I love this new meme of people/cats/things failing that’s spreading throughout the web. On one side it feels childish and sometimes people go a little too far past what is funny to what is absolutely horrible but mostly it’s just plain awesome. I don’t think any of this would have been made possible without LOLCATs (and of course i can has cheezburger), so lets keep the credit where it’s due.
These are really exciting times. Until recently it’s all been small standards-backed movements to build an open base for the structured web to live off of but now big players are really taking things seriously and embracing all these wonderful standards. We have all the people behind the standards pushing as hard as they can with things like OpenID, XFN, microformats, the web standards movement in general, the diso project. But now just recently amazing things have happened. First just recently Yahoo! adopted OpenID and now Google has created an API for parsing the social graph.
This is amazing. I’m speechless. I’m stoked that all this is happening so quickly and can’t wait to see how things evolve.
I wish I was working on a project right now that could utilize this new Social Graph API by Google. It’s fun testing it out but I really want to see some concrete stuff built off of it!
I sure hope that Microsoft’s recent offer to buy Yahoo! doesn’t hurt this trend. Microsoft really sucks at helping push the industry in the right direction and with the situation being as it is, I predict Yahoo! will take Microsoft’s overly generous offer and get sucked into a black hole after the fact. As Gruber mentioned, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo! they would probably sell off all of their properties worth anything and use it as an opportunity to gobble up new users. It sure would be amusing if people revolted and went to Google if an acquisition takes place — that would sure screw over Microsoft — I might even celebrate.
That went off on a slight tangent. Anyways, I’m happy to be experiencing all of this.
This last weekend I participated in an amazing event over in Fremont at the Adobe offices with 121 other Seattleites at Startup Weekend Seattle (of the greater movement aptly called Startup Weekend). We started with nothing but human capital at 6pm Friday the 25th and left with a beta product live at 9pm Sunday the 27th after 51 hours of fun and excitement with amazing people. The product we created is skillbit™, a knowledge discovery application that provides you with the tools necessary to unlock the hidden potential of your team. I’ll describe more further down.
My general opinion of the event as a whole is that it was not only an amazing opportunity to start up a company and leave with [a small amount of] equity in another company, but I had an absolutely amazing time working and socializing with a slew of amazing people with great ideas and perspectives and that I couldn’t have wished for anything more from such an event. The Seattle techie, entrepreneurial crowd is a wonderful group. It was a great opportunity and a pleasure to be able to work with not only my close peers at the event but to spend time associated with such an amazingly skilled, bright, and diverse crowd. Andrew Hyde did an amazing job putting on the event and all of the team leads involved (Chris, Cassie, our glue man Matt, and the others whom I am not aware who was a lead) really made this event a huge success.
Startup Weekend as an event
As a networking event it couldn’t have been more valuable. Other networking and technically minded gatherings around the area all have one dynamic in common — they are social gatherings. None other, though, actually places you in an environment (except for maybe training events) where you actually have a chance to build working relationships with people. That, my friends, is priceless. It’s near impossible to accurately evaluate the workability of a person through conversation. But with a real company with real motivation to work for a shared goal not only is there a natural reason to meet and make relationships with a great number of people, but you actually get to know people.
As a startup and company generation platform I think that it’s a great idea that will sustain itself over time. The investment to put on such an event is (what I would imagine) fairly low and not only do you provide a networking event worth it’s price in gold but the investment put in by the majority of participants is only a weekend letting them leave with easily more than .5% of a company. The risk is only that of a weekend and the potential gain is so high. That being said, there obviously still needs to be people to carry on the projects which is why a core team is elected to continue with the project, but that’s only a fraction of the people involved. These events could even be held more frequently than they currently are and serve as an extremely lucrative business.
Seattle rocked the adobe
Our startup weekend went quite well. We ended up deciding to pursue an idea of a sort of ride sharing/carpooling website the first night but then bagging it a couple hours in due to new information on the competitive landscape and feasibility of the business taking off. After re-evaluating, we ended up with what is now called skillbit.
You work with incredible, talented people. Do you know the knowledge, skills, tools, and resources your people have?
Use skillbit™!
skillbit is a knowledge discovery application that provides you with the tools necessary to unlock the hidden potential of your Team!
Use skillbit to address your talent and skill sharing needs. skillbit captures the knowledge, talent, and skills of your Team, enabling you to discover quickly the depth and breadth of your Team. Access this information in a flexible, fun way with skillbit!
Some press (check out those awesome FAQ’s including several written by yours truly) has been written including an entry by our own local seattle venture blogger John Cook. We even had a King 5 news crew come during the event. Here’s the bit:
I originally wrote this as a comment in reference to another post by An Bui but wanted to record these thoughts here as well.
Pownce (me) is an interesting application because it doesn’t have or really in any way (in my observation) try to compete with the ubiquitous input that twitter has but still tries to capture that need for messaging small bits of information with friends.
I don’t see it’s usefulness as a text/event messaging platform just because it doesn’t exist in the “always on” environments that something like twitter does or even other apps with a mobile presence (pownce doesn’t have one) but instead as a platform for sharing files and little bits of information that need (important) to be private for some reason (meaning only viewable among friends) and viewable at any time interval even up to several weeks between visits.
I currently use Pownce solely as a file transfer mechanism to transfer files, mostly music, that I’d like my friends to have or see in a protected environment but don’t really matter.
The problem is that you can’t see messages that you post privately to your friends from before you defined that relationship in their application which is too bad for the use I have for the site.
I just received my third and “final” notice on the front of my apartment building from UPS unsuccessfully trying to deliver a package for me. These three from UPS follow a mid-December attempt to deliver the same package via FedEx unsuccessfully with three attempts.
This is a problem.
I am not around consistently during the day. They require signature confirmation. My apartment building will not accept the package for me and it is not secure to leave it here. They don’t have an accessible location for me to go pick up my package manually.
I’m going to give them a call now to see what they can do. Shouldn’t there be a better system surrounding this process?
Update: The closest FedEx center (from my past attempt) would have required a 3 hour round trip bus mess or an hour long trip with a vehicle. Now, with UPS, it’s the same inconvenient mess.
They will hold the package for 5 business days in a location unreachable by me. Now what?
Update 2: I take back anything bad I might have said about UPS. I called again and not only was the speech translation fast and accurate, but they allowed me to set a new delivery location. Sweet!
I have a love-hate relationship with my Apple laptops. Sometimes they are beautiful. Sometimes they drive me absolutely crazy.
My last laptop was a 1st gen MacBook (black) and I had it in to the shop three times for a full week each while I owned it. It drove me absolutely up the wall. Then I bought a 2nd gen MacBook Pro (15″) and it was great for about 9 months then it gracefully but quickly stopped recognizing the physical trackpad and keyboard properly. Luckily I had a week-long backpacking trip planned to take my current laptop in over the summer but that time is not often available.
There was an issue with Leopard that gave all sorts of users problems where things would stop responding for a few seconds to a few minutes which they claim to have fixed in the latest software update (of 2007-12-18). There are other issues that I see online that Apple has not fixed yet, though. I’ve been losing sensitivity off and on the last week or so again. I sure hope that it’s fixable through software and that they fix it before it becomes a serious issue. I cannot lose the use of this machine — it is my primary and my only work and home computer.
I really wish Apple would put a little more care into fixing these things before releasing their products. I’m sure they do put a lot of care, but I can’t help but feel like they could do a lot better.
I just made pancakes for breakfast for the second time in three days and they are delicious. I didn’t think twice about making them for my meal even though they are extremely low on nutrition and high on the quantity-eaten-per-meal. These really aren’t a good meal to have, but we (as americans) accept them as a reasonable choice of meal that is rarely frowned upon.
It got me thinking. Are there other similar guilty pleasures that we often indulge in?
It’s not good to have too many guilty pleasures, but there are probably a lot that we don’t think twice about even though they might not be as wise as other choices.
It’s 5:40am and I’m getting a lot of good solid programming done. Do I (a) keep going in my productive, awake, but possibly drone state until I can go no longer and possibly skipping a night of sleep or (b) sleep now, later than I should have, kill my productivity, and promise to get up and running quickly when I re-awaken in the morning (by which I mean the time that I wake from sleep)?
I’m going to go to sleep (after I finish this blog entry) because I want to be cautious about the possible side effects of skipping even one night of sleep. In fact, after reading I may be causing more damage than I think by maintaining a volatile sleep schedule.
I’ve recently become more and more self-conscious about my mental health and progressively adjusting my lifestyle and decisions to help my body and mind stay as fit and problem-free as possible. There are so many other things in this life that can and will stand as external, unavoidable speed bumps causing me to lose time, concentration, and emotional stability that it only makes sense to work hard preserving my body as best as I personally can.
I say this as a person who does not live anywhere near an optimal lifestyle in terms of health. I do not do drugs or over consume foods with large quantities of unhealthy ingredients nor do I exercise really at all. I don’t consider myself an unhealthy person, but rather an “average” person that has a lot to improve upon.
I’ve never done well jumping into new responsibilities or habits without a considerable transition period. I find it difficult to go cold turkey or make sudden changes in my life so I take it easy and change slowly, but in the right direction.
Here’s to a (post new years) resolution to every day make at least a some amount of progress towards a better physical, mental, and emotional health.
I just returned from a panel with several media collections librarians and would like to reflect.
When I think of libraries, I think of vast stores of knowledge that can only be had at a library. When I think of library media (audio or video) collections, I think of a place I can easily obtain copyrightable material to copy for my own uses without worrying about being caught. As bad as that may be, that’s how I perceive library media collections. While both provide the same type of resource and are both just as valid of mediums to collect, they are generally used for very different purposes by the majority of the population.
Books will always have their place. You can’t really replace the utility of a book. Products like the kindle try to be books, but they aren’t and never — knock on wood — replace books. Assuming it’s not possible (at least in the foreseeable future) to inject knowledge into the brain, books will always be the most efficient medium for reading text.
Music and video, on the other hand, is a much more flexible type of information/property that has continued to evolve by leaps and bounds in the ways that people consume, own, and distribute it. There may be evolutions in paper or archival materials for books, but music has evolution of physical mediums far more evolutionary — from sheet music to wax records to tape to compact disc to now digital files that can be created, transfered, and consumed in more ways than we can accurately predict today. Advances in listening/viewing technology, storage technology, distribution technology, and licensing technology are changing so rapidly that it’s hard for even the most successful of players in the business to keep a sustained hold on a piece of the market. Things just move too fast.
Libraries don’t have the financial and human capital required to keep up with the evolution of media. While I realize that libraries are doing great things and are working really hard to adopt a lot of these new “web 2.0″ technologies (cough. I think that’s the first time I’ve resorted to using that term in writing. I can’t avoid it any longer, i succumb to the power of the buzzword.) in their systems and vision, corporations are popping up like wildflowers with new, innovative, and extremely accessible ways for people to gain access to media of all kinds. Libraries are trying to keep up with what has already been done, but without a surge of innovation in industries providing public access to materials (including libraries) companies will soon easily far surpass what libraries can provide as a unique and valuable resource for the majority of users. I say the majority of users because physical archives of multimedia content will still hold some value forever for niche users, researchers, and historians, access to what most regular people (which seems to be the largest audience and reason for the existence of public libraries) need and want is for many people (and increasing exponentially) already far more than any library can provide as well as they already have through commercial and non-library resources.
Being a student in the Information School where the largest percentage of students in the school are studying library and information sciences, this hurts a little but is the fact of the state of the world and our society.
