collapsing geography

kindle reset

2008-07-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

I was transferring files to Kindle's SD card via USB when it locked up. Neither power cycle nor hard reboot fixed it. Instead it would start the power-on cycle, put up the happy Amazon Kindle logo but then hang forever. Was about to call Amazon when I tried powering it down, popping out the SD card, and then booting it. Voila! Kindle came up fine. Turned it back off, re-inserted the SD card, and everything is working fine again.

more reasons to <3 kindle

2008-07-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

Tor.com has opened. Baen's approach of releasing free books to reach a broader audience continues to generate ripples. Kudos to Tor, and thank you for the introduction to a bunch of new authors.

Separately, I just used Amazon's PDF->Kindle email service to move some reference materials on to Kindle. It didn't handle the code snippets perfectly, but it worked fairly well. Getting PDFs to work perfectly on Kindle will make an already useful device even more important to me.

colbert report now officially the most awesomest show evar

2008-07-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

Much improved audio for the Colbert Report introduction:

The interview and performance:

fina-lively

2008-07-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

Coming as a shock to almost no one, the 800-pound Googlerilla released their virtual world-ish product today, Lively.

Lots of good stuff here that pretty much all of us have predicted. It runs in a browser, rooms rather than a whole world to more easily balance resource requirements, integration with Google chat so you can talk to the rest of the world, and a wonderful aesthetic to appeal to Club Penguin graduates.

Lots of the web reports are positioning it as a direct Second Life competitor, with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch declaring "Well, this sucks for Second Life." Really? First, Lively has a host of unknowns. Will Google quickly get it running on OS X, or will Google's love-hate relationship with Apple slow things down? How flexible will the user-generated content become (and will you buy it with Google Checkout)? Sketchup and Google Earth integration? Also, what are you going to do in Lively? Club Penguin runs everywhere and isn't just a chat environment. Instead, there are tons of games and activities on top of the social bits.

Of course, if Lively is a typical Google product, we'll see a lot of iteration and improvement. More importantly, Google moving into virtual worlds adds interest and excitement to the space, which is great. It builds on recent technical milestones like Second Life to Open Sim teleportation, the regulatory opportunities opened up by Vermont's virtual corporation law, Whirled's flash-based approach, and Mitch Kapor's 3D interface experiments. Lively is step forward, potentially an important one if it is approachable enough and gives you something to do. But the idea that it is going to achieve Google web search levels of dominance is probably a little silly.

some tech bits that are making me happy

2008-07-08T17:44:00.000-07:00

At Linden, we had a white board which contained all the technologies that had not yet screwed us. At one point, it had a lot of different technologies, applications, and programs, but over time they were erased until we were down to grep and less. Such is the way of software development. I've been using a few bits of technology that are new to me, both during my teaching/consulting/speaking time and now as I spin up on new technology at EMI, and four have been added to my wall.

The first is TextMate, a coding text editor for OS X. Although it has a couple of quirks -- hitting tab with a block of code selected replaces the block of code with a tab?! -- it is lightweight, handles lots of languages and scripts well, and plays nicely with the command line. I suspect that I could get XCode to do everything I currently use TextMate for, but somehow XCode seems too heavy weight for Ruby, Haskel, JavaScript, and other small, light coding tasks. Yes, I realize that if I was a Real Geek (tm) I would just use Emacs or Vim, but I am secure in my geek cred.

The second is Git. We used CVS and Subversion at Linden and Subversion was my default source code manager, but after mucking around with Git, I have a bit of a crush. I've listened to the Siren Song of distributed source code control before, but after [name redacted] failed to play nicely with the Second Life code tree, I had myself tied to the mast. However, two years later, progress has been made. Git seems to Just Do What I Want, including properly handing file deletion. I haven't yet thrown a large project at it or shifted directories all over the place, but so far Git has been fast, stable, and perfect for my needs going forward. Even better, it integrates nicely into TextMate! Been playing with GitHub -- an online service that makes you glad to be living in a world governed by Moore's Law -- but don't have enough data yet, other than the interface being very clean and easy to use.

Third, I have high hopes for Basecamp. Two days of data entry later, nearly all my thoughts on how to tackle EMI technical challenges are crystalized, partitioned, and shared. Basecamp is very fast, has just enough features, and is cheap enough to provisionally move onto the wall. Lots of other project planning and tracking software leads me to assume that Basecamp will eventually dash my hopes, but so far it has done a good job of delivering on what it promises. More reports to come.

Finally, I've switched to using Fluid for various Google app domains, Basecamp, Github, Facebook, Blogger, and Google Calendar. Fluid is a "site specific browser", one of those web terms you probably haven't heard of yet. You might hear about it in the future, but more likely by the time it gets to the mainstream, OS X will have just integrated it into the OS. Fluid makes web sites act a lot more like desktop applications and other than not playing well with gmail + gchat has been working very well. It has a couple of really nicely thought out features. For example, when using Basecamp, I've found it useful to have two browsers open -- rather than on tabs -- because you can't always get all the info you need to refer to on a single page. When you reopen the Fluid basecamp app, it remembers how many pages were open, their screen positions, and where you were. Slick!

So there you go. Four technologies that have yet to screw me, which is pretty high praise. We'll see how long they remain.

a good read

2008-07-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I read a lot of Baen books. Partially this is due to my tastes in travel reading aligning nicely with their catalog, but mostly it's because I spend a lot of time reading on the road, and Jim Baen, Eric Flint and others at Baen were ahead of their time in pushing to release books as non-drm digital downloads. They've also released tons of books as free downloads, so it's easy to sample new authors. Now that I am Kindle-enabled, I'm reading even more books this way, and last night plowed through Eric Flint's The Rivers of War, an alternate history that begins during the war of 1812. Good, fun read. Doesn't eclipse my current high water mark for historical speculative fiction -- Dan Simmon's The Terror is in a class by itself -- but, like the Belisarius series Flint cowrote with David Drake, Rivers has a wonderful attention to detail, makes one glad to not be on a battlefield, has several laugh-out-loud moments, and was the perfect way to spend a few hours in a hotel far from home.

two macs died in two days, nothing lost

2008-06-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

Clustering happens, which in this case was unfortunate. First my MacBook Air got confused while I was moving files over to my new work computer. The login app was crashing on startup, looking a lot like the corrupt NetInfo DB bug discussed in several places on the web, but with 10.5 that couldn't be the problem. After wasting a couple of hours on the command line and not resolving it, I fell back to the trusty OS X archive install, where you reinstall OS X while preserving your accounts and settings. Worked like a charm and everything was fine. Huge kudos to Apple to keeping this feature solid in release after release of OS X.

This had just finished when I got a call that one of our home Macs was failing to boot and displaying a circle with a line through it. Uh-oh. After fsck and an archive install, it came back up but continued to act flakey. A bit more trouble shooting made clear that its drive is dying, although it was sort of working in target disk mode. Fortunately, Time Machine plus a Time Capsule had been doing their thing, so nothing was lost. Everything already restored to a different machine and busted machine waiting for a trip to the Apple store.

Yay, backups! One note, make sure you let Time Machine do the whole drive, not just the user's directory. If not for target disk mode working, I would have had to reinstall a ton of software.

let us imagine you were a recruiter

2008-06-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

I received an amusing blind approach from a recruiter today. Included below with certain details redacted:

Cory,
Hello my name is [redacted] and I am from [redacted] in Boston. I am an IT Recruiter and I am working with one of my top clients in Boston which is looking for an OpenGL developer for an iPhone/game application. Please send me your updated Word formatted resume and also give me a call at [redacted] to discuss the opening if you are interested. If you are not interested and know someone who may be please forward my contact information along. I want to thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon.
Best,
[redacted]

Wow. Sending a spam email that demonstrates zero time spent investigating me is not the way to get me to send you a resume or help you find someone else, which is kind of silly given how many developers I know.

This was one of two recruiter emails I received today. The other one was also spam, but took things up a notch by arriving with several hundred email addresses that were supposed to be BCC-ed showing up. Is the tech job market once again hot enough to support such poor recruiting?

learning from the mouse

2008-06-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

Walking through Orlando Airport, it was fun watching how the main Orlando help desk and Disney personnel guide arriving visitors. As tired family after tired family stumbles into the baggage claim area, both the help desk and Disney employees with clipboards firmly but nicely engage with a "Can I help you?" followed by a very concise set of instructions and directions to the next stage in the arrival process. Clearly, if they waited for new arrivals to ask for help -- or spent excessive time with most guests -- there would be a massive backup at the help desk. By reaching out and providing guidance to nearly everyone, they catch most people who need help before the guests even know what to ask for and maintain a really high throughput. High volume and high touch customer support at the same time. I bet there are other businesses that could benefit from their approach.

kindletastic

2008-06-17T18:32:00.001-07:00

Something else I like about the Kindle is that it allows me to read multiple books simultaneously, something I used to do prior to having a train commute and lots of travel. I'm liking the Kindle more and more as I use it. The question will be what happens once I can buy a good e-book reader from the iPhone App Store. I suspect I'll end up with as much of my data as possible on both devices and the use the iPhone for short reading sessions, Kindle for longer ones, but we'll see.

yes, hiring now (if not sooner)

2008-06-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

The best part of the two weeks in London is that many of our opportunities have snapped into focus. We're going to be lean and scrappy, so if you are looking to write code to attack interesting engineering challenges with great people, drop me an email. To those of you who've already pinged me, thank you! I'm chewing through back emails as quickly as possible and will do my best to respond quickly.

missing use case and the hidden media library

2008-06-15T00:48:00.000-07:00

[Edit: Comments have pointed out that I almost had found all the pieces, as download delivery is available from the Media Library. Although maybe not from the UK, where I was. Apparently, you order it, then go to the media library for a download.]

Several people recommended Clay's new book on this trip. Here Comes Everybody was on my list, but with extra endorsements it moved to the front of the queue. Now that I have my Kindle, I'm trying to minimize my physical book purchases. Amazon's Whispernet -- their wireless delivery mechanism to Kindle -- only functions in the United States, but since Kindle is obviously targeted at travelers, there must be a "download to my computer and copy via USB"-option, right?

Nope.

Now, in this case, I'll wait to get home and purchase the book then, but what if I was out of reading material and just grabbed it here? Lost opportunity for Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon, the link to Clay's book is Amazon Associate enabled, so in theory I get a small payment if you buy via that link. I hadn't used the associate links before and wanted to see their user-experience. Quite nice, although it has some bugs. Attempting to build an associate link to Kindle generated an empty page and the link generator failed to find the Kindle edition of the book. [Edit: the link is to the Kindle edition but I'm not sure why the link generator picked that one]

In clicking around trying to find a download option for the Kindle book, I discovered Amazon's "your media library", which I hadn't seen before. Is anybody using this? Does the web camera bar code reader work? It seems to aggregate your Amazon purchases, as well as any item that you click "I own this" when adjusting the recommendations. Odd to find a feature with a lot of work thrown into it just lurking on Amazon's site.

and so it begins

2008-06-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

I was in Brighton chatting with former coworkers and realized that I've now been working at EMI for three weeks. Three weeks of drinking from the fire-hose, talking to lots of talented folks, and coming up to speed as quickly as possible. Tomorrow I head home from England, tired, my first moleskin full of scrawled notes from meetings and discussions with my new coworkers.

Apologies to everyone in London who I missed on this trip. I didn't get out of the office much, although the few times I did led to discussions with smart people . Cory provided insights into variable pricing, tipping, and entitlement. Jan was a great devil's advocate about music discovery while John was -- as always -- generous with his experiences running Magnatune. Plus, dinner was delicious! I'm behind on email, but in catching up Salman Ahmad pointed out that I can't count, since I bought Junoon's Infiniti when he played at Stanford last year. Sorry!

This week in San Francisco, next in Los Angeles. Hope United gets me home on time.

gmail psa

2008-06-10T02:26:00.001-07:00

Apparently if you send an email to around 500 recipients and several bounce, gmail's automatic anti-spam provisions will kick in and you won't be able to send email for around 24 hours. In telling friends and colleagues about my move to EMI I, of course, triggered this limit. Fortunately, gmail is working again now.

Interesting user experience lesson, though. If you rely on a free service that has no human support, what happens when the algorithm generates a false positive and locks you out? If Google had a "Pay $20 for help" button, I would have happily done that to resolve the issue. Hell, I would have paid $100 to fix it. Wonder if they're leaving money on the table?

new job, not like the old job

2008-06-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

Many key moments of my career have soundtracks.

Deciding to leave Lockheed Sanders, move to California, and help start Acclaim Coin-Op? Jane’s Addiction’s live album.
Finally crushing Armageddon’s game object memory leak? Veruca Salt’s "8 Arms to Hold You."
Road Rash’s threading crash bug and final Nintendo approval? Hole’s "Celebrity Skin."
Adding lists into Second Life’s scripting language? Rush’s "Vapor Trails."

I listen to music riding BART, walking to work, on airplanes, and while I write. I’ve spent countless hours programming with headphones on.

Despite this, I neither buy nor hear much new music. Since 2000, I’ve only purchased 5 albums. Three by Rush (enough of my friends are Rush fans, so somebody reminds me when they release a new album), Pearl Jam’s "Pearl Jam" (I read a Rolling Stone review in an airport), and REM’s Accelerate (best Terry Gross interview on "Fresh Air" in months.)

Why not? I hear lots of new music I like – anything from the first couple seasons of Alias would work – but I never hear new music in the right context to buy it. When I listen to radio, I’m listening to NPR to catch up on the news. The good local music stores are all gone. When I’m working, I want to hear music I like, so I have a very low threshold for experimentation. Coworker’s iTunes shares provide a hint at something new, but DRM and the hassles of being on the wrong computer – working on a desktop when my music is on my phone and laptop – keep me from jumping onto the iTunes Music Store to make a purchase.

Note that none of this lack of purchasing is because I’m just torrenting stuff. The problem is that connecting discovery of new music to the ability to own the music is completely jacked. Even when I knew I wanted something – Accelerate – I had the problem that I was traveling with my MacBook Air, so buying a CD was useless. I had never setup the iTMS on that computer and you would be amazed at how hard Apple has made that process. It’s like they don’t want to sell me music. Then, once I did remember all the passwords I needed, I couldn’t figure out whether the iTunes download was DRM free. So I went to Amazon, which was slightly easier and made it clear the download wasn’t broken via DRM.

It is incredibly frustrating. I want to be able to find new music. When I find new music, I’m happy to pay the artists for it. Once I own music, I want to be able to listen to it wherever I am. How hard can this be?

I’m about to find out. Two weeks ago, I joined EMI Music as SVP of Digital Strategy.

Why EMI? By hiring Douglas Merrill, EMI has demonstrated a commitment to capitalize on all the technology available to make the music experience better for artists and fans. At Linden, the most important changes I drove were blends of technology and licensing, so when Douglas asked me to join him at EMI, I jumped at the chance. Music touches everyone in the world and is uniquely part of our lives -- how could I not take this challenge?

Obviously, I have a lot to learn about music and EMI, so I’ll be spending time in London and Los Angeles. Moreover, I'll be reaching out to many of you for help as I figure out how to build the right team to generate sustained, ongoing innovation around music. (Want to work on these challenges? Let me know!)

And, yes, I will be definitely be blogging about it.

Oh, and what was I listening to when I decided to join EMI? REM’s Accelerate.

(OK, go back to waiting for Jobs' keynote now)

good reads

2008-06-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

I have a confession. I've never read the other Cory's novels. I'm as addicted to Boing Boing as the next person, appreciate his non-fiction work, read his short stories, and generally enjoy the conversations we've had. But "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" never grabbed me, so I've not read his novels.

Oops.

Thoroughly enjoyed "Eastern Standard Tribe" (on the new Kindle, no less) on the flight over to London. Geeky, fast paced, perfect travel consumption for me. Now I'm about half-way through "Little Brother", which so far is heartbreaking and wonderful, despite (or because of) it being such a rant. When my daughter reads it in 4 or 5 years, I wonder if it will resonate because society has self-corrected or because we've gone even deeper into the rathole of fear. I certainly hope it is the former.

I'd write more, but I want to get back to "Little Brother." If you're on this blog, you'll want to go read it, too.

[Edit: Finished "Little Brother" later Sunday, resulting in being fairly tired on Monday. If anything, it got better as it went. Really enjoyed it.]

a new toy: the amazon kindle

2008-06-08T06:17:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty fast reader and spend a lot of time traveling, so I end up in the annoying situation of carrying multiple books to cover me for a complete trip. As a result, I've been keeping an eye on e-ink based portable readers, especially the Amazon Kindle. A friend from Linden recently got one and has been twittering her support, so I decided to take the plunge. Now that I've had it for a few weeks, I thought a review was in order.

First off, the ergonomics and build quality. It's ugly and feels cheap to me, especially when compared to -- say -- Apple products. It's supposed to snap into its book-like case, but mine sometimes pops out or pops the battery cover open instead. On the plus side, it is very light, which matters when you're curled up late at night reading in bed. I suspect this is something Amazon will improve on greatly with their 2.0 version.

The screen, on the other hand, is delightful. If you haven't seen an e-ink screen, it's a little hard to describe how nice it is to read off of. My only minor complaint is that the smallest test size isn't small enough. The screen has to flash to black, then white, between page changes, but I found that I stopped noticing that almost immediately. I've habitually read on both laptops and mobile devices and really do like the Kindle more -- although when iPhone gets an ebook application, I'm curious which one I'll spend more time reading on.

I've only purchased a couple of books from Amazon. The delivery is quick and easy, the selection good, but knowing that I'm getting a DRM-ed book that I can't use anywhere else is really annoying. I have, however, paid Baen books just about every way I could, including a $500 Andromeda membership to Baen's Universe, since between that and Baen's free library, I'm able to get nearly half of the science fiction books I own as bits. Bookmooch will be getting a lot of additional books in the next few months! None of the Baen books have DRM, so I'm much happier to pay to get bits. Plus, since their service tracks what I've purchased, I know that I can always recover the books if I lose them. To Amazon's credit, it's not like they're going to go out of business, so I suspect that the ease of purchasing may overcome some of my concerns. We'll see.

Kindle has great tools for annotating and highlighting material in books, which I've really enjoyed for books that I'm studying. In most situations, when you pull up your notes, there is a shortcut to then take you to the section in context.

One problem that's been really bugging me so far is that you can't organize books. Especially with series I'm rereading, I never remember which order the books are in and Kindle doesn't do anything to help me. I suspect this will be a software upgrade at some point. Another minor quirk is that if you drain the battery to zero, the Kindle does nothing, so it's easy to end up a little stumped the first time it happens. Most control inputs are incredibly high latency, so its easy to enter multiple commands before any get executed. Finally, annoying to not do charging via USB. It means I have an extra cable to carry around.

All-in-all, despite the quirks, I'm pleased with the purchase. I get to have hundreds of books with me all the time in a format that is very comfortable to read on. I'd much rather buy books as bits, so this should continue driving the ecosystem in that direction.

(Edit: almost forgot to mention Feedbooks. Great FAQ for getting piles of free books onto Kindle!)

a very late apoc wrap-up

2008-06-08T05:43:00.000-07:00

For readers who haven't been following along -- or those I lost during the hiatus -- I spent January through June teaching at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. More specifically, I co-taught the APOC cmgt 534 course with Professor Karen North and Clint Schaff. In addition, I gave a bi-monthly faculty lecture series on virtual worlds. It proved to be more fun -- but substantially more work -- than I expected. For a recap, you can follow APOC label.

The faculty lectures were the hardest to prep for. I generally had a solid turnout of Annenberg faculty, so it was a room of very smart people with lots of great questions. I decided before the first one to create entirely new presentations for each of lectures, which often require a bit of last minute scrambling. I managed to pull it off and the process really helped me to coalesce my own thoughts around virtual worlds, innovation, education, and the future.

The class was work but I really enjoyed learning from my fellow teachers and students. The APOC program brings together an amazing group and I expect we'll be hearing from all of them in the future.

Finally, my copious free time at Annenberg were spent with the Network Culture Project, let by Doug Thomas. The project brings together a great collection of research and ideas around virtual worlds. Going forward I'll remain an adjunct professor connected to the project and depending on where I'm spending my time over the next year, I'm sure I'll be spending at least some time Annenberg. My thanks to Doug, Larry Gross, and Annenberg dean Ernie Wilson who all worked hard to allow me to spend the semester teaching at USC.

been off the grid a bit

2008-05-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

Apologies for recent lack of posting. I owe a serious recap of my semester at APOC, but that isn't going to happen right now. I've been enjoying two weeks mostly off the grid, hanging out at home, teaching my daughter to swim, and learning that my wife consistently kicks my ass at Boom Blox. It's been most excellent and not at all conducive to blogging. It has also been the perfect recharge before starting my next gig. Details to come.

best wii game ever

2008-05-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

I ordered "Boom Blox", the Steven Spielberg/EA Wii game, after reading the Ars review.

Best. Wii. Game. EVAR.

Go get it, especially if you have kids.

two books worth reading

2008-05-06T14:24:00.001-07:00

How to foster and sustain disruptive innovation has been on my mind a lot lately. I've been coalescing my thoughts on how I would do it and reading up on other approaches. To that point, I recently read two books that apply.

The first came via the 37 Signals blog. "Maverick", by Richard Semler, is the story of how the Brazilian firm Semco reinvented itself during the early 1990's. Semco is a diverse 3000 person firm that has units doing everything from industrial mixing units to property management. What makes Semco interesting is that it is run in an incredibly democratic fashion, including groups and individuals setting their own wages, virtually nonexistent hierarchy, and limited management. Having helped craft and drive Linden's culture, it was a fascinating read to look at what it meant to take many of our ideas farther, but also gave great insight into some of the basic differences.

Semco's business units -- by virtue of their extreme diversification -- operated almost independently of each other, allowing different groups to generate high communication rates within the group without flooding other business units with excess information. Much of Semco's business revolves around improving on existing engineering processes, and their model works remarkably well for that. In order to generate more disruptive innovation, Semco adopted a model somewhat akin to the Skunk Works model I described, with rotating participation in a team of outside the box thinkers. Semco also discovered, as I would have predicted, that an organization without structure is vulnerable to politics and rumors, so transparency -- all the way up to Richard Semler as CEO -- was critical to making it work. In addition, great people management and rigorous feedback and reviews -- great people process -- was absolutely required to make it all work. Finally, different parts of the company organize differently, so some teams and groups are hierarchical within Semco's less structued whole.

So, empower employees, build interfaces between different units, support (embrace) differences between how groups function, and make sure that people are well managed. Lots of companies experiment with this, but Semco makes for a great case study in going all the way.

The second book came via Jon Taplin, "The Dream Machine," by Mitchell Waldrop. This amazing book covers the entire history of the personal computer, from the early work of Norbert Wiener at MIT (who's history is told in equally good "Dark Hero of the Information Age"), through the WWII advances in computers, the impact of ARPA, the breakthroughs at SRI and PARC, and the subsequent creation of the personal computer. The story is tied together through the life of J.C.R. Licklider, who's career is touches nearly every aspect of the emergence of the PC and the Internet.

From an innovation standpoint, what makes "The Dream Machine" such a remarkable read is how crushing a blow it provides to anyone who wants to argue that incubators don't work or that it isn't possible to foster disruptive innovation. The story of the silicon revolution shows again and again the importance of allowing ideas to cross polinate and remix, of supporting knowledge and experience collisions in ways that preseverve the ideas and allow later thinkers to riff on them. It details the kind of management structures and support innovation needs to thrive. Young and old turks alike need impossible challenges to inspire them, but then the freedom and resources to overcome the challenges.

Both books feel timely. Larry Page had a recent interview in Fortune talking about these issues. What's interesting is that it still doesn't feel like he's really looked at the history. Google's 70/20/10 goal is a good one, but what is the unit of time it operates on? If 10% of Google's workforce focused on disruptive innovation, where would Google be in 5 years? After all, many of the breakthroughs in "The Dream Machine" were years or decades in the making. Is Larry sure that we're so much smarter today that we can get the same results in our spare time? Or, consider Microsoft. Rather than buying Yahoo! to gain some market in what is most profitable online today, why aren't they leveraging their phenomenal resources to create what will be profitable in 2015? $40 billion could support a lot of disruption.

Enjoy both books and let me know what you think!

apparently i'm not the only one rethinking innovation

2008-05-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

There's a great article coming in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell looking at the myth that big ideas are rare. It looks at Nathan Myhrvold's attempts to engineer innovation and dovetails rather nicely with my recent post on innovating innovation. While I don't necessarily agree with patents as a measure of innovation, his results are very impressive. By bringing together bright people from disparate fields and allowing massive cross polination, disruptive ideas emerge. The challenge is figuring out how to do it in a more scalable way that Nathan has.

technology awareness

2008-04-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Jon Taplin asked me to give my future of virtual worlds talk to his COMM 306 class, "The Communications Revolution, Entertainment and Art." His class was initially slow to ask questions, but once they got rolling it was great fun. Especially in an extended Q&A after class, they had very good queries about the impact of technology on privacy and culture.

They were quick to work through the implications of always on, mobile devices. Jon asked them whether they would consider life logging, or streaming the world around them to their friends. Initially it was the usual "hell no" but as they built on each others answers and started thinking through the implications, it didn't take long to get to "it's a natural extension of blogging", "I'd share it with my friends", "I'm bad at remembering names", and "I do it with Flickr already."

It was also a chance to sample a group of college juniors about technology. (It's a fairly large class, although predominantly communication and comm management undergrads, so obviously there are biases.)

Approximate percentages who had heard of or used the following (as measured by the incredibly scientific method of asking the audience questions and counting hands):

Cell phone: 100%
SMS: 100%
Digital music/media: 100%
Facebook: 95% (ie, almost everyone)
Instant Messaging: 95%
MySpace: 80%
Regularly update something online: 75%
LinkedIn: 40%
Second Life: 25%
Blog: 20% (lots of people who updated their MySpace page did not consider it blogging, hence the something stat, above)
Online games: 10%
World of Warcraft: 10% (and great reluctance to admit it)
Twitter: 1 person (!)
Knew about RSS or used it: 0%
Had heard of Spore: 0% (!)
Had heard of Sony Home: 0% (not as surprising as Spore, but still...)

As we think about games, virtual worlds, and technology -- rants aside -- it's easy to forget the differences between adoption rates and awareness.

To first order, everyone has a cell phone, listens to music, wants to be connected to their friends, and uses the web.

Good lessons as we think about the future.

innovating innovation

2008-04-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

One of the best parts of the Second Life experience was its impact on how I think about innovation. From the first conversations with Philip about how to build Linden and our embrace of user-generated content to ESC and Rivers Run Red, innovation has been central to the process. And I do mean innovation – the commercialization of knowledge – not just invention – the creation of knowledge. It’s not enough to come up with interesting new ideas; those ideas need to be taken to a market.

As I zero in on what to do next, innovation is once again a central discussion, so I wanted to write up my thoughts on how I would approach creating an environment to maximize innovation. To maximize the commercialization of knowledge.

(nota bene: “Commercialization”, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean “for profit.” It means that it has been released into a market. Case in point would be a new standard or piece of open source code released for free in order to create later opportunities.)

Innovation is very much a random walk. As much as we want innovation to be like throwing darts at the bull’s-eye, particularly in disruptive innovation it is extremely difficult to recognize a priori that an idea will be good. Moreover, most disruptive innovation emerges at the intersections of (largely) disjoint communities of practice and of different social networks.

These two realities – no certainty of direction and the need for heterogeneity – have implications if you want to maximize innovation. First, it means you want to create situations where you are able to try lots of different ideas. Second, you want as much diversity as possible in how and who tries. Third, it means you want to recycle ideas as the people and expertise around them changes.

Some of these implications are easier to leverage than others. Y Combinator, for example, does a very good job of optimizing for the first one and a reasonable job on the second. By drawing from a large set of submissions and then pushing participants through a short development cycle, Y gets to do a lot of experimenting and draw from a broad set of people. By focusing on such junior, hungry teams, Y creates massive incentives for those teams to bring a project to market in order to get funding or to be acquired.

However, there are tradeoffs. The micro scale of the funding means that participation is biased towards younger, more junior entrepreneurs. The cyclic approach of not being an incubator means that projects are strongly incented to succeed enough to get the next round of funding, rather than having the opportunity to fully explore an idea, decide there are better options and start over. Finally, Y doesn’t directly participate in funding projects at the next level or supporting more expensive experiments, constraining the exploration space.

(None of these are criticisms of Y, by the way. Paul, Trevor, Jessica, and Robert have adopted a specific strategy that is generating lots of interesting ideas, is clearly a blast, and may end up being financially successful.)

It simply may not be an optimal strategy for innovation, so there are a few aspects that I would approach differently.

You need greater diversity of participation, particularly of experience, temperament, and expertise. You want to be able to build teams that can blend years of expertise with youthful fire, impetuousness with wisdom. Filtering participants down to only those who can dispense with income, health insurance, and non-Ramen caloric sources robs you of the ability to leverage this diversity. Instead, I would argue to make them employees, to give them the scaffolding and support -- salaries, health care, vacation -- required to take huge risks, to experiment freely.

(Of course, this adds cost. Worse, it risks creating a comfy environment without innovation, but I think you address that through cultural and other means.)

Innovation needs a high failure rate. Paul et al are justly proud of the incredibly high percentage of Y teams that reach demo day with a product and that later to go on to achieve funding. However, what if the incentives that drive this performance – the Y team picking projects likely to launch in 3 months, teams not having an easy second chance, tight finances – mean that they are also more risk averse than they should be? If you change those incentives and support greater failure, the initial project ideas can explore a far larger set of ideas, resulting in more failures, but also more learning. Philip had a great saying about the benefits of “noble failures” which I think was dead on. You need to celebrate failures, capture the experience of them, and then preserve that information so that a later group can decide to riff of the failure, to build knowledge and try again.

About now, some readers will be commenting that this looks like an incubator and that all incubators are failures. Yes and no.

This does look like an incubator, but an incubator in the Bell Labs, ARPA, PARC, or Stanford grad school sense, not the modern “will trade space for equity.” Existing teams don’t need incubators, so the idea of providing a home to a set of them doesn’t seem like a good one to me. However, incubating ideas – where you bring bright, motivated, diverse, interested people together, give them challenges, and then get out of the way – has a long history of producing world-changing innovation. So, historically incubators weren’t failures, it’s just that we’ve changed what we mean when we talk about them.

The downsides, of course, are cost and comfort. If you have to employ everyone, to give them competitive salaries and benefits, you have a much higher burn rate. Worse, you must ensure that employees take great ideas out of the incubator to go start them. On the comfort side, you need appointments, contracts, or term limits, combined with a culture that your goal is to join startups. You can probably incent this as well – unpaid parts of your contract get transferred to the startup so startups recruit people, greater ownership of startups you helped launch if you also launch one, etc – but transparency and experimentation is needed here.

The cost is still a challenge, especially if you insist – as I think you should – on focusing the value generation on the launched ventures rather than the incubator. The incubator builds knowledge and expertise but should not be trying to IPO itself, since this strongly misaligns incentives with maximizing innovation.

Because of this, an attempt to innovate innovation may require very different – dare I say innovative? – approaches to funding in order to have enough runway to have a chance to succeed. It might be best applied within a larger company rather than as a stand-alone incubator. Consider a large company with a need for disruptive innovation but suffering from the “raising mice in elephant cages” problems common to large corporations. Rotating employees through a Skunk Works – and potentially letting them mix ideas with academics, outside experts, or interns – might form the kind of catalyst needed to break out of the innovator’s dilemma. As employees came and went from other groups and divisions, a Skunk Works would act as an innovation virus, spreading innovation processes and ideas throughout the organization. More importantly, by committing to experimenting with innovation, funders or the supporting corporation can avoid the micromanagement and hyper focus on short-term gains so deadly to innovation.

When we think about markets or technologies that seem moribund and unable to change, disruptive innovation is probably looming. The challenge is how to avoid Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" and drive that innovation rather than letting it happen around you. The answer may be to look backward -- to PARC, to Bell Labs -- in order to reinvent a path forward.

apoc week 13 aka the future of virtual worlds

2008-04-24T07:15:00.001-07:00

This week was the 7th, and final, of my Annenberg faculty lectures. It was by far the most challenging and most fun of the lectures to put together. A look into the future. My guesses as to where this all is going. While I posted some of my early thoughts on Monday, the full talk goes quite a bit further.

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The trends fit together rather nicely, I think, and expose some of the false dichotomies that currently limit our thinking. Rich, always-on, networked, wearable sensors are a natural extension of bluetooth headsets, combined with cracking the mobile display challenge, mean that divisions between "mirror world" and "fantasy world" or "life logging" and "game" crumble. Accurate location and pointing information in a head-mounted display combined with crowd sourcing and filtering makes augmented, blended, and alternate realities basic parts of communication, collaboration, work, and play.

This is going to happen.

It's only a matter of whether Microsoft, Nokia, Google, or some startup is going to demonstrate it first.