Solving mysteries at 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
September 14, 2015 Leave a comment
According to TechCrunch “Tech is the new status indicator. What laptop you carry, what phone you own, what smartwatch you wear is as reliable a signal of your status and position as dirty dungarees and a hobo bindle were during the Great Depression.”
If this isn’t a sign of “nerd” being cool and mainstream, I don’t know what is.
March 21, 2014 Leave a comment
I’ll be spending the rest of today getting into Happy Fast Kitchen. Under the Deer is SO over.
The latest on teens’ usage of social networks.
January 28, 2014 Leave a comment
In this game, one player wears Oculus Rift, the others do not. The guy wearing OR can see the bomb and interact with it, with tools. The other players have bomb diffusing manuals. Without seeing the bomb, and relying only on the first player’s description they have to talk him through disarming the bomb before it explodes.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes:
December 19, 2013 Leave a comment
I wish I could take credit for discovering this classic gem, but I found it on Reddit. Still, for those of you who don’t know a TL;DR from a TIL, behold the wonderful ignorance that was 1995.
Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana (Newsweek, Feb. 26 1995)
Here are my favorite quotes:
“Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM (I linked this term, in case you are too young to know what one is) can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
In response I give you NYTimes.com, Khan Academy, and Facebook.
“How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach.”
How many of you are reading this on a tablet, smartphone, or ultralight laptop? That’s a trick question, I know that no one is reading this (I have the data) but in theory you COULD be reading it at the beach on one of those devices.
“Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”
“Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”
The salespeople? That’s what we’re going to miss? Minimum wage retail jockeys? Are you kidding me (and I can say these things having spent A LOT of time working retail)?
The next time you’re tempted to poke fun at a new technology, just remember that your comments will be archived for nerds like me to make fun years in the future when you’re wrong.
Unless we’re talking about Snapchat. I’ll never understand that (outside of sexting).
December 17, 2013 2 Comments
Not only does Mt Gox (a BitCoin exchange) have their Twitter account set to auto-reply (a big no-no), the auto-reply message is basically just telling you to fuck off. AND THEN, the message is more than 140 characters!
Maybe they’re too busy watching their BitCoin valuation shoot the roof to care about something as silly as Twitter. That’s okay!
But if that’s your plan, why use Twitter at all?
Probably, because internet.
November 11, 2013 1 Comment
This video is amazing. Look at us (and I’m definitely including myself in this). This is not natural. This is not how we are supposed to live.
Let’s put the phones down when we’re with each other, okay?
And let’s stop suffering from Phomo.
September 12, 2012 2 Comments
Later today we will see the newest iPhone. We may see a new iPad Mini (although TechCrunch thinks we won’t). So why am I not more fired up? Following along with the liveblogs on Engadget or Gizmodo used to be one of my favorite ways to procrastinate at work. I used to tweet about everything they would say as it came out.
Maybe it’s because I know I won’t be getting the new phone (not up for an upgrade this round). Or maybe it’s because I know that no matter what they reveal tomorrow, it won’t be that much better than what I have right now. A slightly bigger screen? Cool, but not a game changer. LTE? faster would be nice, but not blowing my hair back. A better camera? A sharper screen? New dock connector? Please.
These are evolutions not revolutions.
A few years ago it felt like everything was getting awesomer every day. New apps were literally changing the way we live, new devices were radically blowing away their predecessor, and new websites were creating new forms of entertainment.
But now? Now everything feels very blah. Read TechCrunch and you see headline after headline about some new mobile CRM platform or yet another app to modify your photos. You see newer, sometimes better, versions of things we already have. Facebook is boring (although maybe that’s a reflection of my and my friends’ life stage).
Where is the awesomeness?
The digital toys and tech that used to get me so fired up has become a part of my everyday life and now I need more. It’s like a drug. I need another Uber. I need another Hulu. I need another first generation iPhone.
And yet, I don’t need “another” anything. I need a NEW. I need something I can’t even imagine.
Has the pace of innovation slowed? Have we mastered everything there is to master? Every so often someone comes out with a stupid prediction like that and quickly proved wrong. In the past, the technology itself was rapidly changing as we moved from analog to digital. But as digital technology evolved the revolutionary-ness of it slowed. Today’s computers aren’t that different from the first Macintosh. They’re faster, more powerful, have WAY more features. But if you brought someone from 1984 to 2012 and showed them a computer they could probably identify it. I doubt the same would hold true from the average person from 1964.
So what do we have to look forward to? What are you looking forward to most?
August 10, 2012 1 Comment
Last week, for my birthday, Wendy got me a Nike+ FuelBand. If you don’t know what that is, here is what the Nike+ site has to say about it:
Nike+ FuelBand tracks your activity through a sport-tested accelerometer. Then translates every move into NikeFuel. Nike+ FuelBand tracks running, walking, dancing, basketball – and dozens of everyday actions. It also syncs up with a motivational web and mobile experience. So put it on and get moving
And it looks like this:
Basically it’s a fancy pedometer. “NikeFuel points” are a proprietary system Nike created to allow you to compare your performance across activities and with other people. So if I’m a runner and you’re a rower, we can compete over who is more active. Woo hoo, right? But that’s not the important part.
What it really does is guilt and shame you into being more active. Every day you have a goal to reach, 2,000 or more NikeFuel points. You can check your progress throughout the day and see how close you are to achieving your goal. And that’s where the guilt/shame comes in.
Today was a low energy day for me. I sat in a 4 hour workshop, then drove to the airport, then sat at the airport, and then on a plane. I didn’t even hit my ridiculously low goal of 2000 NikeFuel points per day (I’ve only had it a week, I started with the lowest goal to get a baseline before upping it). Ordinarily after a day like this I’d hit the couch. And then I’d go to sleep.
But with the FuelBand, my glowing, flashing reminder that I was a lazy sack of crap today, I forced myself to go to the gym this evening and make sure I met my goal (I wasn’t that far off, from walking around today, etc). I even took the stairs to and from the gym, and the laundry room (several times), which I don’t normally do. This wasn’t even public shaming, it was just my own sense of guilt. My own sense that I would be upset with myself if I didn’t hit a totally arbitrary goal.
That’s some powerful shit.
People have been talking about feedback loops for a long time. It’s nothing new. But it sure is powerful. Simply by measuring something you can encourage people to change it. It’s how Weight Watchers works.
The act of measuring is much more powerful than the actual numbers. For instance, one of the first days I had the FuelBand I spent 5 hours in a car and earned 1200+ points. That was almost half my daily goal. There’s no way that riding in a car was half the activity I needed for the day. Additionally, I first started wearing the FuelBand on my right (dominant) hand. But after racking up some impressive amounts of points, I decided that eating, drinking, talking with my hands, and other movements really shouldn’t be counting towards my activity goals. So I switched it to my left hand and I’ve definitely been earning fewer points.
But again, it’s not about the number of points you get it. It’s about setting the appropriate goal and then forcing yourself to beat it.
Will I keep it up? I hope so. We’ll see how easy it is come winter. And how guilty I feel.
April 25, 2012 Leave a comment
I’m not really a huge Henry Ford fan. While you have to respect his business acumen and innovation, it’s really hard to see past his anti-semitism and support of Nazi Germany prior to the US entering WWII.
But one thing he did that I do like, is provide the world with this quote:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
And then decades later, Steve Jobs came along and echoed a similar sentiment:
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Often times, we are too reliant on asking people what they want. Or what they think they want. Or whether they would like some abstract idea. Notice that Steve Jobs didn’t say “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show them a concept board.”
The problem is context. Even if you have a great idea, without the proper context consumers cannot imagine how a new idea/product/service fits into their lives.
One example of this from my life is tablet computers. In 2005, when I was in grad school, our IT strategy professor gave us a lecture about tablet computing. He demonstrated tablets by running his whole class on something like this:
That was a state of the art tablet at the time. It was essentially a laptop where you could swivel the screen around and fold it over the keyboard then write on the screen with a stylus. It was a terrible experience. It was heavy, not terribly fast and really, offered nothing that regular laptops didn’t (other than writing on the screen – and who really needed that?).
And then came this:
And it blew every other tablet out of the water. It revitalized the whole concept of tablets. And I’m sure that Steve Jobs didn’t ask customers if they wanted tablets. He looked at how people use technology and made a device that enhanced their experience. If he had asked people whether they wanted a tablet or what they thought of tablets, they would have imagined that Toshiba above and said “no thanks.”
But my absolute favorite example of this is text messaging. In 2001 I participated in a focus group about text messaging. Because as strange as it seems now, back in 2001, in the US, not many people were using text messaging. Back then, I was using one of these:
It pretty much just made calls and stored phone numbers. So when I was told that I would be able to use a phone to send text messages to people I thought it was a terrible idea. I couldn’t imagine typing on a number pad to send one-way messages. I couldn’t imagine when I would WANT to use text messages. I conceded that if I was in class, or in a loud bar, it might be more convenient than making a phone call, but I couldn’t grasp the idea of sending someone a message and not getting an instantaneous response like you do when you are actually talking to them.
And now? Last month I sent 393 text messages. Thats 13 a day. How much did I talk on the phone? 135 minutes. 4 minutes a day. I hate talking on the phone and pretty much only talk on the phone with my parents and customer service reps.
21 year old me thought that talking on the phone was more convenient than texting and waiting for a reply. But now, most people would agree that calling, waiting for the other person to answer, making pleasantries, and then finally getting to the reason for the call is much more inconvenient.
So stop asking your customers what they want. And definitely stop asking your clients what they think their customers want. Get out there and meet your customers. Spend time with them. Observe them. Talk to them about how they solve problems in their life. And then take what you learn and figure out how to solve those problems better.
But unless you make faster horses, don’t ask them what they want.
March 27, 2012 1 Comment
Switching agencies has forced me to change my business travel habits a little bit. Instead of frequent trips to NYC where I am chauffeured around in the finest taxis the city has to offer, I’ve been driving to more “local” clients. Local being Hartford, CT or Framingham, MA. And because these are not bustling metropolises (metropoli?) I’ve found myself spending a lot of time in Zipcars.
And because I have a terrible sense of direction, especially in places I have never been before, I have been relying on my GPS app on my phone. A Lot.
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