit mankind in life-affirming ways. Their contributions would strengthen the human condition, and their toil would be recognized in the people that benefited from their work.

Now flash forward to the 21st Century. In the late 90s and early naughties (00s), the prevalence of ubiquitous computing is in our hands, in our pockets and in almost everything we touch. Much like the advances in transportation and infrastructure, we have had the same explosion of technology growth in the past 20 years and the previous 120. And, as we move forward, we will continue to have this explosion of technology and need for taming it to our benefit long into the future.

Could it be that those pioneers of the 1850s - the mathematicians and the physicists and the scientists - who were able to bring understanding to the world that the artisans, journeymen and apprentices had at their fingertips on an ongoing basis but had little understanding, were a perfect marriage of experience and understanding? Could it be that the 21st Century with the same scientists and mathematicians and physicists and climatologists and nutritionists and so on require an equivalent group of people out there to help bring the future under control?

To that I pose the question: are programmers the civil engineers of the 21st Century? Are programmers - who have now moved into a different style of learning programming (gone is the BASIC programming language, gone is the Assembly code or the Fortran 77 - being equipped to address the challenges of our future needs? Are we teaching/training our programmers to work together and share knowledge - or are we making it difficult to provide that exercise of "hands-on" experience that is needed to make an art a science, and educate and create to help build a better tomorrow?

I have talked to many recent graduates of colleges and schools who have graduated from colleges that offer courses in programming and data structures and software architectures - and I find many of them frustrated with the world they enter into. They find themselves ill equipped because their work was individualistic and limited in scope to the work they were assigned such that they could be graded in comparison to others, and not finding a satisfactory method of preparing for the future. Yes, there are the maestros of programming - I have known and worked with a grand few. But, the idea is to build the artisans of programming - to educate and replicate their skills and imagination in those that follow and want to build beyond.

I am working on something to address this issue. I tried one method - and had some success - where I measure success as the graduates becoming sentient beings creating their own ways of impacting the world, instead of cogs in the machine.

I think, rather - I know there is a need for those artisans of yesteryear to return to the frontlines. I know that the mentorship that made America the envy of other countries was founded on the concept of cooperation and collaboration. And I think we are due for another turn at the wheel.

Laughing at the difference in complexity

2009-08-06T13:12:00.007-05:00

On the nextNY email list today, Randy Noval forwarded something incredibly funny comparing the upgrade path between Windows Vista and Windows 7 and the Mac upgrade path between Leopard and Snow Leopard.

From Microsoft:

From a Mac friend (dean@strelau.net):

Doing my eval on the Nokia E75

2009-07-31T12:34:00.009-05:00

Image by Urban Mixer via Flickr

Couple of weeks ago, I got an email from a social marketing team interested in my feedback on the new Nokia E75. Since I am working off a couple of different phones (and I happily own a Nokia 5310 and use it for my UK phone), I was willing to try a test run.

When the phone arrived, it was in typical Nokia fashion - with all of the components available. In playing with it for the last couple of weeks, I thought I might put some feedback on the various issues with the phone:

What did I like?

I got a kick out of the fact that the phone is supposed to be an equivalent to the Pre or iPhone in general features (e.g. music listening, web browsing, email and so on) and has some additional features like an FM radio (which did not work well at all) and supports SD cards on the phone. But overall - the Nokia is a foreign phone - using the Nokia OS (I believe it is Symbian) and the OS is just different.

Oh yes, I am used to it on my 5310, but other features like the email client, calendar, and web browsing - took a lot to get inspired.

What did I NOT like?

Sheesh - this is going to be kind of long - and I want to couch this the fact that I have been a Palm user for over five years, and a Nokia user for over ten years (yes - I still have the carcass of my Nokia 3310 in my tech drawer). So, when I am comparing features and functionality, it is with full understanding that this is a Nokia/Symbian phone - not a MacOS, Android or PalmOS.

Physical Shape
The phone itself is a slider phone (similar to the Pre) but has the difficulty of sliding left-to-right, rather than opening like a phone (making it longer). The keyboard is kind of awkward - especially since the keyboard is trying to emulate a standard keyboard (numbers seem to be above the first line of keys rather than in a phone configuration). It relies on the standard thought that the keyboard should be separate from the phone keypad (like the old O2 and HP phones). I personally have never been a fan of that.

Additionally, the phone is bulkier than both the 5310 or the Pre, and feels kind of "heavy". And the screen is definitely not as clear as the Pre. And sadly, the screen was very easy to smudge - I was not impressed - even with the funky storage sleeve that came with the phone.

Keyboard/Keypad
I have a lot of friends comment on the smallness of the Pre's keyboard, but I must say, using the E75's keypad and keyboard is not so pleasant an experience either. Simply put - the number keypad is kind of "flimsy" - almost like the rows of the keypad have the keys connected, even when you are trying to hit just one number. (check out this review who gives it a slam on the flimsiness) Even the slideout keyboard has that "weak" feeling - not like the sturdiness of the Pre buttons or the hard glass of the iPhone.

Software/Apps
Sorry - this phone just fails in this arena. Even my Palm treo 755p with VersaMail is a much better performer than the onboard email app the E75 comes with. The Symbian OS is okay-ish - and I think it is quite nice that they offer a "work" view and a "home" view (each view can have certain apps on the launcher), but it was not a very compelling addition for me.

The web browsing - sorry, I left the Opera experience when I started using the Pre. Using the center pad to mouse around a limited screen - or to use the zoom out feature to go to different regions of the screen - wow, I did not realize how spoiled I have gotten by a richer web experience on the Palm Pre.

Calendar is a joke - even if it syncs up with google Calendar (which I am not sure it does). And even the FM radio, which was nice getting the information from the Internet was fine - but the tuner had issues even connecting to local stations.

And, sadly, I was not impressed with the video - especially after having the Pre or seeing it on the iPhone. And, they downgraded the onboard camera to 3.2 mega-pixels (from a 5 mega-pixel camera on the N95), which was not as good resolution or performance to my buggy Palm Pre's camera.

Would I recommend it?

Funnily enough, I might. But it would have to be someone who had not used either the iPhone or the Pre and was very used to the Symbian OS interface and vagaries. Otherwise, I would wait for the series of phones Nokia to arrive with an improved OS, a better screen, better applications and simply - a better experience.

I left the small screens when I upgraded to the Palm treos. Please Nokia - learn from the experiences. RIM - I think you are safe.

P.S. Thanks WOMWorld for the loaner. Nice change of pace...

Just saw "Funny People" - not as funny as you think...

2009-07-23T16:57:00.007-05:00

Last night, a friend and I went to see Funny People, the new Judd Apatow picture with Adam Sandler, Eric Bana, Leslie Mann, and a couple of the Apakow crew (Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill) shedding a light on the world of traveling comedians and the worlds they live in when they become successful.

My friend and I spoke about the movie and were surprised how nuanced and extended the movie was - not your typical Adam Sandler movie - tho there are plenty of great amusing references to the type of movies he makes (wait for the references to Re*Do and MerMan), some of Sandler's own initial content back when he was starting out and yes, there are fart jokes and other commentary on body and sex organs.

But this is a different kind of movie that Sandler, or his character George Simmons, would be part of - this movie is a melange of a number of things:

The life of a comic writer (or a bunch of them in LA)
The life of standup comics
The life you have after success in comedy
The life you may have neglected
and the choices we make, regret and wish we could recover...

All of these threads are obvious in the trailers you'll see online. The warning I give is that the movie is not typical Apatow, it reminds me of an Altman movie, showing you a number of threads that you would not have expected to see, with a number of characters that you did not expect to learn about.

This will not be a normal movie for Hollywood movie fans to appreciate - it will be a movie that you will have to think about later and review in your head. There are great funny bits, incredible cameos (still in love with Sarah Silverman after all these years), and a thread that is incredibly believable when you think of what Adam Sandler's life (or any other successful comic's life) might be and the choice he/she made.

Beware of the Critics Wrath I promise that the statements from the critics will contain phrases like "too disjointed", "too long", "too many characters", "hanging threads" and so on. And, in some ways they are correct. Two hours and 30 some odd minutes did seem a bit long, and there could be some editing left to be done upon wide release.

But enjoy the movie with the expectation that this is a movie about "LIFE" - or at least the threads of life that you may take, you have to climb, and the paths you did not take and wish you had.

NY Tech Meetup #64 - June 2009

2009-07-08T16:10:00.003-05:00

ExitStrategy

How to handle exiting and transferring on the NY subway via an iPhone app
Shows how to use the subway lines and which exit of the train to get out at.
Sister and himself – 10 weeks and figured out how to get out of the doors and such.
On the iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Android and the Amazon Kindle

Q/A:
Thought about crowdsourcing – needed higher quality data and could not crowdsource the effort

Jared Richardson, Gliider
Gliider is a research tool purpose built for the travel space
Looks like clipmarks or the new cut-and-paste functionality for the iPhone 3GS – supports collecting information and categorizes the content for storage. Looks like it is an interface for structuring data into the system (for reuse) and then uses the intent of travel to help both the user to keep the info they need for their trip – and allows it to be shared.
Can export the trip information and the details of it into a PDF for carrying or printing out.
Q/A:

Technology used: no answer – need the tech guy
What about intellectual property issues? Have thought about it – and have protected themselves

Avi Flombaum, Designer Pages

How designers and architects are sharing products online as well as a web-based project management suite.
In a room, every single product is accounted for – no space is left unknown
$400B a year is spent on architectural products. No real collaborative technology in place outside of sharing URLs in emails or printouts and photocopies. Designer Pages seems to have extended the Yahoo and google Groups/mailing list/Facebooks Groups functionality for a unique customer base.
Supports clips (bookmarks with tags) into the project. Sponsorship via result-based advertising – had to build their own technology. Not keyword dependent, focusing on verticals.
Only accessible by trained professionals – suppliers tend to only want to speak to professionals
Currently looking into Engineering into expanding the product offering (what about software design?)

urtak

Trying to change how opinion information is gathered. Polling is not the appropriate approach – “polling does nto work since it will only inform what the pollster only already knows”
Ask a question to urtak – you can ask a question to the general pool. And the information is relationable.

Jeff and Jeff from Vocab Sushi
Bite-sized learning – combining real-world contextual questions, real-time training and contextual learning (instead of memorization) – computer-based training, has soy sauce bottles as your progress bar. Removes the SAT word cards and bring it to a different level.

Ben from Spongecell
Changing how people interact with banner ads – making widget ads – accepting a feed to interact with the Flash component – layers the buttons into Flash banners. Stays within the IAB standards. Interactions come from the rollover – does not require a click
The service is tracking any time the mouse enters into the Ad.

Ryan Charles from Zagat
Mobile product (Zigg-ghat) – NRU (near you) – available for google Android phones.
Restaurants that are close to you – offers an augmented reality view where you could use the radar interface or the scouting interface.

Speaker: Ali Emami – sharing his experience from the Iran Election
Discussing the election – supposedly the government would count 10% of the votes in front of the news media

Why did 160% to 200% of the vote in various towns show up to vote?
How come so many villages that no longer exist also voted?
How did the votes that were counted in "full-view" of the media come out unfolded when, in order to put the votes into the ballot box, you needed to fold them?

Doing the revolution the “new way” – cellphones, youtube, facebook and twitter.
Cellphones for image capturing device, youtube for independent news, facebook for community organizing, twitter for notifications
Bad news: Nokia sold wiretapping equipment to Iran Telecoms

Technology: as a technologist, have to think about ways to solve the issue of wiretapping/filtration and interception
Wiretapping, filtrations, interception should be illegal and considered a human rights violation

Speaker: Douglas Rushkoff – Life Inc.
Most important thing to get – the economy in which we are living is a closed source operating system – as much as Microsoft. We behave as if it was a product of the natural world. Social sciences like economics – as if science is applied. We spend our time looking at the economy as if it is a natural system rather than a game.
Shows a dollar and says this represents money – and this kind of money is biased to a particular kind of action. The Internet “broke” the economy. This is the second leg of the dot com bust. Made a faux mortgage to hide the second crash of the Internet
People can create value – how this operating system came to dominate the world – and how close we are to offering an economic Linux system. Our OS was built up in the last part of the Middle Ages (1000 to 1300) – people were getting very, very wealthy.
Currency was biased toward transacting – versus hoarding – based on the abundance in the fields. In all of the different areas, there was growth. Could not save money for the future – so they reinvested their money into generational projects
Did not favor those who do not create value. Wealth was being redistributed – and the rich did not like this. Charted corporation – had to have a select relationship – work for a corporation
Centralized currency – had to borrow from the king.
The beauty of the Internet in the gift economy – first time in many, many years – it was about creating value.
Fortune 500 are stories on debt – activities that are dictated by the debt structure – nothing to do with value creation.
Problem with the dot com economy – we do not need their money. We live in an economy where money wants to make money. We want the opportunity to make value, not money.

Shall I discuss a heresy? What about the twitter ecosystem?

2009-07-01T00:27:00.002-05:00

This evening, as I was helping explain how to use my Palm Pre to another Pre owner via twitter, I began to think about how to share a visual (via twitpic.com), count my followers (via twittercounter.com), connect in a video chat environment (via tokbox.com) and I wondered: if twitter finds that elusive business model, how will the ecosystem survive?

Are we building a twitter bubble?
I am flashing back to the 90s when everyone was building portals because "eyeballs" were king (because you could monetize them), then there was the ecommerce / eMarketplace growth that lead to very few successes, then there was the blog bubble (which had a few successful exits, but primarily was a publishing play) and then, lets not talk about the podcast bubble that left thousands (is it 50K publishers, tubemogul?) And our most recent growth spurts of organic, vertical search tools and social networking platforms - why am I not surprised what is next?

Two years ago, when twitter was just being used by a few hundred thousand users, there was a big discussion on what twitter's business model would be. But I think the question now is - how can twitter do a similar model where they provide a social good AND generate a revenue stream that benefits all who leverage it and sell services from it.

Case in point - look at the ecosystem from RSS and blogging and podcasting. With the lovely gift of RSS being the thread that supports syndication, the major player in the space (feedburner), got absorbed with it little revenue stream, into the mother ship. Modeled after the fremium service model, feedburner might demonstrate what the companies with traffic that offer compelling service (like Summize) can look forward to.

But what of the not so lucky ones?
My fear is the story of all tech companies that do not hit the exit. They either whither (or whimper) away and die or the sell to the best bidder to share their IP and staff or become zombie companies. Those are the ones that I hope take Nate Westheimer's tack and place their company/code in the hands of the Open Source community.

A month later, do I still like the Pre?

2009-06-28T19:07:00.003-05:00

So, I was in SF this weekend and was showing off the Pre at various events and parties - and the Pre had all sorts of reactions.

The first and foremost are that people seemed to think that it is "cute" - as in, holding the round black piece of phone, they are quite amazed. For the first week, I heard endlessly about the ability for the Pre to "cut cheese". Yeah, yeah - funny. I can use an iTouch to cut soft cheese as well.

As for the functionality of the phone, there are some niggly details that are killing me still - and I even downloaded the 1.0.3 update - but no avail. These issues are:

Battery life
5 hours talk (or use) and less than a day standby. Yes, even when I forget to plug it in, the darn thing runs out of juice overnight more times than I can count. Another friend in the Valley also had terrible experience with the battery life - because of the problems, he missed a numebr of phone calls - and when we got together, I offered my TouchStone to charge. But lo, he only had the plastic backing.
OS Slowness
So thrilled about the multi-threading - but there is definitely a lag in the operation. Almost makes me wish for my treo once again. Starting apps, modifying elements, flipping between them - not sure what is causing the slowdown.
Camera Phone Replacement
My Sprint store said they would call me when the replacement phone came in - but no news yet. And we are a month out. Big issue for me: do I want a replacement when I learned that all of the actions on the phone do not get backed up - so I lose my history and settings from my current phone when I switch over to a new one. Very upsetting.

And then the camera - almost like playing my own form of lottery. Sometimes it works (especially when I am entering a new person into my contacts), but more often than not - just sits there with the grey cloud. Very frustrating.
Auto-capitalizing login names in form elements
Oy! This one is driving me crazy - when I am logging into Facebook or google Mail from the Pre web browser, the first thing that happens is the login name gets the first letter capitalized. Why? Guys, come on - what's the deal? Can't you make this a setting or something?
Hardware beginning to loosen up
So, since I use the phone regularly, I keep finding the top piece beginning to shift a little bit more every week. Granted, it is plastic - and I am wondering if there will be some wear-and-tear that will cause problems. Only time will tell.
Anemic App Catalog
This is not a new story - but I have been trying to do development for the Pre - and do not even have the Mojo Development Platform for myself (which I was promised would happen). Quite frustrated actually about the dearth of apps - and I want to build FourSquare with the guys.
google Maps on Pre is a memory and processor suck
Recently, when I was traveling between San Diego and LA, I was trying out the google Maps on the Pre to see if it could help me get to my destination. Aside from the inability for this version of google Maps to retain my previous destinations (like it did on the treo version), the google Maps App is a memory and processor suck - as in, within 5 to 10 minutes of tracking your position (and potentially using the traffic option) the Pre gets hot, slow and can not open other cards/apps. Come on google/Palm - can you repair this? I get incredibly envious of the iPhone apps, and this is at least one that should be solid.

Yes, I still have it - and since I am still on Sprint, I will keep it - but boy, iot takes some getting used to.

Showing off the Palm Pre in NYC...

2009-06-18T01:24:00.008-05:00

Tonight, just to see what would happen, I went to the nextWeb event at MI:5 and had people asking to see the Pre. Here are some shots (from @bpapa) and his iPhone.

Funny thread on the Science News Cycle...

2009-06-17T10:24:00.008-05:00

Jorge - I think you need to add twitter to this thread...

Live Blogging from the 140Conf Conference - Day 1

2009-06-16T12:10:00.003-05:00

Day One: I am liveblogging a bunch of the events/speeches that are being presented at Jeff Pulver's #140conf. I will re-edit the content later tonight.

John Borthwick - betaworks

"now"ness - much is not pushing out real time data - Need to push out real-time data across the real-time access.
Streams - webpages are and were a convenient metaphor. Streams are a new representation of data
Does a stream really belong on a webpage
Appropriation is implicit in stream - recycling is implicit in a stream
Redundancy
Business clarity - vital to the business ecosystem - need to help make it make understand.
What is a user, marketer, amplification, and so on.
Context - vital part of the stream - extracting content - need metadata, structured data, lightweight stream and how do you add more content to the stream.

David from Israeli Consulate

Begins with a "Visit Israel" slideshow
Maxim magazine on the IDF then beach in Central Park for the 100th anniversary of Tel Aviv Beach
claims twitter allows for a dialog of the conversation - for the Israeli govt is connecting
Expect the unexpected - David goes onto twitter for a press conference.
Building a platform for twt4peace - to promote environment, minority rights, and education

Panel - Patric Laforge (NYT), Etan Horowitz (Orlando), Peter from WSJ, Village Voice Media
Q: How do you have a two-way conversation? Are you using twitter?
VVM - the ivory tower is breaking down - pent-up desire. Too long of a blog-roll - confered with follower to get feedback
NYT - city room blog - comments are better handled in the blog comments. Presence on twitter is going to where the audience is
Q: any solid tips that have come from twitter?
OS - have feed leads - builds back the readership because the people become invested in you and the paper (brand)
VVM - Some people are using twitter to do reporting - short bursts - in the Bay Area. News gathering process is a compliment to the original effort.
NYT - twitter solves the following of hundreds of blogs - now using twitter to filter the feed/editorial
WSJ - 2K followers, 2/3rds followed back
Q: MSM was failing because they were not covering it fast enough. Is twitter an early warning system?
VVM - there was a lot of #cnnfail discussion on twitter -
OS - set up a hashtag for the iPhone launch - all of the people that were doing real-time reporting on the guys blog. Leveraging citizen journalism
NYT - twitter is providing tracking and performance of competitors
WSJ - traditional news org - very deep belief of "going there". Journalists going to the location of news is important of seeing both sides.
Q: notion is better to be right than to be first might backfire - people want to know right now.
Q: twitter is second source of traffic for TC (due to suggested user and so on). How do you see twitter as distribution?
VVM - yes, traffic showing up
OS - David Pogue has a bigger circ than OS and his post drove traffic and the RT continued a lot

BREAK

Shelly Palmer - LNJF, SCIFI, VH1
Q: Customers would have asked for a "faster horse" - discuss
SCIFI: people do not really know what they want. If we had listen to the fans at the beginning when BSG was in development, we would not have launched. Now, people realize it was great. Sometimes, people do not know what they want. Important to hear people's feedback - but do not need to mindlessly follow.
LNJF: have to take advantage of the tools, but it is not a democracy. twitter is helping get interesting content on TV. As a creator, need ot make the decisions on what to bring to TV or not.
VH1: great for finding out what is happening "out there", what is funny and surprising. Excellent on getting feedback
Q: remember txtmobbing? You could create txtmobs - electronic mob mentality - o you see this happening now? Do you respond to this? What is the backlash?
LNJF: depends on what you put out there. If you are open and put it out there - and if people know that you are out there - it is a good thing.
Q: do people "get" twitter? What does it mean to "get" twitter?
VH1: Fred told me to get onto twitter - and it was difficult to explain. First blush, did not make sense. Then, when using it, it became very addictive.
SCIFI: three times signed up - did not really get into it in the beginning. Checked twitter out at the end of BSG - and then began to join the discussion. Peak behind the scenes of the network (twitter feed). Tells story of when Dom Delouise dies and people sent tweets to the SciFi feed - and
Q: It's a conversation - any negativity?
VH1: twitter is the anti-blog - people are joining a conversation feed - blogs are like "graffiti" because people have to step through.
LNJF: Jimmy is communicating with people - people do not go negative if they might get responsive.
SCIFI: Change from SciFi to SyFy - one woman was unhappy, tweeted, and then the SciFi guy responded which turned the customer around.
Q: economics of TV and economics of twitter - how do we account for the economics of having a "twitter team"?
LNJF: not cost-prohibitive. Trending topic from Zack Morris to Jimmy Fallon on twitter which gave a boost to one of the shows.
VH1: work on the creative side - identity is closely aligned with the show on twitter.
Q: TV execs have a twitter account - no corporate restrictions - why?
SCIFI: twitter has microblogging - not really giving too much hassle.

Liz Strauss

Last conference - 90% of the conference was not on twitter - so now had to handle the people actually watching her.
twitter is like a three wall set - people are aware there is an audience. Sometimes we are talking for the audience/easedroppers.
20K people who are eavesdropping - when I post a link, a bunch of people might follow.
If you want to talk about your product, talk to someone. Last panel - was there ever a conference like this about the telephone. the pencil, are we getting a little precious about our tools? [I would say - communications and travel is more democratic - think of the private salons]
Girls Night Out is a continuous conversation - 140 characters is a way to get a brief message out there - but whole conversations are important too. twitter is the largest networking room - bring a friend who can help grease the skids
Listen so you can challenge the assumptions.
Blog goes deep - twitter goes wide. You need to confirm what you hear is what people are saying?
Never say Thanks - thanks sounds flippant, thank you is more appropriate.
Leverage the conversation - marketing to the eavesdroppers - throw out one question (not a whole list of them) and let it go wide.
Social media is a wonderful change agent because you can not control the conversation.
Make it fun, short enough. Feel proud to pass the tweet on. And be sure to be interesting - do not just keep retweeting the thanks message.

Stowe Boyd - microsyntax

Shows the "Tower of Babel" - Nimrod - G-d confused the languages
We are i na time of great changes - many streaming/flow apps. Because of some of the interesting constraints - we have a real opportunity to confuse ourselves.
Microsyntax - do everything we can to make sense of information patterns - various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages like RT, @, $, # and others.
[Is this not the issue of having too few characters? Sounds like the limitations of RAM in the 80s.]
Discusses a hashtag meltdown at this year's SXSW
Launched microsyntax.org as a non-profit focused on identifying, researching and finding consensus on info syntax within twitter messages.
Offering all to join to #MicrosyntaxCamp

Effects on twitter on business (ZAPPOS, RADIANT6, SOMEECARDS)
Q: what was the aha moment on twitter?
ZAPPOS: discovered in SXSW 2007 - knowing what parties to go to. Used it for about a year - introduced it to Zappos employees - focus on culture - long term brand. Replicate the SXSW getting together to connect, family. Someone tweets "I need a cheeze burger"
RADIANT6: 2007 - on twitter - did not quite get the value. At a tradeshow - first man to tweet our brand. Someone from Edelman tweets - people come - then someone sends a tweet,
SOME: aha moments - one of the first was when a lot of people were willing to listen to what we had to say several times a day. SomeeCards is short-form comedy. Direct correlation - launch something and then tweet is soon afterwards. A great way to look at trending topics - audience is tell you what to make fun of. Tweet about actual news, tweet about it and then redirect to a relevant eCard.
Q: why is twitter so relevant to business and not other social networks?
SOME: twitter is like the quarterback - guide our brand through twitter. If we want people to look at a new card, if we want feedback on the new site/new navigation - it is the best thing for use to have a conversation with 680K people. Way to get that immediate response - just like having audience reaction at a stand up performance.
RADIANT6: Conversation of brand online - diversity of conversations on twitter about brand - people more likely to ask question and comments on twitter. Customer response. Unique characteristic: listening for the point of need. Listen for a problem - and connect to the need. Rich environment to help with the customer need/customer conversation.
ZAPPOS: twitter.zappos.com - default page for listening to when someone discusses zappos on twitter. Another link goes to the list of twitter accounts. Can get a good feel of the company culture - brand may lag the culture, but twitter can show it and brand will reflect the culture.
Q: are the people themselves or are they Zappos?
ZPPOS: they are themselves - be authentic and use common sense
SOME: bets if people are NOT themselves (laughter) - I am the ambassador of the brand - right now, like having one focal point of the brand.
Q: conversations and listening - is there really a conversation? Do you recommend companies actively participating
RAD: conversational listening - are you gathering info for a relationship or - start with passive listening to understand the conversation. Participating int he conversation changes the connection.
ZAP: stories of the @replies - almost never send an @reply - usually sends a DM. @zappos_service handles the @reply to the customer request.
Q: companies doing too much talking and not enough listening?
Q: what are companies doing wrong on twitter?
RAD: 1) yellow brick road - how to start. Take tradidional marketing (one-way thinking) and think that is the way to do it. Start to push brand messages - start with listening, then listening and responding, then listen more broadly and begin to discuss the community at large. Biggest mistake - jumping into the PR way
Q: how do you choose which to reply?
ZAP: I choose the ones that only I can answer?
Q: is there a twitter CRM how you manage the status of twitter conversations? ZAP: not yet - we have a portal but will more than likely happen.
Q: #1 thing desired - what is the ROI? Creative is all about changing I to involvement. How do you measure ROI
ZAP: twitter not a marketing tool - we do not look at the ROI - initially, phones are not now looked at as ROI.
RAD: calls social media as the "social phone" - they are asking how do i measure the advertising metric on social media? ROI is difficult - how do you measure relative to other business metrics. No one magic social media ROI.
SOM: hesitant to call twitter a marketing tool, but it is. Use bit.ly to show branded cards to show performance of cards. Balancing at is to not make it feel like advertising.
ZAP: never thought "What is the ROI of this hug?" Better to be thinking about - how can I help? What can I do help? Do not ask for more.
Q: Though participation and engagement - we can be doing more of an "unmarketing" making marketing more scalable and leveraging more of a word-of-mouth. [NOTE - what will be the bandwidth and speed of conversation]

Maegan Carberry
Capacity of bipartisanship or post-p[artisanship in the political community.
MSM missed the Obama candidacy - need to pay attention to the grassroots? Was hope lost or was the seed is planted?
1) social contract has changed
2) twitter is the natural extension of myBO - and #mycnt is the natural connection for Repugs
3) did we build the foundation of a multiparty platform for the future.

Social Contract has changed - when Claire McCaskell tweets to her constituents, good for local, state and national
Bowling Alone - civic orgs were dead. We needed channels for communicating.
As an individual, you can quantify your sphere of influence.
Whole legion of part time activists versus a bunch of

Is twitter a direct extension of myBO?
60% of her followers are conservatives - these are people who have children and are real people. Every time we push in directions - have engagement.

Why do we need political parties? We needed a way to have people to push ideas - collect money and drive ideas forward. myBO gave both functions. Created a sense of momentum that did not apply to parties. Can be for issues - and not be for parties.
Can be around an issue and hashtag.

Are we regurgitating the 1960s or a new stet of ideas/ideals. All tweeters are thought-leaders. More important is the exchange of ideas. How are you contributing to the collective intelligence? Coming to twitter is a great engagement.

Jeff speaks: the largest gap between generations is the Millennials and all others. Playing field where revolutions will be heard. Would the Wall come down faster in 1989 if twitter had been there?

Robert Scoble with Ann Curry (@AnnCurry), Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn), Ryan Osborn (@todayshow)
When Robert grew up, major three networks - no major access to content.
Today - Ev Williams and the disruptive network twitter.
Tells a story of the earthquake that happened in China where he saw three tweets that gave him info way prior to the news groups/channels. Second story of the plane in the Hudson. This Saturday, the story of the protests in Iran - could not see Q to it full HD TV.

Q to @ricksanchezcnn: what happened on Sat? And does CNN regain the brand of being the premier news network
@ricksanchezcnn: anything can make news - defends what happened. There was a West Coast effect versus an East Coast effect.
Q to all: news judgement of all groups - what happened? 100M dying in Bombay not as important as 10 people in your local school. Is the news judgement of the MSM changing due to the world's interconnectiveness?
@ricksanchezcnn: blows it out in CNN
@anncurry: reason why they did an hour on Iran sunday before the election - recognize that "you" need to know. Whatever came to Iran was going to affect us. What you are really asking "Is the MSM covering the world enough" and the answer is no. Journalism is a battle - the world is changing. Keep fighting the battle to make international more prevalent. The interconnected nature of the world is changing things. People in Iran are reading the NYTimes - which is feeding the desire. Incredible how there was a similar movement for change in Iran (just like the Obama generation) - people want to change their destiny.
The Iranian people feel that they are being poorly represented in the world - and they are sensitive to it because they see how they are being depicted in the MSM and blogs. Now, MSM needs to show the story - not how American's see the story - rather than the "truth" of the story.
We demand this "Wherever you are - you shoot that story like it is your mother, your brother, and so on - tell that in that way" - it is the way to becoming fully global.
Q: isn't the news changing because we get direct contact to the people there?
@todayshow: yes, but how do you get the credibility evaluated?
@ricksanchezcnn: social media has driven the story that there is something "hinkey" in the Iran election, but the MSM can not find any smoking gun.
FoxNews: seeing a real tipping point - what we call MSM and what we call "new media" - lag time and fact checking - how do we understand the standards? What is the MSM job? Is it context? I do not believe anyone has an answer.
@anncurry: it is important to make sure things are true. Sometimes, stories that are important for people to hear are not getting reported. There is a lot of nuance in the 140 characters - have to guard against misinterpretation ALL the time. Understand with empathy - your reader/viewer that is going to reach them with good information without misleading them. One bad word can mislead people and they have to be careful. There are problems getting through the "news judgment" issues.
Aud: We have to be sensitive about this. What about the difference between twitter, faxes, emails and such that?
@ricksanchezcnn: Social Media is not to be used as a gag. Need to embrace more than that. Companies who do not apply managers to social media will fail in the future.
@anncurry: have a problem - people do not pay attention to the "truth" - Americans are not watching the world. What is up with that?

Just off the phone with Palm Development Team

2009-06-15T14:20:00.002-05:00

So - I got off the phone with the Palm team in Santa Clara and have a couple of good pieces of information from the call:

Why does the camera cycle like mine does?
Turns out that one of the first things the camera app does is perform an auto white balance - and that causes a slight delay as the camera is starting up. But, it does not explain the 20-second cycle of the camera app not working - which we are investigating.
Auto correct feature is currently a legacy function
The guys told me that the auto correct system has approximately 55K words that are designed to handle most misspellings that treo users have experienced in the past. They are not keen on the iPhone style of auto-correct (with the floating word below and the X to dismiss) and are working on some of the issues.
How do I soft reboot?
Just asked this one after reading one of the everythingpre.com threads - and asked. Turns out: hit the OJ key, the Sym key and the R key at the same time for a soft reset.
Multi-select of attachments - not happening yet
One of my issues (in my last post) was the lack of a multi-select feature. They do not have one and will investigate if they could/would add it.
Repositioning the cursor in a text box
One of my first finds was when I needed to reposition the cursor into a text field that already had content beyond the visible bounds of the field/screen (imaging a 20 character text form with a 50 character entry. Now go to the start of the form entry and then try to edit the last five characters.) Turns out the OJ key helps there as well. Hold it down and repositioning your cursor with your thumbs.

It was a great call - the team is really enthused and had already captured a number of my bugs prior to our conversation. I also think I am going to propose we call the OJ Key the Palm Key if only to keep the branding alive.

One week with the Palm Pre - what's my verdict?

2009-06-13T08:22:00.002-05:00

So, I have been carrying the Palm Pre for the past week - and been enjoying it for the most part. You can read my former posts here, here and here on the issues about it - but as my friends comment, it is a Version 1.0 phone.

I learned a couple of other issues that have been demonstrated:

Word auto-correct function has some glitches
I love the fact that you can type "u" for "you" and the Palm Pre will auto-correct it - but couple of issues like it does not retain capitalization or when using it with the email app, it keeps the "u" instead of the "you" that is displayed.
Camera is glitchy
Sorry - this keeps happening - I have been to Sprint - they do not have enough phones to correct the issue yet. And, this time, when I went to Sprint yesterday, they changed the battery - and suddenly, the camera worked. But today, no working camera. Ugggh.
Battery life is abysmal
Again, I have been using the Pre and have had pretty sad battery life. I left the phone home one day - with Wifi off, GPS off - and still the phone went down to 30% battery just sitting there for six hours. Now, the iPhone also has issues (my friends tell me they have to keep their iPhone plugged in every day when not using it), so I guess the removable battery and Touchstone charger are better options that the iPhone. And I learned how to change the brightness on the phone (turns out it is a feature in the Screen and Lock app), which I hope reduces the battery suck.

But, must say once I get my spare battery, the Touchstone and other components from the online stores I ordered them from (yes, Sprint had WAAAYYY too few), I think I will be satisfied with my purchase.

My life on the Palm Pre - Day 2.66

2009-06-09T10:25:00.006-05:00

After going through using the Pre for the past couple of days, I have learned a number of things that I am happy to share:

Camera problem is more than likely a faulty camera
Reading at everythingpre.com - I have learned that others have had the same problem with the camera. They have been told that the camera is the problem and that I should get the Pre replaced. I will, after my family leaves.
Pocket dialing is annoying...
Turns out that the Phone interface, while nice to use, has an interesting problem. After you finish the call and hang up, the phone interface stays active and if you are like me and grab the phone, you can accidentially either hit the numbers or hit the dial button. I think with my treo, once I was done with the call, the recessed screen was not easy to hit after finishing, so I would not accidentially call.
...but the proximity sensor is terrific.
When your face is close to the phone, the screen turns off. When you are ready to hang up, the screen relights - and you can hang up. Nice touch.
Pre had great heft, but it slips easy
I love the feel of the phone - I have always loved how the Palm phones always feel strong and solid - but sometimes, when you are using the phone while eating or doing somethiong else and you grab it quickly, you can lose it like "a greased up pig at a country fair".
Pre battery life is a pain
After using the Pre for a couple of days, I can affirm that it has a very short battery life. My guess is that, while the processor is energy efficient, the access to the networks and multiple applications open at the same time can be a battery suck. Additionally, the Pre does not have a brightness control (or at least I can not find it) which I would assume could reduce the battery life suck. Even Palm does not show how to reduce the battery consumption, but I did find some suggestions on everythingpre.com.
Selecting multiple attachments is a pain
Oi - I was trying to add multiple photos to an email and/or text message and I discovered that 1) the text messages only take one attachment, 2) multiple attachments on email takes an insane process of confirmation and attachments. What happened to my lovely list with a checkbox to choose what I want on the message?
Love dismissing alerts with a swipe
With every alert on the main screen, you can get an insane number of interruptions (if you get email, tweets, IMs, texts, and voicemails). Nicest item is to sweep the item away to the right and they go away.
Text message history and delete via a right swipe
When I first saw the text app, I was worried because I did not know how to see all of the old text messages in one location. Text message history has come in handy (incredibly handy) when I needed an old text for another meeting. My life was made much happier when I learned with a left ball swipe (across the LED field), I could see ALL of the text messages.
Direct dialing from the keyboard
On my treo, I used to love just typing out the phone number directly from the keyboard. Now, I can do the same with the Pre and I have more than just phone as an option. To make the call, you need to hit the Return key (bent arrow) on the keyboard.
Missing global search
Please. Fix this.
How do I get to my photos off the Pre?
When I had my treo, I could sync up my phone with the computer and go to the photo folder. Where are my photos from the Pre? I do not want to download one photos at a time. And having to do it one photo at a time to my photo is not helpful (even if it is going to Facebook) because I can not get the original photo itself.

But - still enjoying the Pre. Just wish it had a better battery life.

Continuing my odyssey of the Palm Pre - Day 1.33

2009-06-07T20:01:00.004-05:00

After charging my phone last night, I decided to see what would happen with the Pre after a full-night charge.

While I still have issues as described in my earlier post, I have learned a little more about the phone in showing it to my family and friends.

Battery power might be lagging

As described in David Pogue's article, the Pre's battery life is somewhat lacking. I was in a badly covered area of the Sprint network, and found my phone getting warm the entire morning. But, when I got into the city, I decided to recharge the phone and see what would happen. The phone was at 2% and after one hour, it charged back up to 52%. But an hor later, the phone gave me the 20% battery warning.

So, while I understand hunting for a network could run the battery down, I would not expect the batter to lose 30% of it's charge in another hour.

Apps have some improvements to go

After being such a treo / Palm OS fanatic, I am missing a couple of things such as:

Accidential pocket dialing
I discovered that the phone app has a sensitivity to dialing - without a lock/unlock feature on the phone app, I worry that I might make another pocket dial.
A better set of menu options
When I would use the productivity apps on the treo, there was always the menu of other options/features that were available at the top. Right now, the apps seem to be missing "something"

What do I love about the Pre?

So, with all of these complaints, why am I still carrying it around? Well, for all of the complaints, I have a slew of compliments:

Its not a treo!
As in, it does not use Windows Mobile or is over three years old.
Its a phone with a keyboard!
The styling of the phone (when open) is amazing. It has great heft and the speaker phone actually works.
It works!
Yes, I know - it should, shouldn't it? But after having smartphones for the past five years, the phone is very usable instead of completely buggy.
It does not require a theraputic reboot!
Yes, one of my favorite acts (sarcasm alert) was to restart my treo every so often when too many apps had taken up all of the memory. So nice to have memory and a stable OS.
Love the interface!
Yes, after this long wait, I love the way the OS operates and allows me to play with the apps. Might not be terribly intuitive (see my last post), but it is fun to play with.

My big concern is that @palm is posting only the good issues, not addressing the bad ones so far. @palm - when you are ready, give me an email and we can talk about how to solve the camera issue.

Problems with the Palm Pre - Day One

2009-06-06T23:55:00.010-05:00

I have been a long term user of Palm products (way back to the Palm 5000) and I have been waiting for the Palm Pre since I have played with my friend's iPhones. So, when I found out that the Pre was available on Saturday morning at the local Sprint store, I got up, pulled on my clothes and headed to the store.

Nicely enough, the store was incredibly gracious (Thanks guys!) and within 20 minutes I had the hot little object in my hand going through the tutorial. So, an hour later, when I caught up with my brother and his brood, I was deeply engrossed with the Pre.

Love at first site (yes, site)
Initially, I was enamored. The new cards interface, the interactions within the browser and interface elements (form elements and navigation) are incredibly familiar from using my friend's iPhones. As I played with the Pre, it became evident that the Pre interface had things that I did not see how to address - such as how to take a picture (since my camera app seems to be having problems).

So while you can read all sorts of great posts on the Pre (which I agree with them all), I have my issues with the Pre:

Help Info is "slow"
When I discovered that the camera was not working as advertised in the excellent reviews, I started looking for information on how to use the camera. I started with the documentation in the box (which was limited to gestures and other high-level options) and then went to the Help documentation. Since the docs are online, the speed of the Sprint network seem to impact the access to the Help documentation. Took me a bit of time to find the info (since there is no Search option within the documentation), which made me a little disappointed in learning how to use the phone through the documentation.

-1 point for the increasing difficulty to use the Pre

Camera App is "flaky"
Since I heard that the Pre had a 3.2M pixel camera, I chose to to leave my standard Canon IXUS at home as I headed to my cousin's bat mitzvah. While in the car, I tried to use the Pre camera and wondered why I could not take a photo. I would choose the camera icon, a grey screen would show up, the camera icon would sit in the middle of the screen and sit for 20 seconds, then would go dark and restart the campera app. Twenty seconds later, the camera app would end, restart and go through the sequence one more time until the phone went dark based on the power settings.

After wondering if I had done something wrong, I discovered how to kill the app (toss it north) and tried a couple of times, I thought "Maybe there is an update" and I checked for updates and downloaded the 1.0.2 update on to the phone. Much later, after the webOS 1.0.2 update was installed, I tested the app - and still the same behavior.

Later in the evening, just on a whim, I would try the app. One time out of five, the camera app suddenly worked. And yes, the photos are gorgeous. But still, I have no camera on the Pre.

-2 points for a flaky app or driver management

Pre web browser has weird quirks
The web browser is very similar to what I have seen on the iPhone - full page support, zoom in, zoom out - all of the things that make the iPhone mobile experience wonderful (heck, I even can use the x.facebook.com interface for iPhone, the m.facebook.com interface for WAP browsers and the www.facebook.com interface for normal browsers. But, the Pre web browser has some other quirks:

Strange reflection of a short page on the lower third of the page
When I logged into twitter via their Login link, the top part of the browser shows the login div - but the lower part (2/3rds) should be blank. Instead, there is a stretched out version of the login div in the lower third of the browser. And this is not only on twitter, I also saw it on the opening page of Spymaster.
Form elements do not expand to access the hidden parts of the content within
On the Blazer browser, if you entered more text into the form field that was visible, the browser would become an editable text field that showed up on the lower third of the page. You could modify any portion of the text that was entered - and did not need arrow navigation to get anywhere, since you could point to the needed correction. Now, with the Pre web browser, you find yourself having to make sure you type everything correctly, or you have to refresh a page if you make a mistake and need to edit character 23 in a 20 character visible field - when the text has already exceeded 25 characters.
On mobile sites, the browser does not support number shortcuts
On the Blazer browser and other WAP browsers, mobile site designers could set up a situation where, if the browser sensed a number being pressed, it would act as if the link was hit that was tied to the number key (see this action on the mobile version of twitter, Yahoo! Mail and Facebook). Now, when you hit a number key on the Pre web browser, the browser thinks youa re typing a new URL - which makes shortcutting difficult. Additionally, on mobile twitter, hitting the aforementioned number shortcut link via a finger touch changed the page - but has the page still at the same location on the browser (the page does nto refresh with the start at the top of the page).

-2 points for browser issues

Charging up the phone is a bit cumbersome
One of the comments I heard on some blogs was the fact that the Touchstone charger might be an extravagance for $80. But, after trying to charge up my phone a couple of times, I can see why they did the Touchstone. If you try to plug in the USB cable into the phone, you have to work the cover off of the mini jack, which I will bet wears out eventually. Additionally, you need to know that the mini jack has to be inserted in only one position, you might accidentially insert it into the Pre upside down. To extend the life of the cover, you should get the Touchstone recharger.

-1 point for product issues

Conclusion?
Now, all of these issues are not critical - and will more than likely be addressed soon. But it is funny - I was one of the people who got a treo 650 when it came out, and went through 19 (yes, nineteen) returns to the Sprint store (because Sprint at the time did not have a solid tech support for the treo smartphones).

I have only had the phone for a single day (not even 12 hours yet) so i will continue to learn more about the phone as I use it.

I am happy to be a guinea pig for the Pre (and the new one), as I was for the treo 755p and the Centro - but please fix the phone. I want to love this device - I have waited almost two years.

NY Tech Meetup - June 2009

2009-06-03T16:48:00.004-05:00

Liveblogging from FIT:

Nate shows off a NY Tech Startup from UpNext 3D

UpNext - Danny Moon

3D Cityscape - launched the site 2 years ago
Shows off the 3D interactivity
True location search
iPhone App
Shows Category search, Keyword Search,
Allows for update of your twitter and/or Facebook status
What's UpNext feed - Just Opened, Latest Reviews and (something else)
And it uses the GPS capability
"Thought that was cool." - Nate

Centrl - Murat Aktihanoglu

Runs on the iPhone and other SmartPhones - you are going to miss alot of information
"Leave Britney alone!" - Nate
Can add a user, vote for the user, send a gift, private chat on the Centrl world.
Shows the deals and coupons on the site - can show the coupon and share the coupon with friends.
Can do a keyword search for restaurants via Yelp
Can search for info via Wikipedia
Can set up georelated sites to help in connecting
Can make chat only with personal friends and turn off the location functionality

"You all know our 'strict' no Powerpoint policy. But then we have some special cases." - Nate

NYSenate.gov - Andrew Hoppin / NoNeck Hidalgo

1965 - last time Democrats in the majority in the NY Senate
January 2009 - wants transparency in the NY Senate
Their email was Lotus Notes, CRM was via a VT100 interface
Created the Office of the CIO
Noel shows us the information from the new site - open transparency
Platform - expose as much data as possible
Senators are on twitter and Facebook - included a new functionality at the New Idea link
Public Markup section - can vote on ideas
Have their own YouTube channel - using the cloud to give access
Go to CapitolCamp.org for a Barcamp for internal work
Twitter: @NYSenateCIO, NYSenateCIO.org
Q: "Where does the crowdsourced ideas go?" It is tougher to do to create a workflow internally.

Max - Livestream (formally known as mobus)

Internet video platform. It is free - ad powered. Professional version with more than 1000 customers.
Create additional TV stations - very good for event. As the web becomes more real time, live streaming will become mainstream.
Livestream Procaster - livestreaming - download it for free.
Nice livestream tool - our coworking space does this at (http://www.livestream.com/newworkcity) where people are doing their own production
Can broadcast your desktop
Can promote on twitter, can manage a channel chat,
Allows you to livestream a working video feed.
Has a 3D effect that can show both the video feed and the live video feed
Game mode which allows you to play the game and video feed and have people see you doing the stuff as well.
"Incredible product!" - Sanford (mumbles)
Q: Pro version? A: Pro has no ads, can disable publishing on the guide, and can make the videos private.
Q: When for Mac? Couple of months from now.

Michael Alpert - Aviary

Edit images online (essentially Photoshop online)- create digital content in the browser - photo editing, vector editing
Released their API to allow people to create their own cartoons
Image Editor, Color Swatch Editor, Vector Editor or Effects Editor - uses a Firefox Add-On
Can create an effect in a blackbox effort - help create open-source
Sneak peek of the Aviary audio editor.
Q: How are you enabling education? A: School can have the educators use software directly in the classroom - collaborate and edit within the classroom.
Q: Pro version? A: Yes - file storage and other features.
Q: Versioning? A: Yes - it is online and can track versions that are being created and can return to an older version.

Bre Pettis from Makerbot Industries

www.thingiverse.com - 3D digital design files library

Normally costs $25K to $300K to have a 3D printer - MakerBot is only $750. Everything is open-source - made it to be hacked out of the box.
"A thing that can make anything you want. 'Earl Grey, hot'" - Bre
Made a coin in google SketchUp (with a hack)
Q: How much does it cost to build something? A: Someone else - $30 to 40 per, self - pennies.
Q: Wear out? A: Two months going strong
Q: What is the world 20 years from now?

Jason Calacanis shows Mahalo 2.0

Allows for the creation of crowdsource management of the pages
Q: Love TWIS - This Week in Startups
Q: Aren't you a serial pimp? A: People often overestimate the downside of risk. How can you sit here and watch these demos and not want to try? Failure will only help you. NYC is the greatest city in the world.

Hillary Mason at BarCampNYC4

2009-05-30T16:06:00.004-05:00

Great talk on data scrubbing: Have Data? What now?!

Open Calais (www.opencalais.com) and Freebase as data analysis tools.

Entity disambiguity - ability to discern which goes with what (Hillary shows Cuil's search results on herself)
Company disambiguation - often handled by humans
At Path101 - human, Data APIs (e.g. mTurk) or auto-classification

Shows her google spam box: how does google check it out
eScienceNews uses a vector analysis and hierarchical clustering model (to figure out what is interesting) then uses baysian document classification model. (www.esciencenews.com/about.html)

Discussing clustering and hierarchical clustering and how it is applied to Path 101.
Depending on your algorithm, you need to choose your algorithm - lots of rules of thumb, but the artistry is on knowing how to tune the groups/clusters to the algorithm.

SuperNews kicks twitter again...

2009-05-12T14:41:00.004-05:00

Once again, the guys from SuperNews did a terrific take on twitter and the overall funny nature of the lack of understanding of what twitter is and how it works in terms of personal narrowcasting.

To me, this is quite funny, but it also seems to show the fact that most people do not get the inherent value of twitter - in terms of people being interested in diverse sets of information - and even with 140 character, some people (twitter celebrities, political celebrities, or Hollywood celebrities) will have a natural editorial style that some people will be attracted to.

Some read the Hollywood celebs because of their interest in the person, maybe their cause, what have you - heck, I am a follower of Shatner, Joss Whedon (@whedoneque), Eliza Dishku (@ElizaPatricia), @nathanfillion, Obama, and a bunch of other celebs - usually because they are interested in aspects of the celeb. I choose who I follow for various reasons, and assume that the reason waxes and wanes as time moves forward (for example, once DollHouse is renewed, I do not need to ~~watch~~ follow Joss as much).

I do not read them religiously (or all of the others I follow), and (blessedly) they do not post all the time. But, I do enjoy reading some of their posts, and others not.

So what if they are celebs - if I am interested in what they are saying, I read. if not, I eventually un-follow. Very democratic. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do this with our politicians?

Dear Ed Colligan, please send the Pre out...

2009-05-10T15:12:00.011-05:00

Dear Mr. Colligan -

Since 1995, I have been a staunch supporter of the Palm platform through thick and thin.

Image via Wikipedia

I have gone through more versions of the Palm platform than I can count, kept away from silly things like Mobile Windows, Blackberry Pearls and MP3 players and network computers masquerading as telephones - and have patiently waited for the next Palm device.

Please, please get the Pre and other phones out - my treo 755p is on its last legs (the power button is working intermittantly) and I am sick of having my treo called a Blackberry when I am a proud Palm customer.

My Palm History

When I first started at Andersen Consulting, your company launched the Palm 1000 and 5000 - two devices that revolutionized the use of handheld devices and made my memory Swiss cheese since I let all of my dates, numbers and efforts on the small RAM found within.

Over the next five years, I told, showed, extolled and rubbed my screens raw with the devices - moving onto the Palm V and Vx, and even purchased a m505 simply because it was hip and happening. But, when the treo 180 came out, I could not get my carrier to support them in London. And, when my friend Luke showed me his three 180s that were all in various states of disrepair - I was worried.

So, when I moved back to the US, the first thing I did was salivate over the treo 600 - it was the accessory that all hip, well-equipped Washington DC power-user had attached to their hand. I was still stung from the incredibly poor screen resolution and incredibly slow processor - but it was an incredible step up from all of the cheap, plastic phones I had seen from Sony Ericsson or Nokia, I knew I wanted something better.

Then, I found the treo 650 - and on December 2004, I made a heady purchase of the phone without a two year contract (I hate those lock-in things) - and promptly spent two months getting the phone to work properly with nineteen exchanges (yes, 19!) with Sprint on a regular basis - having to update the OS, get patches, incredible issues. And when the treo 755p showed up at Gnomedex two years ago, I even convinced a friend to sell me hers that she had won (since she loved her Blackberry).

And then, the same PR guy who helped me with the treo 755p got me to test out the Centro - which I absolutely loved....until I lost it. It was small, hip and absoultely rock-solid. The first time the PalmOS did not crash on me - the first time all of the features worked the way they should. I was so excited, I even published my thoughts on how to use the Centro for the field.

And that was the end of 2007.

I am ready for the new phone

I have been waiting patiently - and wanted to become part of the next evolution of the networked community - and have plodded around with my treo 755p, while my friends show off their iPhone 3Gs and Blackberry Storms, Pearls and Bolds (the last two phones coming incredibly close to me purchasing).

Please get out the Pre and the other devices being hinted about - I am your early adopter customer, and I am the word-of-mouth you desire. I am happy to deal with the bugs you OS may have, and I am a devoted Palm fan.

Email me if you want - because I can only wait so long.

A devoted Palm user

Where are the great Shopping Carts/Checkout Pages?

2009-05-05T11:07:00.004-05:00

You know, when I first started out in the Internet, there were all sorts of people doing what we now do so regularly. There were:

AOL - with their chat rooms
Compuserve - with their chat rooms and forums
Prodigy - with whatever they were doing

And a bunch of other people from schools like University of Illinois, Stanford and Carnege Mellon who were building webpages and services to index like MetaCrawler, WebCrawler, eXcite and some funky company called Yahoo!

Back then, I worked for Andersen Consulting (before they were Accenture) and became one of the Internet Architects. At that time, I had little knowledge about user experience, information architecture and all I thought about was generating requirements and building my app to meet them. At that time, I realized that eCommerce was going to be the key to the Internet and wnated to be part of that new wave.

I joined a company which, at that time, was the forefront of online purchases - ICVerify - which handled point-of-purchase credit card authorizations, and was the leader in the space. At that time, we talked about SET (secure electronic transactions) and other protocols that everyone and their mother wanted to own. Long past that time, those protocols all devolved into what we know today.

But the shopping experience was still the same - fill in your details and hit a button. It did not matter if the experience was long or short, clean or messy - as long as it was secure, it would happen. So, when people were asking about conversions - all that mattered were visitors and transactions.

Where Have All the CheckOut Designers Gone?

Today, almost 15 years later, we have all sorts of shopping experiences and not many of them make the experience much better or more palletable than what I experienced back with my Mosaic Browser and ICVerify software (which got bought by CyberCash which was bought by FDMS which was bought by Verisign, but I digress). Even a search on the web for some (if any guidance) gave me these pages:

All great checklists or complaints of the pain of checkout pages, but no good examples of quality checkout experiences or form design. As my client said, "Checkout Pages are the back-alley of the ecommerce process. No one really pays attention to them anyway."

I can not dine myself to believe this.

Where does one go to find this elusive expert/artisan?

UPDATE: one of my friends on twitter (@spencerfry) showed me Threadless who has a kick-ass interface design.

How to Build a Marketing Incentive Proposal

2009-04-23T18:13:00.005-05:00

Funny thing happened to me on the way to finding a twitter guru, athe last three emails from the people handing in their proposals all asked "how do I create an marketing proposal with an incentive in it?". Everyone has ideas for giveaways, for getting the readers interested in the content, but the question is on the concept of pricing - as in how should they draft a pricing model.

Well, I always start off with the value of the action (e.g. PR, SEM, SEO, social media, etc) in terms of value to the company - and usually in a fungable manner - which usually corresponds to how much money do visitors bring to the site.

For marketeers, the minute you talk about money - or the expectation of money due to their actions - the following comment shows up:

"We don't promise traffic or revenue - we only promise mentions or hits. And we can not prophesize how many visitors will come or how many visitors will buy."

And - that's fine. But, the idea of the web and the incredible power of IT is that we can discover trends in performance and see what could be performance.

An Example

Let's start off with an blog outreach marketing example: lets have a website - call it AcmeGifts.com which generates 1000 visitors a day to the site. 70% of the traffic is organic, 20% comes from search and 10% comes from referrals (from a link from another site).

Overall, the site converts visitors to sales at a 2% conversion rate (for every 100 visitors, 2 make a purchase) and the average ticket size of a purchase is $50.

This information should give you a starting point - and you would have to understand the concept of the funnel - finding a percentage of the people who are doing one action that will do the next action.

The funnel here will be:

From the blog site / blog post to a AcmeGifts.com landing page
From the landing page to the Checkout Page
From the Checkout Page to the Thank You Page (they completed the sale)

So - Steps 2 and 3 are addressed by the conversion rate described earlier (2%) which means we have to guestimate on Step 1.

Making a Guess

From most sites - we can make an estimate of a 1% transaction performance - for every 100 visitors, 1 person clicks through to the link asked to be clicked through. So, if we know a site generates 40K viewers a day, we can make an estimate on post performance (how many viewers it gets). Again, we have to make a model on the post performance based on the length of time the post is at the top of the page of the blog.

NOTE: we are not talking about views, but viewers.

For instance, if the blog posts more than one post a day, there is a declining performance of viewers on the post. So, think along the line of 4 hours at the top, 4 hours second, 4 hour third and so on. Then weight the hits on the article along a declining scale (top gets 100%, second gets 80%, third gets 20% and others almost nothing). Thus, if the site gets 40K viewers a day, then one could caluclate a post gets the following number of viewers: (1/6) * 40K + (1/6) * 40K * (0.8) + (1/6) * 40K * (.2) = 16K viewers.

That means that if a post gets on one of these blogs, then 1% of the 16K viewers or 160 viewers will go to the link posted on the blog.

If you figure out how many blogs you would b targeting, how many viewers are at them, how frequenctly a post will occur - you can get an estimate of the viewers that will become visitors at the target site.

Then, once the estimated number of posts and viewers are calculated, you can calculate the revenue that is possible from the earlier metrics.

So how much do I make?!?

And now comes the challenge - how do you figure out how much to charge the client?

Well, there are norms out there in terms of other work effort - which include 15% sales commissions for a sales lead, 30% margins for marketing costs for products, and so on - you have to fugure out what is your target metric of revenue as well.

In addition, consider the point-of-view of the client - they are looking for a return on their investment on you - and specifically, how you will generate the sales they need to succeed. They are not interested in overspending in the long run, but they are often able to understand there is some front-loading on the beginning, and the return comes in the later weeks.

But social media and PR is a difficult effort - since it is not like programming where the work is at the beginning, and the performance improvements are found after the site is launched (as you save operations costs, or gain on improved conversion and revenue). It is about continuing to build relationships and to provide content for them that will help their needs - for their viewership.

At this point, an Excel Sheet comes in handy - to show what the expenditures are, and the revenue the company will make as the program is executed. Now, you have the map the revenue generated to the money spent and balance the two.

"Umm, Sanford - this is confusing!"

I know - I understand the challenge - and wish there were an easier way of forecasting. But - the nice aspect of this is that the client can go over your numbers with you - and help you improve the model.

I will try to refine this post with your comments.

Are you a social media/twitter G-d or g-ddess?

2009-04-15T10:51:00.006-05:00

In the past five years, I have been following the social media waves from blogging to podcasting to RSS feeds to YouTube to twitter to friendfeed. I have had various engagement projects with political and corporate clients on how to development their relationship with their customers.

And I read all of the Social Media blogs like everyone else - and often search for excellent case studies on how to use social media to grow your brand, customers and revenue.

So, for all of those budding social media marketeers out there - I have a gig for you:

Grow my client's twitter List

The task is simple: grow my cleint's twitter follower list and figure out the conversion performance (followers to sales from the followers) and what are the characteristics that drive performance.

What does this mean? I am looking for someone to grow my client's list in an ethical manner - no spam following - and I have a specific set of metrics I am happy to leverage. In a four month period, I would like to see the following ratios on following to followers (and yes, you are allowed to cull as long as culling does not impact followers adversely):

Month 1 - 1:1 ratio, following under 1K
Month 2 - 1:3 ratio, following over 1K but under 2K
Month 3 - 1:4 or better ratio, following over 2K but under 2K
Month 4 - 1:5 or better ratio, following over 1K but under 2K

(if you think this is TOO hard, come up with something better!)

And, the extra benefit you have is the content of the client is quite funny - and can be used to generate followers. Additionally, if you have a different strategy (e.g. create a twitter customer service account and a twitter CEO account like @zappos), make the proposal.

To get considered, you have the following characteristics yourself:

You are a twitter fiend yourself (we will check you out on twitter grader and on other twittter history tools)
You have EXCELLENT grammar skills and you can "bring the funny"
You can help the client with great 140 character one-liners and repackage their content into twitter gold

Your proposal - should be with a base plus performance bonuses. Explain why you are the twitter-g-d or g-ddess that we are looking for. Price and performance matters here and the client is looking for talent across the country.

If you are interested, simply send me an email at sdickert+tgod [at] google's email account. The proposals are due by the end of next week (April 24th, 2009 at 5pm EST).

I look forward to your proposals.

Can you explain that twitter crap? Sure.

2009-03-15T14:03:00.006-05:00

Every so often on my Facebook account, I get a friend of mine asking about the funny shorthand for my status messages. For example, last night I was twittering on about an event I was at (or going to):

If you are still in NYC, a group of us are heading to #nxne from @nwc. Send a DM to join us...

And my friend replied:

Dude, what the heck does "#nxne from @nwc" mean anyway? You always post stuff like this that just make no friggin' sense. Can't you just use plain English?

Sure - I can, but just like the shorthand language kids developed for beepers back in the late 80's and early 90's, SMS texting has taken the format and expanded on it.

And since twitter is somewhat like blogging (in a very short 140 characters per message), combine the sensibilities of SMS texting with comment blogging grammar and you get the 'at' and the 'hashtag' formats.

At Format (@name)

Born out of the need to have a dialog with commenters on a blog post, the 'at' convention (@name) has been co-opted by twitter to allow for an easy response back to an individual to talk with someone in an open communication platform. And since 140 characters requires some for of simplification, the @ symbol has been used to symbolize the designation for a name. In the twitter case, it means to convert @name to http://www.twitter.com/name .

Usually, the name is the login or twitter ID for a user on twitter, so if you follow the link to the twitter site, you will see their thread of discussion on the page. When used in the context of a discussion (in reply to), it usually means the person is discussing a topic with someone. In the case above (@nwc), New Work City (a coworking location in Manhattan) maintains a twitter account where announcements are made. As more brands migrate onto twitter, the brand takes the twitter name and uses it much like they would with a URL or a blog name.

Hashtag Format

Since the twitter namespace can only support so many names, and since events or ideas are usually not as permanent as brands or people, another convention got created using a different character, the hash, number or pound symbol (#) depending on your preference. As quotes from the Hashtags.org site:

Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. We provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what's happening now.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

So, in the case of the #nxne code on the first status message, an event was created in NYC in response to the South by Southwest event by others in the city who did not get a chance to go to SXSW (or in hashtag lingo, #sxsw). The event, called North by Northeast, was a gathering at a cbar in the East Village. And to communicate you were going, you ended up - on your twitter messages or status messages, using the event's hashtag - #nxne.

So why all the lingo?

Simply put, it is easy to communicate with a shorthand, and you need someway to thread your discussions when you are talking in a very noisy space. Imaging you were having three or more conversations in a party - you are able to distinguish your conversation by addressing each individual by name (@name) and use the topic noun to distinguish which topic you are talking about (#name) with whom.

So, when you are tracking a feed page (either on your homepage on twitter, on friendfeed or on Facebook), you can see the threaded discussions and distinguish what people are talking about And, if you are really adventurous, consider using the Search feature at twitter.com (search.twitter.com) and put in your favorite @ name or hashtag.

Twitter purchased a company (Summize) that built our a live tracking system that allows you to see the feed discussions on any search query you want. So, if you want to watch the discussions going on about SXSW (for example, #sxsw), you were enter the hashtag into the query box and watch the discussion.

More information? Just check out my twitter feed at twitter.com/sanford