apoc week 13 aka the future of virtual worlds

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.

the futures

This week, both in class and in my faculty seminar, I'll be speaking about the future of virtual worlds. It's been a topic on many people's minds of late, including Trevor's great thoughts, Raph's riffs on those, the open source panel at VW08, and Mitch's 3D camera demo. I'm putting my talk together today and will post on it when done.

But in organizing my thoughts, there are a few things I think I think:

• In thinking about virtual worlds -- especially in the R&D and innovation sense -- we need to try to see 5-10 years into the future. Projects seeing 1-3 years into the future are already underway, so if predictions are to have value, we need to take a longer view. We need to think about what happens when Moore give us 8-64X more transistors, so either a similar gain in speed, reduction in cost, reduction in power requirements, or a blend between. 5-10 years means wearable or portable displays of some kind, ubiquitous mobile broadband, ever increasing GPS accuracy, vast sets of local search data, and new generations of mobile input devices.
• As much as I have argued that 3D is a fundamentally different experience than 2D or text -- different, not better -- 3D is not a solution to all problems. It enables different mechanisms for trust building, perception, data organization, etc, but these mechanisms are only useful if they are leveraged as part of larger decisions about what the goals are. Want to sell books in 3D? A 5fps tour of a bookstore that takes an hour to load is a bad use of 3D. Want to enable the power raters on Amazon to give you a personal tour of their favorite books and you have a client that runs on most computers with an easy interface? Maybe that would be a good use of 3d. Want to let people put their data into a 3D memory palace to help them remember and correlate data? Maybe a good use, but text and well indexed search might be better.
• In my opinion, usability is not appearance. Craigslist is not pretty, but it does an excellent job of loading quickly, running on any browser or computer, and letting you find what you want now. Games and MMOs do a much better job than virtual worlds of answering the "what do I do?" and "why am I here?" style of questions. Virtual worlds in the future will need to do make those answers easy to find. "You can make money" or "you can go listen to music with your friends" are compelling answers, but they're hard to discover -- and compounded by hardware requirements -- today.
• Attempts to strongly separate "play" and "work" virtual worlds will stunt the growth of both. Communities that play together work together better. And vice versa. While different applications will need to find proper balance between play and work, being able to do both at a distance is a big part of why virtual worlds are so interesting.
• Future virtual world will obviously play nice with the web, but more than that, they will have to integrate well with browsers. Raph has a post up about 3D and the web, but it's more than 3D. Virtual worlds share a need for features common to many applications that are moving into browsers -- seamless online/offline operation, strong collaboration and sync features, "use anywhere" mindset, painless (or not) installation -- that are at least as important as 3D.

These are just a start. More later today or tomorrow as the presentation comes together.

why i like data

The Easterlin paradox is a bedrock of social science and pop culture. Roughly, it argues that beyond a certain level of wealth, happiness no longer increases because you just end up wanting more stuff. It emerged from research in Japan in the 1970's and it tells a nice story, that we're more attuned to relative wealth and "money doesn't buy happiness." There are a host of reasons to want it to believe.

However, according to a story in the NY Times today, it might not be.

Feel free to read the story, but be sure to check out this graph:

Sure looks like a tiny bit of a trend there.

apoc week 12

Jason Kirk, VP for MySpace TV, was our guest. I had never looked at MySpace TV, but was tickled to discover an extensive Top Gear section. It seems like MySpace has an interesting opportunity to explore how best to blend various media forms with user creation, although the fact that MySpace TV is somewhat separate will make that harder. The quality level of submissions is steadily increasing, and Jason spoke about the importance of better production and editing going forward.

(It seems like a very obvious combination would be for them to acquire one of the many web 2.0 collaborative video editing/sharing products out there...)

Consider the ways you could combine MySpace TV and MySpace Celebrity, for example...

They currently are US dominated, with 73 million unique viewers from the US, but are looking to become more international. Jason was very focused on their position as an internet company, not a media company, which makes it easier for them to remain creator focused. It also work well with his philosophy that he wants MySpace TV to be a storytelling platform, using video as the catalyst.

Another interesting -- and obvious in hindsight -- point was that user-generated video was very character driven, given the need to be relatively short. Recognizable, repeatable characters help build out the brand, relate to niches, and are transportable to other parts of MySpace and the Web.

In class, because we were behind on time, rather than the normal short presentations from the students, we bounced around the room playing "tell me one thing I don't know." I found this to be incredibly interesting and gave a glimpse into how good all these students are going to be after they graduate. They all bring such interesting prior experiences and interests that when they start making assertions combining their domain expertise and course material, those assertions are worth listening to. I look forward to visiting in 6 months to see their final projects.

If you are an Web focused company in LA or San Diego, you should really start reaching out to these students, because you'd be lucky to get them.

apoc week 11 (part 2)

Continuing our string of excellent class visitors, Charlie Nooney, the CEO of MobiTV, spoke to APOC last week. He's relatively new to his position, but had a host of interesting comments about the challenges of bringing broadcast television to mobile devices. Big picture is that while half the world's population now has cell phones, virtually none of them are watching television, but carriers are confident this will change. In the last few handset releases, video has gone from 4fps to 20fps, although these advances have required custom clients for every phone. Quality and reach are now high enough for MobiTV to register significant usage hits when live events are breaking, such as Obama's speech on race.

He also had some interesting comments from his earlier career, in particular putting live video advertising into Wal-Mart. Turns out the shopping in Wal-Mart looks a lot like a scavenger hunt, with customers spending an hour on average in the store trying to figure out what's new, what's on sale, and where those items of interest are. Live updates in the store via video -- or, one presumes, eventually on mobile devices -- ended up being great drivers of business, got people through the store faster with more purchases, and were appreciated by the customers. Yet another example of well targeted advertising being seen as a service rather than an ad.

We've all shuddered when thinking about the GPS-enabled cell phone advertising future -- you're near a Starbucks and you get an SMS with a discount coupon -- but the Wal-Mart example shows people want that when they're shopping, so the challenge for mobile innovators is how to present those options when people want them. Given how much I now use iPhone's Google Maps and how often I'm working from Starbucks, I suspect location-based advertising could be pretty useful to me.

afghan sloths

My roommate and best friend from the Naval Academy is being deployed to Afghanistan. You're probably saying "I didn't realize that the landlocked nation of Afghanistan required a significant Naval presence" but don't worry, the story gets weirder. We'll call my friend Sloth to protect his identity. I realize this doesn't seem very complementary, but as he once pointed out, sloths spend 97% of their lives sleeping, eating, and reproducing, so what's the downside?

More importantly, it closely approximates the life of US Air Force officers, which is important because Sloth did what is known as an inter-service transfer when he graduated from USNA, moving to the Air Force, which made him a pilot and gave him a sequence of expensive machines to drive all over the globe. Years of training and extensive deployments all over the globe has led to this:

An "in lieu of" mission to Afghanistan.

What the hell is "in lieu of mission" you ask?

In lieu of, or ILO, missions are where highly specialized Air Force airmen and officers -- who the Air Force has spent millions of our tax dollars to train as pilots, mechanics, and analysts -- are being sent to Afghanistan and Iraq in lieu of soldiers or marines.

That's right, because the combined might of NATO and the US Military is unable to meet their commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military is pulling Air Force personnel out of their normal tasks and training to do a job they are not properly trained or prepared for -- guarding prisoners, for example. Apparently I'm not the only one who finds this practice ridiculous. Exhibiting a clear, liberal bias, "Air Force Magazine" -- published by the Air Force Association -- just posted an article about it.

Listening to General Petraeus testify, it was clear that the testimony we needed to hear was Secretary of Defense Gates, Army Chief of Staff General Casey, and Secretary Rice. Petraeus is correctly focused on his operational theater while Congress should be focused on the larger picture of how our military and diplomatic power is being deployed -- and the stresses it is under -- around the world. Many false comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq has been made, but one outcome of Vietnam's extended, unpopular, and ineffective application of force was a long period of reduced morale and material readiness of the US military during the 1970's. As we continue into a more complex and uncertain geopolitical future, why aren't our leaders spending more time focused on the big picture of what our military -- and its missions -- will look like during the next decade?

Sloth, of course, is not complaining. He's doing what he has done for nearly 20 years.

He's serving our nation.

I hope the Army does a good job of preparing him and that he comes home safe.

apoc week 11 (interlude for bragging)

I know, I go on and on about how brilliant the APOC class is, but sometimes I just have brag on their behalf.


Nonny de la Peña, one the students, has had a pretty good week.

First, on the day of class, she had a story featured in the New York Times. Her article about noisy fish was one of the most emailed NYT articles of the day, and made the national news.

Second, today, her project in Second Life, Virtual Guantánamo Bay, has an extensive write-up in Vanity Fair!

I'm kind of curious what she has in store for Friday.

apoc week 11 (part 1)

So, to be different, I'm going to post these during the lull between faculty seminar and class. Great fun preparing this one, because I've been doing a lot of thinking about how innovation, education, and entrepreneurship intersect and what interesting projects could be built around that intersection.

But more on that in a later post.

First, the faculty seminar slides:

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apoc week 9 (part 2)

So, this is quite late and unfortunately is missing Dmitri's slides for now. However, for completeness, here are the slides from the March 11th Faculty Seminar.

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If there is one takeaway from this talk it is that we are at the earliest stages of virtual world research. Lots of activity and lots of claims, but not a lot of data yet. Fortunately, that is starting to change.

i really will do a post on the hearings eventually

But, until then, I'll let the Daily Show take care of the commentary for me.

Pity they didn't actually make the dolphin avatar in Second Life. Congratulations to Sue for getting featured in the report.

connections and networking

I was chatting with Pathfinder at the Virtual Worlds Conference 08 in New York and we realized that there were two particularly long chains of personal connections that were relevant to the event and Second Life. The first was the State of Play conference, the second a video I had just been emailed showing Second Life being used for public diplomacy in Doha, Qatar.

The inaugural State of Play conference in November, 2003 was the first inflection point in Second Life's growth. It was where Philip took down the house by announcing, during a shared panel with There.com's Will Harvey, that Second Life residents would retain intellectual property rights to their creations. This announcement, the culmination of months of debate initiated by Larry's comment about ownership (1) and a complete rethinking of our EULA, generated incredible excitement and is a huge part of Second Life being what it is today.

But how did Linden Lab end up at State of Play, a small conference about games, economics, and law, created by Beth Noveck and held at New York Law School?

To answer that, we back up a few months to the first Austin Game Conference. Chris Sherman -- who also created the Virtual World Conference -- had decided the time was right for an MMORPG-focused games conference in Austin. Robin Harper and I attended, largely because we were still unsure of whether Second Life was a game or not. Second Life had around 1000 users, so basically nobody had heard of it or knew who we were. On the second morning, Raph Koster delivered the keynote that later became "A Theory of Fun", which hit many topics related to user-created content and motivations for creation, so I decided to go up and say hello.

I hadn't met Raph yet at this point, but he knew about Second Life because our first community relations employee, Peter Alau (2) knew Raph from Sony and had setup a meeting where Philip and Peter visited SOE and demoed Second Life. Raph recognized the Linden Lab t-shirt I was wearing as I waited after the talk. We started chatting and ended up talking about music, along with an ASCAP lawyer who had some very interesting questions about music in online games.

As we walked across the main hall, Raph mentioned to the lawyer that he was speaking at a law and games conference at New York Law School. He said that Ted Castronova was going to be there, too, and this it would also focus on economics. I thought that it seemed like a good conference for Second Life, but then didn't think much about it until I was sitting at Austin airport with Robin, waiting to fly home. We were discussing the fact that even though AGC was a great conference, Second Life didn't really seem to fit in. I remembered Raph's comment, did a bit of googling -- since I hadn't remembered which New York school --
and showed it to Robin. She thought it looked interesting, especially since we were in the midst of our IP transition, so once back at Linden, she and Catherine Smith reached out to NYLS and Beth.

And to think that Robin and I considered skipping the keynote!

This will seem like a left-turn at Albuquerque, but it isn't. I just received a pointer to this video:

This video is thrilling to see, because it raises some of the ideas possible when virtual worlds are applied to public diplomacy. It also demonstrates how far networks can extend.

After State of Play, Beth gave a talk at Harvard on virtual worlds, law, IP, and economics. This talk generated a lot of excitement at Harvard and led to me being invited to speak at the Berkman Center, where I met John Clippinger, a Berkman Fellow. John was working on the user-centric identity project Higgins (3) which seemed very applicable to Second Life, so he invited me to a later Berkman conference. At that conference, John, BCG's Philip Evans, and I ended up kicking around the idea that the massive entrepreneurial activity within Second Life could be a model and tool for real-world collaboration and market activity, and that Dubai might be the perfect test case.

John thought he knew the perfect person to ask about it, so a few weeks later we met Della van Heyst in Palo Alto. Della deserves a blog post -- hell, an entire blog -- all to herself, but for this story it is enough to say that she didn't think Dubai was the right place to start but that she was organizing AMD's Global Vision conference and would I like to speak at it, since Second Life was running on a huge grid of AMD-powered computers? That seemed like a great opportunity for us, so I accepted.

Ironically, by the time of the conference, Intel has reclaimed their lead in the MIPS/watt game and Linden had switched back to Intel CPUs, making for a somewhat awkward talk. The evening before my talk, Della hosted a speaker's dinner where I met Juan Enriquez and talked his ear off about virtual worlds and their uses. Juan subsequently introduced me to Cynthia Schneider, the former US Ambassador to Holland and one of the organizers of the US Islamic Forum in Doha (along with Peter Singer at the Brookings Institution.) Thanks to Cynthia, I attended the conference, spoke at Brookings (4) and re-introduced Cynthia to Josh Fouts at the Center for Public Diplomacy (5).

Which led to the panel and video at this year's Doha conference.

Pathfinder had seen the video -- and has met most of the connections in this story -- but as we laid them all out, we were amazed by how infectious the promise of virtual worlds are. It was against the backdrop of that conversation that I found the sudden smallness of virtual worlds disappointing.

Notes, because there are even more connections...

(1) I've written about the impact of Larry's comment in "Collapsing Geography".
(2) Peter, worked at Linden because his then-girlfriend/now-wife and my wife had met at a mutual friend's wedding.
(3) Higgins also has historical links to Andrew Donoho's Papillon project, which arose in part due to State of Play and a tech talk I gave to IBM Austin's Advanced Technology Group.
(4) Which led to the hiring Sue Singer, who Congressman Markey specifically thanked at the hearings last week!
(5) How I met Josh and Doug, and ended up teaching at Annenberg, is in a previous post.

this cracked me up

My dad clipped this Dilbert for me and it generated a spit take. And, before nosy readers ask in the comments, I've never hit Philip.

the best pizza you won't ever find (but should)

I was in Brooklyn today visiting the Wello folks when lunchtime rolled around. Someone suggested hitting a new pizza joint they hadn't tried yet, Roberta's. As you can see, no expense was spared on the facade and entry:

However, appearances can be deceiving.

The worst pizza in New York is better than the best pizza anywhere else, so I'm not the best judge, but wow was their pizza good. Cooked in a wood-fired oven imported from Italy, the pizza's range from deliciously traditional margherita to a pile of whimsically named originals. My favorite was "The Goblin," a pizza topped with olive oil, garlic, jalapeños, and ricotta. As the New York Times noted, the "Guanciale and Egg" is amazing -- and would be a killer breakfast :-)! Great ingredients, beautifully prepared. And easy to get to off the L.

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It was so good we ate ourselves silly. Do yourself a favor and find your way out to Roberta's, you won't be disappointed.

it's a small world after all

I'm having fun spending a couple of days immersed in the metaverse at the Virtual Worlds conference in New York City. I was out in New York for consulting and the company asked me to attend, so suddenly I'm back where everyone knows my name.

Actually, I know about 1/3 of the people here, the same residents, entrepreneurs, and businesses that have been at the bleeding edge of virtual worlds for the last 2 or 3 years. The other 2/3 are new, which is good to see. With over 1200 attendees there is a fair amount of buzz.

Linden and IBM had a pretty exciting announcement about a new, enterprise solution with a portion of Second Life running on machines owned by IBM. This is a great step and one certain to generate additional corporate interest.

However, what really struck me walking around the show was how constrained the virtual world dream has become. There are a bunch of projects that look like less populated and less functional versions of Second Life, usually with some marketing material promising a "safer" or more "corporate" environment. A few other companies are promising rapid and cheap creation of advertising worlds, leveraging outsourced production.

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet? Isn't this the same week that we saw Congressional testimony on virtual worlds, on their potential impact on education, community, business, and communication? Technology is just enabling us to take incredibly bold steps, to connect people in entirely new ways. From 3D camera technology to spatialized voice to novel interfaces to mobile to augmented reality, we should be ready to embark on the next exponential curve, building on everything learned from Second Life over the last 8 years.

The future is not a phalanx of walled garden, advertainment worlds constrained by short-term thinking.

I know Linden is going to continue to be bold. I am shocked that none of the competition is.

good luck, douglas!

Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until yesterday, is heading to EMI. Douglas and I shared a stage in Singapore about a year ago -- you can watch the video here -- and after realizing we were neighbors, stayed in touch. We each tried to recruit the other -- ironic, given the events that followed -- and ended up as friends. Douglas is one the sharpest people I know, so I'm sure whatever he does at EMI will be exciting to watch.

He is not one to simply rearrange deck chairs.

Congratulations on the new role, Douglas, and good luck.

one down, who knows how many to go

Went through my first real CEO interview yesterday. While a few very early stage companies have approached me, this was my first full, meet-the-board CEO interview of an accomplished, 100+ person company. Very interesting day, since I can't imagine a harder challenge than trying to pick the right outsider to come in and lead an experienced, successful group to the next level. I'm sure there is a "101 Questions to Ask a Potential CEO" instruction manual somewhere, but I haven't seen it. In my opinion, it comes down to connecting with the current executive team, founders, and board of directors. Do you inspire trust and confidence in your ability to raise the performance of those around you, to face difficult challenges, and to add an effective voice to the decision making process.

The company I visited yesterday had , I thought, some particularly good questions around conflict resolution, style, and vision that were fun to answer and generated more questions on both sides. Like most high-performance technology companies, they were a little less organized than they wanted to be, but the result -- a rotating subset of the interview team -- seemed pretty effective and kept me on my toes. I may incorporate that as a strategy in the future when I'm back on the interviewer side of things!

And, no, I don't know whether it will go forward. I think I did a good job presenting an accurate picture of who I am, what my strengths and weaknesses are, where my passion and experience aligns with their needs, and where we aren't a good fit. Even if they feel I'm who they want, there is no guarantee I would take the job. But I am still interested and spending the day being tested by a really smart group was a blast.

Of course, I feel like I should take this opportunity to talk about Paul Graham's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" post that has been generating a fair amount of blogging noise, both pro and con. I thought his post was particularly apropos, since I'm currently in the process of talking to large technology companies (>10,000 employees), medium companies (>100), small companies (>5), and startups (<5). They all have positives and minuses, although my biases are pretty clear since my last three jobs were at early stage startups. In fact, my last time working for a large company was Lockheed in 1994.

But that doesn't mean I think working for a large or medium company would be foolish. Larger companies have expertise in many areas -- people management, for example -- and resources rarely available to startups. With a young daughter, I might decide to trade off for a different risk-reward profile than I have in the past. I might view it as an opportunity to learn by working in a different environment.

However, no matter the scale of the organization, the key question is how hierarchy is used (or not used.) Hierarchy is often spoken of as a singular structure -- usually the org chart -- but is actually made up of at least two independent components: control and communication.

• Control: Who can tell you what to do
• Communication: How information flows between people in the organization

Now, when we think of traditional hierarchical organizations, these two functions are superimposed. You have a boss. He tells you what to do, gives you salary reviews, and fires you. Sometimes, as in matrix management structures, there are multiple hierarchies, so that the person who tells you what to do may be different from the person who reviews your performance.

But, these are not the only choices. Think about control for a moment. Forms of government are a reasonable approximation of management structures:

• Monarchy: typical management hierarchy, with decider at the top
• Anarchy: either nobody tells anyone what to do or everyone can tell anyone what to do
• Republic: everyone selects a group to tell them what to do
• Direct Democracy: everyone participates in every decision

Or, consider communication parallels:

• Broadcast: one to many
• Telephone: one to one, sometimes few to few
• Blogging: many (well at least a few) to many

Organizations have the freedom to choose whichever structures make the most sense based on their size and requirements. More importantly, different groups and levels within an organization can choose different combinations. When many-to-many communication is failing because of team size -- how many emails can you process a day? -- either adopt a different communication strategy or create interfaces between teams. When you need all hands on deck to fight a fire, democracy might not be your best option, but once the fire is out and you need to innovate, bring on the anarchy!

Which brings us back to organizational size. Clearly, strategies that work for 3 or 5 -- direct democracy, many-to-many communication -- won't work for a company of 10,000. Many-to-many communication scales as O(n^2), so if everyone is trying to engage with everyone else they are going to spend all their time just reading email. Worse, if all 10,000 have to vote on every decision, the stress of knowing everything so that you could alway vote wisely would be crushing.

One response to this is a traditional hierarchy. However, it this hierarchy need not be fractal. If you have teams of 5 or 20 or 50 that operate smoothly with different structures than the company as a whole, that is fine. In fact, it's better than fine -- it's almost certainly what you want! A good example of this were how game teams were run at PCP&L. The team helped build the design, schedule, and budget and then was generally cut lose to exist as an insulated pocket within the company. For all intents and purposes, the game team was a little, entrepreneurial startup, except that you had the surrounding company for health care, payroll, etc. Wholly owned subsidiaries can operate the same way, with the employees within the sub virtually unaware of the structure and requirements of the parent company.

The question comes down to how flexible will the group I work with be allowed to be, because all projects have changing requirements throughout their life cycle. A small company or startup means flexibility is limited by funding and resources. In a large company, that flexibility is more limited by culture and habit. Some people might argue that a small company's limitations are better because "you control them", that it is better to be denied flexibility because you ran out of money rather than some pointy-haired boss' random decision. Maybe, but in my experience, not being able to execute due to a limitation sucks either way.

So, for me, choosing based on company size is the wrong metric. Instead, the question should be about how open your design space is, what opportunities you need, what impact you hope to have, and which constraints most impact these vision and goals. For some, that will mean a startup, for others a big company.

And that will be OK.

no april fools on the hill

Tomorrow, Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale, along with New Media Consortium's Larry Johnson and IBM's Colin Paris, will be testifying before the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee, chaired by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA). Both James Au and Adam Reuters have coverage and additional details.

It's exciting to see these hearings finally happening after spending a week in DC last fall laying the groundwork. That trip including an extensive visit with Representative Markey and his staff, plus a separate two hour briefing I gave to multiple House and Senate staffers. Apparently nobody could remember so many staffers sitting in one place for that long, so the interest in virtual worlds was clearly there.

Like my previous trips to the Hill, it was an interesting week of wearing a tie, hurrying up and waiting, and answering a staggeringly wide range of questions. I came away impressed by how intelligent and prepared both Representative Markey and his staffers were. I expect Philip, Larry, and Colin will face challenging and important questions relevant to all of us thinking and working in this space.

On a "the world is a terrifyingly small place"-tangent, my coteacher at APOC, Karen North, used to work in Representative Markey's office and has an endless set of stories backing my impression that he and his team are among the most inquisitive and thoughtful on the Hill. Virtual worlds are fortunate to have their first major Congressional discussion with his committee.

whirled open beta

Whirled, Three Ring's latest project, is now in open beta! Whirled is a mix of flash games, flash 2.5D virtual worlds, user generated content, social networking, social media, and a marketplace. Although my poor Macbook Air can't play all the games, the less CPU-traumatizing were fun. Whirled integrates well with the web, although sometimes you wish you had more screen realestate.

Definitely go check it out!

Congratulations to Daniel and the rest of the Whirled team. I think this is a great example of where you can go if you bet on the Web as the platform. It will also be loads of fun to watch how the experience of Whirled shapes Raph's Metaplace. Both Raph and Daniel would likely be quick to point out that Metaplace and Whirled are different, which they are, but they do rhyme. They will also share both audience and creators, so we'll get to watch how great ideas are expressed on both platforms.

hot (macbook) air

So, after a month of MBA bliss, found a problem. Despite the early adventures I wrote about, various OS X updates have eliminated the click wonkiness, making me very happy with the Air. It is easy to travel with, its battery life has been more than sufficient, and I've been able to run everything I wanted on it.

Until last night.

I was testing a friend's Flash-based game project and discovered that Flash pushes the MBA's CPU enough to trigger self-protection, turning on the fan and limiting performance. Other people have written about the MBA's aggressive thermal settings, so it isn't clear if the Flash performance problems are because the CPU isn't up to it or if its performance is being clamped.

Either way, it means the MBA may end up not being my only computer.

moore and complexity

Sometimes the impact of Moore's Law can surprise you, even if you work on cutting edge technology and should know better. Take the Rubik's Cube.
First, a confession. I bought the book in order to solve the Rubik's Cube. I had several friends who solved it without the book, including one artist who solved it the first time she picked it up -- bloody savants -- but I bought the book. Fine, sue me. Anyway, for many in my generation, the Rubik's Cube will forever be imprinted as an incredibly complex artifact.

But now Moore has caught up. First, mathematicians at Northeastern used 7 terrabytes of storage to prove it could always be solved in less than 26 or fewer moves. Next, a Stanford mathematician has knocked it down to 25 with only 1500 hours of CPU time.

And these kind of attacks are nothing compared to what Distributed.net has accomplished.

But what I found useful about the Rubik's Cube is that it helps demolish some incorrect assumptions about scale and complexity. As inexorable, exponential progress moves more computing and connectivity into everything around us, the set of what is "solvable" is going to expand with it.

And expand in ways that we often won't think to look.

apoc week 10 (part 1)

So, Apoc Week 9 (part 2) is still waiting on some slide issues, so time to skip ahead to week 10. This week focused on regulatory issues around virtual worlds:

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We also had Todd Rosenberg from Userplane give a talk on user acquisition and retention. Userplane provides flash chat and video to community sites and currently is used in over 200,000. His talk very much reinforced topics we've been hitting all year:

• start with niche communities
• usability trumps everything else
• make barriers to entry low

Time to run for my plane home!

two travel notes, one good, one not

Oakland Airport was a zoo this morning as people returned home after the holiday weekend. Despite a spectacularly long security line, the ID checker from TSA took my ticket and driver's license and almost immediately asked:

So what are you doing for your birthday?

My birthday isn't for a few days, but having a TSA screener demonstrate that he was actually reading the documents in front of him was a pleasant surprise. It might be an interesting experiment to give screeners a requirement to ask one question based on the IDs they examine -- "What day is your birthday?", "Do you prefer James or Jim?", "Have you lived in Oakland long?", etc -- both to signal to passengers that they really are comparing the documents rather than holding them for 20 seconds and handing them back, and to make it easy to spot when screeners are getting tired or distracted. Not to mention that having to verbally engage with the screener gives security another set of signals -- a technique used extensively at European airports despite the language challenges this presents.

On the not-so-good side, this was the fourth arrival where getting the jetway lined up with the plane took more than 5 minutes. The OAK<->LAX United flight is on one of the itsy bitsy Canadair Regional Jets, so the jetway needs to come extra close and be lowered before the little walkway is inserted. Finding the right spot is often challenging. However, given that the geometry of this is fixed -- the aircraft is parked at the same spot, it's hatch always at the same height -- why not provide some cuing for the jetway operator? They'd be able to pick back up an average of 2 or more minutes per aircraft arrival, which would add up quickly. More broadly, going back to yesterday's post on mental models, how much ill will do you generate among passengers and employees by constantly having this problem?

models

On Friday I spent the day at a workshop sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation surfacing ideas on how to raise public consciousness around the United States’ financial future. With 10,000 baby boomers a day about to become eligible for Social Security, it is easy to understand the urgency policy experts feel around the issue. MacArthur brought together an amazing and eclectic group, even prying Ze loose from Color War, and generated a lively discussion around our perception of government, changing mental models, and what has been done so far.

Patrick Bresette, from the Demos Center for the Public Sector, reported finding from their 18-month study on how people talk about government. Their videos were striking – if you ask people “What do you think about government?” nearly everyone responded in the same way: cynical laughter followed by comments indicating lack of trust. Further interviews demonstrated that opinions about government are overwhelmingly driven by two factors. First, recent news dominates perception, so whatever politician did this week tends to be interpreted as what government is. Second, most people look at government from a “consumer stance” focusing on what “I want” and on government as “them”, a bureaucratic blob of exaggerated waste and bloat.

Researches surmised that reframing the discussion from a “citizen stance”, where government is a tool of the electorate -- government is “us” -- should enable a more productive discussion. They primed later surveys and focus groups with a brief paragraph that described the idea and benefits of common goods. They gave concrete examples of enduring systems and structures that help and protect people, although they didn’t actually mention government. The result was a dramatic change in discourse, where participants would bring up government and regulation in positive ways, reinforcing beneficial impacts in discussions with each other. When researchers tested how durable these new mental models were – through the social science equivalent of an extended game of telephone – the new, positive framing would survive through 7 or 8 generations.

This is, of course, a result you would expect from Communication 101. Moreover, this need to change mental models shows up repeatedly when attempting to address science education, where misapplied models end up reinforcing mistaken beliefs. It is important to investigate where mental models are dysfunctional, demonstrate their failure, cause people to practice with working models, and then to drive discussion that integrate these new, functioning models. In the case of how American’s think about our government, the Demos work suggests our tendency towards incorrect models hurt our ability to effectively think about problems, talk about government, and maintain an effective civil society.

I bring all this up not just because those findings are interesting, but because the lessons learned around interactions between governments and the electorate seem to apply quite well around two topics of great interest to me: building online communities and building companies.

Note that I’m not just talking about misapplying models to communities and organizations. Misapplications like using Dunbar’s research into primate social structure to determine organizational size or thinking about the corporations operating online communities as governments are interesting and likely deserve a separate post, but what about the consumer and citizen stances. How do they apply to communities and organizations? At their core, the consumer stance is about “me” and the citizen stance is about “us”, so consider how being stuck in a consumer stance can be damaging.

For a company, employees in a consumer stance are likely to respond to the question “how’s management doing?” with the government survey reaction of cynical laughter and lack of trust. Do I have to ask how most virtual world residents talk about the companies that run them?

In both cases, power disparities make finding workable models challenging, but the opportunity is there. Employees want to work for companies they are shaping. Community members want to improve their community. As executives, as community managers, it is critical to remember the need to provide constituents with working models to maximize effective communication and to work tirelessly to detect when we misapply our own models.

rockets are cool

Do you read Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website? You should. He recently linked to this movie from Universe Today. It's amazing, especially a view at about 2:30 from one of the separated SRBs. I challenge anyone to watch this and to then complain that science is boring.

cooking development

I've already posted that Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" has lessons for community and project development. Apparently, I'm not the only one to realize that it has lessons beyond cooking. Matt and David over on the 37 Signals blog both point out that Gordon's common lessons for restaurants of "local foods, cooked simply and well" support 37 Signal's software development philosophy/methodology of simple, small, and fast.

"dictated a letter"?

There was a story on NPR this morning where Norman Gant, the executive director the Ob/Gyn certifying board, noted that he had "dictated a letter."

Dictated?

I know that living and working in Bay Area/Silicon Valley means that my world is a technology infused bubble, but dictating?

to quote jon stewart

At 11:00 on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race, as though they were adults - Jon Stewart

This was an amazing speech.

spore bumper sticker

Saw a "Spore 09 2008" bumper sticker driving home. Guess that means the release date is now solid. Here's hoping the Mac release comes at the same time!

y? y not!

Attended Y Combinator's demo day yesterday. It was a hoot, tons of bright, energetic kids doing their first real pitches to a pretty supportive crowd. I had to leave before the end, so I only got to see some of the pitches and missed some I wanted to see. A few broad trends:

• Do anything to capture usage data. Several different groups were using different hooks to get you to install tool bars, applications, or use bookmarklets to better track web browsing. As next generations search heats up, building large corpora of browsing, buying, and social habits will become increasingly regular parts of business plans. Alas, not one of the projects I saw made privacy a serious part of the pitch, which will lead to the kind of problems Ed Felten has been writing about.
• An unfortunate meme is propagating that "productivity" can be determined by looking at how many hours you spend using various applications. This is bunk on so many levels. Certainly, a 10 hour-a-day habit of browsing ferretbondage.com is unlikely to make you a workplace star, claiming that we know it won't is foolish. Richard Feynman worked on problems that stumped him at strip clubs. 8 hours of email use in one day could either result in zero productivity (you were coordinating timing with the Emperors Club), massive global increases in productivity (you are program managing three critical, distributed projects), or anything in between. Now, much like counting calories, getting more information is good, but perpetuating silly ideas -- and worse, trying to monetize those ideas by selling it to managers to "monitor" their teams -- is a very pointy haired choice.
• Many of the Y Combinator companies look more like features than companies, but I'm OK with this for a couple of reasons. First, I'd take a good collection of features looking for business and product people to partner with over the reverse any day. Second, if you look at Y as a talent scout, it suddenly seems incredibly valuable. These teams proved they could execute on good ideas under pressure, which is incredibly valuable, especially when combined with the networks they're getting exposed to. Not sure what this does to Y's business model if a high percentage of teams get scarfed into other companies, but as someone hiring in the Bay Area, I love the fact that these teams are moving out here.
• Although it had nothing to do with demo day, I had a chance to talk to Trevor Blackwell and see what Anybots is up to. Very exciting stuff! The science fiction convergence of augmented reality, telepresence, and virtual worlds is not as far away as you think.
  

So, on to the projects (in the order they presented):

• Omnisio. I am torn. Omnisio is almost exactly a small side project I was spinning up my flash knowledge to write for fun. Video markup, sharing, and annotation done right. Cool features like being able to sync a powerpoint presentation to the video, tag sections of video, share video with social comments, and compilation clips. All of this adds searchable data to videos, which is interested. Not a business yet, but a great collection of features. I love this idea and think we'll see more uses they haven't thought of.
• AddHer. Hot or Not with automatic link exchange and easy publishing to social networking sites. This is all about trying to drive more profile traffic and time will tell how valuable that will be. Good statistics interface, although user experience -- even in the demo -- was rough and had many extra clicks.
• Snaptalent. Google meets Monster. A targeted ad network for job postings, using all kinds of neat tricks to achieve better targeting -- "Oh, you're coming from Google's IP range? Want to work at Facebook?" -- and a better user experience. Ads expand -- go DOM manipulation -- into a picture and movie covered page that allows a candidate to submit a resume, visit your site, or just learn more. All three options are instrumented, so tons of user data is generated and collected. Easy tools for building the ad, too. Snaptalent has the distinction of being the first Y company to be profitable before demo day!
• Rescuetime. First of two "productivity == more time focused on visual studio" plays. Nice UI, cool graphs, and if lots of people use it I suspect they'll generate very valuable collections of user data, but marketing this is managers bugs me. I love the idea of bringing social networking news feeds to team collaboration, but showing programmers that they are below average for the week in terms of time spend with an editor open is not going to make your team more productive. First off, half your team will be below average for hours. Second, measuring time typing is like judging code by the number of lines produced. Third, I already talked about the dangers of too long a work week, so positively reinforcing what is already a destructive trend is a mistake.
• MightyQuiz. Just go click on it. Come back in a few hours. User-generated trivia game with very nice social networking tools for tuning questions, easy question generation, easy syndication, and done by Harvard classmates of the Windward Mark team I acquired when at Linden. Cool folks who presented lots of compelling user data. 94% of people hitting the site answer at least one question, average is 19 and 8 minutes per day. Tons of metadata being generated.

• TipJoy. I've already written about them, but TipJoy seems to have improved quite a bit in the last few months. I love their argument -- that micropayment attempts in the past failed by focusing on the payment part -- although if they get traction fraud may destroy some of their secondary positives (such as the Digg-like ranking on the home page). Good points about usability -- PayPal takes 8 steps, Amazon 7, to pay someone. 200,000 impressions per day at this point. Not at all sure there is a business here, but their usability lessons are worth remembering.
• Mixwit. Slide plus iTunes. Collect online resources of photos, music, and movies and build widgets to share those collections on social networking sites. Widgets for programmableweb.com. Very early, but the widget they did for a mix tape looks very polished. 47% of people who start a mix tape publish it.
• Wundrbar. ZOMG, it's a COMMAND LINE for the Intraweb! Yeah, you think I'm joking. It's a command line. The URI to list commands is "http://wundrbar.com/command/ls" Command. Line. Google could add these features in, oh, about 8 seconds. Now, to be fair, it's an interesting use of javascript and one that could probably be taken further, plus the referral business could be decent if they get a lot of use. But it's still a command line. I'm waiting for the GUI interface to create text for wundrbar. Then we'll have Windows for the Intraweb!
• 8aweek. Another "if we just know where you surf you'll be more productive" product. I know, I shouldn't be harshing. A bunch of very heavy handed tools -- like "no, you can't go back to Digg, biatch! (click here to be lame and go anyway)" Polished, earnest presentation. If they collect data, the search implications will be very interesting, but again no mention of privacy issues. Plus, they generate great web analytics, which will also be valuable.

So, an interesting collection of bright people generating cool ideas and features. I don't know if Y is the right way to convert that energy into companies, products, and profits, but I'm glad they're doing it.

starbucks dangers

I'm at my Menlo Park office -- the Sandhill Road Starbucks -- working before a few VC meetings and then popping over to Y Combinator's demo day. This Starbucks makes a particularly good dopio espresso, so it's been a happy morning. It almost wasn't, however.

My laptop was sitting on a low table next to my chair while I finished Bill Buford's excellent book, Heat and made some phone calls. I had just gotten on the phone when a rather elderly gentleman tottered my way with a very full cup of coffee, a muffin, an unlit cigar in his mouth, before dropping heavily into a chair and setting his coffee down right next to my closed laptop, despite their being room on the table to keep some liquid-MacBook distance.

I knew what was going to happen next. I reached over and picked up my laptop, moving it back onto my lap. I had just finished when my new neighbor dropped his nearly whole muffin straight down into his cup of coffee, creating a spectacular coffee eruption that covered the table in coffee, drenched the space my laptop had occupied, and narrowly missed drenching my legs.

That would have made for a sucktastic day of meetings.

red light! green light! red light!

One aspect of my post-Linden career that is obvious but I hadn't fully grokked (note: how cool is it that Blogger's spell checker recognizes "grokked"?) is how often everything changes and how unexpected events shape my days and thoughts. I get off the phone and think I'm flying somewhere to do a week of work, then the next day get a call asking to put it off for a month. I take a meeting at Starbucks because someone kept pestering me only to discover a project that would be a blast to work on. I answer an unknown number on my cell phone and it's a recruiter with an intriguing CEO position. I'm walking to get water from the fridge at Catamount and Jed pulls me into a meeting that blows my mind.

And that's just the last week.

I do pretty well with multitasking, chaos, and lack of structure, but the mental shifts are striking. Part of why I only pick projects and companies that excite me is that I think about what I'm working on all the time. As anyone who met me knows, there wasn't much time over the last 7 years when I wasn't thinking about, talking about, or working on Second Life. It was -- and continues to be -- a project and company I love, so of course it always gets cycles.

Thus, it's a new skill for me to get spun up about something only to then put it on hold. Obviously, when working a normal, full-time job you do this all the time, but generally within the context of an overall context or direction. The new skill is also perform a context shift on the context itself.

I suspect this will make me a more effective multitasker in the future, but today it is still very much a learning experience.

entrepreneurs and bloggers

There has been a recent spate of posts about startups, hiring, spending, and how you must -- or shouldn’t ever -- hire workaholics. Comment sections have been ablaze and everybody has an opinion. There is a great deal of certainty, although many opinions seem to be extrapolated from a sample size of 1 (and we all know how many lines can be drawn through a single point.)

Much of the advice is of the “buy low, sell hi”-variety. Obvious, known, and tautological:

• “Startups must hire the right people.”
• “Working with more interesting people is more interesting than just working.”

History is replete with examples of startups that were formed by whacky creative types, by armies following specific procedures, brilliant kids riffing off great ideas, mad geniuses, and everything in between. There are, in face, enough different and mutually contradictory ways of succeeding that selection bias allows one to defend almost any approach. Nearly every argument in all the blog posts can be supported or negated by examples.

Even though I’m a little late to the discussion, I do have some thoughts on this topic.

Rule #0: Have a Vision Driving Both Product and Company

Know what you are trying to do and why it's worth doing. Make sure the user experience flows from this vision. Duh.

But, remember Conway's Law.

Your organization's structure and culture will be reflected in your products. More than that, how your company operates will shape the possibility space for products you can create, will determine what you can create. So it is critical that Conway be extended. Vision must drive organizational structures capable of realizing the vision.

Rule #1: Don't Be Dogmatic

You won't always be right. Shocking, I know. So, be ready to change. Particularly when you deal with scaling -- whether in company size, code size, product complexity, number of customers, etc -- you need to assume you're wrong about something. After all, very few systems are scale free.

This rule may be the easiest to say but the hardest to follow. It is an example where how your startup is organized, how you work and collaborate, will define what you are capable of.

Rule #2: Tired (and Stressed) Employees Are Stupid Employees

The various posters spent a ton of time arguing back and forth on workaholics while ignoring a great deal of research and evidence that long work hours hurt productivity and efficiency. Studies going back to Henry Ford’s production lines demonstrate again and again that excessive hours reduce productivity and increase turnover. Since nobody was arguing that lowering productivity would contribute to success, how can anyone argue in favor of extended sleep deprivation?

Worse, for programming – especially in the knuckle dragging languages that I’ve spent my life using – the most subtle and difficult bugs to track down are usually memory related. Fatigue mirrors the impact of alcohol consumption and reduces peoples’ ability to assess their own competence. So, tired programmers are like having drunk, overconfident programmers. How much time do you lose to the memory leaks they introduce?

That’s before the costs related to increased turnover.

Now, there are qualifiers. There are lots of times when an all-nighter – whether alone or with the whole gang – can be a productive, bonding, or necessary event. A few weeks of intense effort or a weekend may be what gets you over the hump, but months or years of a culture that demands 60, 70, or 80-hour work weeks will destroy your productivity.

And cause other problems - just ask EA.

Rule #3: Know How to Do Math

This applies to a lot of areas.

Consider financing. At every startup I’ve been involved with, salaries have been the primary cost driver. Burdened programmer salaries in the Bay Area can easily hit $150,000 per year, so almost any discretionary spending will be less than 5% of the salary cost. Sure, it is possible to buy hand-stitched, gold plated toilet tissue and to burn $20 bills in a woodstove to heat your office, but my experience is that you really have to work to waste enough money to notice, especially if spending is transparent so everyone knows about your payments to Emperors Club VIP. The risk of an early employee abusing the company Visa card is way less than the lost time to someone not being able to buy something they really need when they need it.

Worse, refusing to buy a second monitor, laptop, extra computer, comfortable chair, free soda, beef jerky, or whatever it is that is keeping your key employees happy can easily reduce their efficiency by more than 5%. So be smart and do the math.

Again there are caveats. If you are scraping to get a better demo before a funding round, in a dry spell, or whatever, then change the rules. Just be honest about what’s going on.

Math also helps refute correlation-causation errors, which can be incredibly useful when trying to balance vision and change. Demand data and then analyze it honestly.

Rule #4: Have Fun

You’re going to spend a ton of time and energy on your startup, no matter how carefully you plan your time, how much jerky you buy, and how carefully you plan. So make sure the time in the office is fun for you, your coworkers, and your employees. Every company – everyone – is going to define fun differently, but figure out what it is for your vision and culture, then work to hold on to it. If growth means that the old definition no longer applies, spend the cycles to find a new one.

If you find yourself not wanting to come into work on Monday, you aren’t having fun. Figure out the problem and fix it.

But, remember that nothing is more fun than succeeding, so make sure your definition starts there.

apoc week 9 (part 1)

This week was my fourth faculty seminar. Dmitri Williams tag teamed with me and I'll get the slides up with commentary early next week.

Class was exceptionally interesting this week because Janice Rohn of Yellowpages.com was our guest speaker. Now, I have to be honest. I had never been to Yellowpages.com and approached the class with a pretty negative opinion of the Yellow Pages because I haven't used one in a decade yet they keep tossing these huge, useless books on my front door.

Janice changed my opinion. Completely.

Janice is a usability expert who has worked at Stanford, Apple, Sun, World Savings Bank, and Yellowpages.com. She has a spectacularly clear view of the process of usability and ability to convey its importance. She is also a great spokesman for Yellowpages.com. Did you know they were the number one local search site and are owned by AT&T? Me neither. Their site has a very polished iPhone interface that works very well. Who knew?

More generally, she spent about 90 minutes laying out her approach to usability design and answering questions. I can't hope to do it justice -- try to hear her give it sometime -- but among the many interesting points:

• User experience, like all interesting fields, traces its methodological roots back to IBM and Xerox. It has only become a basic part of most businesses since the Web emerged.
• User experience is a mix of the usefulness, learnability, memorability, and efficiency of the activities a user takes part in, all trumped by the satisfaction they feel upon completing a task. For example, the satisfaction at the end of a search task is more important than the time it takes to find information. (I find that balance of particular interest in regards to Second Life)
• She recommended Danny Meyer's "Setting the Table" as a great discussion of user experience. Interesting that I'm not the only one using restaurants as an example.
• In the balance between product presentation and structure, user are more aware of the presentation, but in the long run usability is actually driven by the structure. Again, very salient to virtual world discussions.
• Companies never publish their data, but user experience has the highest impact on retention, sales, and support costs of any product factor.
• In product development, lack of user involvement is the number one driver of missed deadlines and canceled projects. What does this say about game development, generally viewed as the latest and riskiest software projects?
• During user testing, it is critical to remember that people think in terms of solutions, but you are trying to tease out requirements instead.
• For every 100 people who have a bad user experience, 50 will tell 8 to 16 others. Bad experiences are incredibly viral!
• When trying to assess user experience on small projects, decide on target market -- so niche is easier! -- and create user profiles. Find out what is important to those profiles, understand their top requirements and stick to them. Don't try to solve everything! Use your competition to held define the profiles and understand what makes your project unique.

So, lots of good bits of information. Thank you, Janice!

The rest of class was taken up by presentations on our second module, which included viral marketing, legal issues, and investing which I will get to in my next post.

the heroic choice

A couple days ago on NPR, Daniel Shore made the comment:

The democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity

I'm starting to wonder if it is the democratic party or Hillary Clinton this best applies to.

Senator Clinton is an intelligent and capable person with an enviable lifetime of accomplishments, but what exactly is she hoping to gain by staying in the race? If we assume she is staying in the race for the best of reasons -- that she honestly believes she is the right person to lead the United States out of the quagmire President Bush has created -- it still requires her to have some hope of being elected President.

Is that at all likely at this point?

Mainstream reporting aside, Barack Obama continues to extend his delegate lead. Even in his supposedly disastrous week, he still ended up winning Texas and only lost 4 delegates, which he more than made up yesterday. While neither candidate is likely to reach the Democratic National Convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination, Obama is certain to have a lead.

So, Clinton’s only chance to be the nominee is to wage a scorched earth campaign to minimize Obama’s lead and cut enough back room deals to get the super delegates to defy the electorate and go her way. To do this she would have to use her considerable resources to convince the super delegates that Obama would lose to McCain by assaulting his experience, his leadership, and his readiness to be President.

But if this works, the results would be destroy to her chances in the general election. First, it would have alienated the broad base of Democratic support that Obama has generated. Even though he would support Clinton, is it so hard to imagine the traditionally disenfranchised, non-voting groups he mobilized returning to form and not turning out? Moreover, how many of us would choose not to support someone who spent every last penny destroying a candidate we feel is one of us?

As Bush-Gore-Nader proved in 2000, people are quite capable of cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Second, the angle Clinton has chosen to attack Obama – experience – is one where she looks pathetic compared to McCain. If Washington knowledge, foreign policy expertise, and military experience are the determining factors, McCain trounces Clinton. Her anti-Obama playbook becomes McCain’s anti-Clinton playbook.

Unfortunately, what is even more likely is that Obama will be the nominee despite everything Clinton does, but that he will face a far more difficult race against McCain because Clinton will have handed McCain attack add after attack add, Obama will have to continue to campaign against Clinton rather than McCain, voters will have been alienated by a bitter primary, and McCain will have had a long head start on the general campaign.

The tragic punch line is that if Clinton were to take the high road, to drop out on her own terms and to throw her considerable support behind Obama, she would be a hero. Moreover, she would be in the position of having nearly infinite soft power within the Democratic party and Washington. Rather than squandering the tremendous capital both she and Bill Clinton posses trying to block the future, she could be helping to drive the transition, focus on the many Congressional races the Democratic Party could win, and know that she made the right choice. The brave choice.

The heroic choice.

ian mini-rant

Ian Bogost posts his thoughts on the iPhone SDK and games over at Water Cooler Games. He is being a little harsh, but it would suck if Apple delays too much longer on the developer registrations.

forks in the road

Some travel, APOC, and the flu all conspired to interrupt my studying process, so as I carve out some time this week I find myself at a major fork in the road. On the one hand, I could return to my original plan of building a simple LAMP + AJAX web application, probably then rebuilding it with some different back end options. On the other hand, I'm itching to play with Flash and Action Script 3, and have a an application or two in mind that would be fun to build. Finally, on the third hand you humans are missing, the Apple iPhone SDK came out with a great development environment and simulator.

Decisions, decisions.

sad panda mac day

I'm an Apple geek. I can admit it. I've been primarily using Apple laptops for 5 years, own an iPhone and several iPods, Mac Mini's are connected to every television in the house, and I've generally pushed Macs on anyone I knew who was buying a computer and didn't need to play games.

Thus, I am saddened by three distinct Mac problems that tumbled together today.

First, the MacBook Air. Using an Air is a little like having an iPhone several months ago. People who would normally never talk to a stranger in public come up to you and ask about it. With the iPhone, it was easy to respond with a big smile and a loud "I love it!" With the Air, it's a little trickier. For the most part, I do love it. Even discounting the adventure of the my first one arriving broken, it has proven to have enough power to run Second Life, takes up no space in my bag, has a great keyboard, bright screen, enough battery life, stays nice and cool, and -- when everything is working -- has been an absolute joy to use.

Unfortunately, everything doesn't always work. Ironically, it is again an intermittent problem with the trackpad. Unlike the first time, this one is easier to reproduce. If I spend a lot of time with Gmail open in a tab while clicking around in other apps, eventually the trackpad button stops taking clicks. Tapping the trackpad still works and -- here's the spooky part -- reloading Gmail generally restores the click functionality. Alternately, shutting down and restarting Firefox fixes the problem. Oh, yeah, reloading it in Safari generally fixes it, too, so it isn't just Firefox.

Weird, eh? I don't quite have it reproducible enough to add into the Apple bug database, but I'm close.

So, I want to tell people I love the Air, but instead I tend to waffle a bit. Too bad, because it really has recalibrated what I expect from a laptop. I may never go back to a larger, heavier machine.

Second, my Airport Extreme wireless routers at home have been randomly dying. Turns out, there is a lot of unanswered discussion on the Apple boards about this, although several different problems seem to be overlapping. I have two wireless networks set up at home, one for 802.11g/n for guests and the Mac Minis and a separate 802.11n for our laptops. Both are on Mac Airport Extreme N routers. The .11g/n network started randomly failing the other day in a very weird way. The green light would stay on, but both wired and wireless connections would fail, the wireless network would vanish (even iStumbler couldn't find it), and if you tried to ping the router via a wired connection, the host would be down. Cycling power would fix the problem. Eventually it started happening continuously.

I figured the equipment had failed, so swapped routers and temporarily ditched the .11n network. Then it started failing. Since both were next to each other on a high shelf in the corner of the room, I thought maybe I had cooked both routers, so I went and got a new one and installed it in a better ventilated spot.

The new router began failing immediately.

Now I was really intrigued -- where "intrigued" is a synonym for "angry and frustrated." I turned on max logging and started streaming the logs to a wired host, looking for patterns. What emerged was that every failure was preceded by bittorrent using NAT-PNP to setup a route it would lock up the router. That hint gave me the clue that led me, via Google, to the linked discussion. I've tried the voodoo solution of turning off IPv6 support (Manual Setup -> Advanced -> IPv6 -> Local-link only) and so far haven't seen a lockup, but we'll see. Very annoying, as my home network had been rock solid for years.

Third, remember the comment about games? Well, just saw the Instant Action announcement and I want to check out there technology! Sadly, despite being a web plugin, they don't have a Mac version yet, which is too bad.

I'm sure tomorrow will be a better Mac day -- maybe I'll download the iPhone SDK to make myself feel better.

apoc week 8

David Pollock, a managing director at Bear Stearns and member of the Southern California angel investment group Tech Coast Angels, visited the APOC class this week. Interesting guy, thoughtful, and provided a nice overview for the class on the various steps of funding, the differences between friends and family, angels, and VCs, as well as being very open to answering questions about what he looks for and thinks about. I've been fortunate to meet a lot of investors during Second Life's development, as well as a larger group in the time since, but more information is always useful.

He had a few interesting data points and comments:

• He did a study at the Milken Institute that determined that 75% of the value in the US economy is the human capital
• 7 out of 10 venture investments fail completely
• LA area angels and VCs don't want seed funding to be spent on patent protection

More generally, he gave the impression that LA VC scene is a bit more of a sellers market -- ie, more money looking at fewer entrepreneurs -- compared to the Bay Area. Maybe he was just being nice to the students.

As I explore the funding landscape, a couple of trends are jumping out.

First, Y Combinator (and its many copies) will generate a much broader exploration of Web 2.0 consumer services. As the number of available services becomes large, matching users to services will become a very interesting problem. What will take us beyond marketing, search engine optimization, and viral approaches? Will the news sites targeting this space, such as Tech Crunch, Mashable, Paid Content et al, take on a more of an aggregation role? Specialized search to help consumers find the services they want? Or, will service businesses emerge to build custom mashups, maybe using Yahoo Pipes?

Second, there may be a funding gap around the $200 - 400k level. Angels and some VCs, such as Charles River Ventures, are focused on this amount, but both face the challenge of being time consuming at a time in product development where a lost month or two to close funding is a significant percentage of total development time. Especially if the visionary founder is the one most distracted by the funding effort. A funder who really streamlined the process would meaningfully change the performance of their investments, since an extra month or two of progress 9 to 12 months into an idea could be the difference between having launched or not.

What I like about both trends is that solving them well requires a mix of search and reputation, both interesting problems to work on.

free

Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor-in-Chief, just posted the main arguments from his new book, “Free.” Chris is well known thanks to his last book, “The Long Tail,” which explored the interaction of consumption patterns and distribution. “Free” is the logical next step. Just as decreased search and distribution costs enable niche demand to generate as much aggregate consumption as the more popular part of the curve, decreased hosting, processing, and bandwidth costs are driving the cost of web services to zero.

To free.

Chris is a very sharp guy. However, what inspired me about “The Long Tail” was not the story he told about long-tail consumption. Instead, it was how long-tail thinking could be applied to community, innovation, and learning. I wrote about this in the “Collapsing Geography” paper, but to sum up:

This same power law distribution is a suitable approximation for other aspects of innovation and collaboration, beyond the Long Tail of consumption Anderson describes. Consider the potential entrepreneur: how many factors act to prevent someone from even attempting to build a business? Remember, this is not just the investment of dollars, but also includes time, social risk, and other elements. Even a basic requirement for a lawyer or license is a substantial hurdle.

In cultures or nations that generate many of these impediments, only a few entrepreneurs even try. While they may be the best funded, most determined, or most risk-tolerant entrepreneurs, innovation — as a random walk through design space — is dampened by significant reductions in participants. Inventory and shelf space pressures will tend to constrain a market to the top of the power law, reducing the variety and ignoring a lucrative customer base. In the same way, regulatory, legal, or social pressures also prevent entrepreneurial activities.

Given that innovation occurs at the intersections between information and social networks, yet another Long Tail exists, that of long-tail communities. New York city supports an unparalleled number of differing, overlapping communities, thanks to the density and diversity of its population. When communication technologies allow similar numbers of communities to form and intersect at a distance, the opportunities for innovation expand tremendously.

Long-tail communities aid long-tail innovation.

In a similar way, what excites me about “Free” is less the insight that any web-based service is going to face enormous pressure to be free, but the increased relative cost of what is left. After all, if duplication, storage, and distribution are free, then the percentage of your product or service costs associated with design, development, and support increase proportionally.

Not to mention the cost of your customers’ time.

Intel and AMD are fighting it out to ensure that computing power is free. Where is the competition to make it free to develop a great user interface? A compelling experience? To support millions of users?

To create something worth spending your increasingly fragmented and limited time using?

Certainly, open source development, Creative Commons, and other crowd sourcing models are creating additional tools for reducing design and development costs. Moreover, Y Combinator, 37 Signals, and others are demonstrating that certain forms of software development are much cheaper than they used to be.

But the iPhone’s interface wasn’t created by two people over a weekend. World of Warcraft was an enormously expensive endeavor.

Tools and technology to attack the not-free portions of development are one my favorite topics when I think about what’s next. They could make for some really fun projects.

bring on the science

Tamin Pechet, who's an EIR here at , pointed me at this Boston Globe article about Second Life. The gist is that a Mass General doctor is going to attempt to reproduce real-world stress reduction therapy sessions via Second Life. As John Lester points out:

This is one of the first attempts to see if Second Life can help people in a scientific, quantifiable way.

Patients are already reaching out to each other through virtual worlds, so understanding the impact is an incredibly important area for research. If virtual worlds allow distance therapy to be effective -- and remember, it need not be as effective as in the real world, just effective enough -- it could open up entirely new connections between doctors and patients.

more customer service goodness

I almost never check bags and tend to travel with the smallest, 20" roller bag possible to ensure that it always fits into the overhead storage on flights. As a result, my trusty Victorinox bag would sometimes get stuffed to nearly cold fusion levels. Eventually, the bag paid the price of my jumping up and down on it to cram things in. It lost several structural screws and one of the internal loops ripped out. I bought a newer version of the bag, but on a lark decided to take the old one in to Edwards Luggage to see how much a repair would cost. The gentleman at the counter counted up all the missing pieces and bits of damage, handed me a claim slip, and announced that all the fixes were easy so there would be no charge.

Free.

Wow. I can say with certainty whenever I need new luggage or wallets that I'll be returning to Edwards.