Thence and Now

IMO this is not necessarily bad; as long as it is helping us fight the true enemy -> http://www.iousathemovie.com/ and not a political enemy of the party in power.

THENCE
Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

NOW



h/t -> http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/

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This has the potential to be the "breadboard" for the current generation

via blog.makezine.com

Maybe, I am little too aspirational but the potential is enticing. :-)

Source:: MAKE: Blog: $100 Linux wall-wart launches

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Change management in the real world

via datagovernance.com

I came across this diagram in a technical context but I think it is more general purpose than that. I think everything from presidential campaigns to entrepreneurship will fit this model.

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Testing Posterous new bookmarklet.

via picasaweb.google.com

testing posterous's "share bookmarklet". btw this is a inside of the new grace sanctuary.

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Crowd-storming within your company

"Rebooting" or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack's group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

That paragraph is my favourite part from this blog post ->  http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/. Of course the make up of the group had more to do than just the act of brain storming as a group. Of course, it needed funding by people with vision to last long enough to matter. (Btw, Twitter just raised 35mill in funding last week in this economy, so you bet it is around to stay).

I am just pointing out that this is a cool way to get your base excited if you are a company and your employees are wondering what's next.

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Time to bring liberal arts back in vogue for undergraduate studies.

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curiosity + talent + different baggage - what will the next generation do?

I was reading a love story on msnbc which curiously, is categorized as a "Tech and Gadgets" story. I was struck by how easy it was for these two young people to connect from across the world based on a share interest.

I should point out that they are both very talented; he cut his teeth on photoshop and she on GIMP. The tools aside, I think we are going to see more and more of this in the future. Young people collaborating with an ease and speed that was science fiction to a generation before them. The only difference is that unlike the earlier generation, these two are not going to stop and marvel at the ease of collaboration. They are going to keep building, creating, destroying, experimenting and pushing the boundaries faster than ever before :-)

I cannot wait for it to happen. Happy Valentine's day everyone.

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Teaching can be addictive

I am jealous of people who can create stuff like this (below). I need to find a way to include creating presentations like this as part of my job :-) Maybe that would be a good goal for 2009.

Below is a short video introduction to twiiter by the talented folks at commoncraft.

 

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

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Cost of being extraordinary

"The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever. That's because they don't got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. I got music, you got this. The thing you think about all the time, the thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else. No woman waiting at home after work with the drink and the kiss, that ain't gonna happen for us."

Transcript collected from House MD - 1.09 DNR - http://bit.ly/EFa7

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Making "stuff" better

• Why isn’t there an ice cream scoop with built in coil powered by AA batteries so it is easy to scoop out rock hard ice cream from the freezer?
• Why isn’t there a coffee maker with back lighting that turns on when you pop open the water lid, so you can see clearly when you have reached 5 cups of water?
• Why isn’t there a roof gutter with a latch based lid and removable units so all you have to do to clean your gutter is pop open the latch, remove the unit and rinse it?

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Point and click away

I am not a budding photographer and have no illusions about my skills :-) But I do like to keep working on my presentation skills (ala pz and duarte designs) so I went looking for a p&s camera that helps me see the world and record it for future use. I just placed my order for a Canon A590IS. It is perfect for the price(109$) I am paying for it. Plus I got a 4GB SDHC card  for 7$ (man, the prices are dropping).  It came down to choosing between the Canon A590 and the Fuji Finepix J10. The Canon was my choice due to 3 reasons

1. Runs on AA's, I am notorious for losing my charger.
2. Has image stabilization built in.
3. Has rudimentary face recognition built in.
   

The biggest con for the Canon is its form factor but not a biggie for me.

Here are the links that were helpful to me in my selection process. Hope it helps you.

• http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/popular-digital-cameras-and-gear/
• http://bit.ly/mT6O (amazon link for the fuji finepix J10)
• http://bit.ly/28ET39 (amazon link for the canon A590 IS)
• http://bit.ly/YGXE (side by side comparison of the two from dpreview)

Happy 2009!
-amar

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Communication - message first, medium second

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Ode to the NFL 2008 season

This is the work of a reader of the Sports Guy's columns (if you don't know who the sport's guy is.... tch tch)

I thought reader Ian in Portage, Mich., summed up the season nicely: "Hey, check out what I did for the last six hours trying to make this work all the way through. OK, Kansas City beat Oakland, which beat Denver, which beat Cleveland, which beat Cincinnati, which beat Jacksonville, which beat Green Bay, which beat Seattle, which beat San Francisco, which beat Buffalo, which beat San Diego, which beat New England, which beat the N.Y. Jets, who beat Arizona, which beat Miami, which beat St. Louis, which beat Dallas, which beat Washington, which beat New Orleans, which beat Tampa Bay, which beat Minnesota, which beat Carolina, which beat Atlanta, which beat Chicago, which beat Indianapolis, which beat Baltimore, which beat Philadelphia, which beat the N.Y. Giants, who beat Pittsburgh, which beat Houston, which beat Tennessee, which beat Detroit, which beat NOBODY."

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Gall's law in action -> start with a working simple system

The good folks at Evernote released a new product functionality today. The ability to take a picture and have it show up on your Evernote account with you doing nothing more than take the picture. The magic is not in taking the picture or the integration, to me the magic is in the words "you doing nothing more than take the picture". This is exactly what product management should be about, seamless, frictionless ways to enlist a person to use your product.

I am jealous, I want to use Evernote but I ended up paying money and buying OneNote and I feel guilty :-/ even though I stopped using OneNote a while back. *sigh*.. :) Maybe evernote should start a program where I can turn in my OneNote software and get a 15% discount or something so I don't feel guilty.

Any way this is very cool and imho a potential game changer -> http://bit.ly/6jEj (Evernote blog post)

Congratulations! fine people of Evernote.

Reference:

Galls Law -> http://bit.ly/iFIK (Gall's Law).

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Yay for tomorrow

I am hoping tomorrow will be a day of synthesizing, processing, assimilating and coherently communicating. I am hiding from work tomorrow with the hope that i can get lots of work done.

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Babyslist.com Site Launch

Posting for Jeff!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeff Chambers <jeff@zooven.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:47 PM
Subject: Babyslist.com Site Launch
To: undisclosed-recipients


Friends,

I'm happy to announce the beta launch of another Austin Startup Lab company called BabysList.com. BabysList is a niche site that will serve the Austin and surrounding communities by assisting parents that want to sell, swap and search for all things baby, locally. It's my hope that this site will develop into a marketplace for parents to help others in their community that don't have the means to buy "new" baby products as well as provide a platform for letting stay at home moms and dads make additional income without the cost of shipping charges and risk of fraud.

BabysList was "born" (sorry I had to :) ) when Jen and I were shopping for Elise before she arrived. I was amazed at how much stuff we needed and what it all cost. Given the life cycle for most baby items is measured in months, I saw them as barely used, or in some cases not even used at all before the child grew out of that product. I set out to create a place where parents could market their used baby items to a very specific, local audience as well as find great bargains on all sorts of things for their baby.

This holiday season is shaping up to be a hard time for many people, so if you have any items that you were waiting for your next garage sale or were going to donate, I would ask you to consider posting them on BabysList so that local parents needing a little help with finances this holiday season have an alternative to buying "new". It's good for everyone when we all lend a helping hand.

Check it out: http://www.babyslist.com

Thanks for your support,

The Chambers Family – (Jeff, Jen and Elise)

p.s. Tell a friend or blog about babyslist!

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What if Gall’s Law were true?

Thanks to Bokardo.

 

 

What if Gall’s Law were true?

via Bokardo - Social Design by Joshua Porter by Josh on 12/1/08

An interesting bit came across my twitterstream the other day:

Gall’s Law

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Yup, seems to hold for the complex systems we know and love: organic life, government, law, medicine…and of course Twitter.

Let’s imagine for a moment that it does hold. This would change lots of things, including much of the software world, which is laden with complex behemoths who frustrate us daily.

1. Building simpler software from the start
   Obviously, if Gall’s Law is true then more teams would start out building really simple software instead of overly complex stuff. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to think that way. Instead, the thinking seems to be, if we’re going to be as successful as (X), then our system needs to do more than (X). But in complex, social software, that may actually be impossible, since (X) didn’t spring fully-formed into life, either. Most of the software people try to emulate quickly took years and years to evolve to where it currently is. (as an aside, my recent argument is to focus on designing to support a specific activity and nevermind emulating success for its own sake)
2. Meeting solid metrics before adding features
   This is an interesting idea: make sure that your software works at some basic thing before you add features to it. I’ve seen on a couple projects in which there was a tension between the current under-performing software and the ambitious engineering plan that adds a lot more features. Which do you do? Stop and get people using the simple software first or push on and hope that people will come flocking after you’ve added a few more features? Well, according to Gall’s Law you get the simple software working first. My question is…are there teams who actually do this? Are there any that have actually said: “we have not reached our initial goals, let’s stop adding features and work on the ones we already have”?
3. Changes by design
   The overall effect of Gall’s Law is that most software would start off simple and evolve over time. So we wouldn’t end up with the software we imagined, but the software that managed to live through the early use and subsequent selection process. Accepting this as a rule, could we somehow plan for this evolution even though we don’t know what it will bring? Can we plan for this change? I think so, by building in feedback and reporting mechanisms and merely acknowledging to change the design based on such feedback.

Of course, the reason why we add feature after feature is because we don’t realize we’re doing it: we don’t see the accumulation of complexity…we only see adding “one more thing”. In the same way that a camel wouldn’t feel the slight addition of weight but ends up with a broken back, we don’t really feel each additional feature until its too late.

Gall’s Law might not be an actual law, but it sure seems like a good thing to keep in mind when you get into those inevitable project debates about improving what you have vs. adding new features.

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Apologies for the recent snafus

I recently started using posterous and really like it. Posterous cross posts all of my posts to twitter and blogger. Unfortunately it seems to have some problems with the cross posting. So my posts on blogger show up with typos and structural problems. I am hoping posterous will clean that up for me. 

In the meanwhile my posterous blog is at http://staysmall.posterous.com

Random thoughts on recent events

The ongoing attacks in Bombay got me unsettled. Below is a top 10 listcountries by population categorized for the four major world religions.As you go through the list, ask yourself two questions -

1. Do you see that country as an aggressor or a victim?
   
2. Do you consider that country as having bright future or goingdownhill?
   

Why is that?

Hindu	Christian	Islam	Jewish
Nepal	USA	Indonesia	USA
India	Brazil	Pakistan	Israel
Mauritius	Mexico	India	Russia
Guyana	Russia	Bangladesh	France
Fiji	China	Turkey	Argentina
Suriname	Germany	Iran	Canada
Bhutan	Philippines	Egypt	United Kingdom
Trinidad and Tobago	United Kingdom	Nigeria	Brazil
Sri Lanka	Italy	China	Germany
Bangladesh	France	Algeria	Ukraine

I was trying to look for patterns across these countries. I did not trytoo hard and gave up after a while but during the process I ended up atthe "human development index". According to Wikipedia,apart from Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh all the other countries listedin the top 10 Hindu list below, have a higher HDI score than India. Iwas born and raised smack dab in the heart of Indian middle class andnever would have guessed that the UN thinks Guyana is a better placefor me to be born than India. Then again no one person can representthe country of a billion people. Just something for me to keep in mindbefore I try to pretend like I understand what motivates people to doseemingly barbarous acts.



Sources:

• http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_hindu.html
• http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_christian.html
• http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_islam.html
• http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_judaism.html
• http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_jew_pop_lar_jew_pop_top_50_cou_by_jew_pop_jew-populations-top-50-countries-jews
• http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/world-top-ten-countries-with-largest-muslim-populations-map.html

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Why cannot I give a business presentation like this?

I don't think it is gimmicky, I actually believe it is powerful!

 

 

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