Category: Technology

A head in the clouds

In 2008, when we started PointAbout, my co-founders and I imagined a flat phone completely running of the Internet. It seemed possible with the advent of the iPhone, although we weren’t exactly sure how it would get there, or that we would be integral in its coming. Just last week, shortly after Job’s death, my co-founder Isaac sent out a video of Steve jobs from 1997 where he describes a completely networked computer/device as the goal of Apple at an early WWDC keynote. Amazing.

Well, I just installed iOS 5 and I realized that vision is closer than it has ever been. In iOS 5 not only is all you data fully synced in their cloud, but you have access to more and more tools to connect and control your network and devices from apps. It is a subtle nudge forward from Steve’s grand plan as we quietly fall in line without questions, and eager, not complacent, for the next beautifully implemented well thought out upgrade towards an endpoint we all believe in, but are not entirely sure at all what it will look like.

As Steve mentioned a few years ago, the world will be seen through apps. And his new console of apps show more an more of how vast that vision was, beyond serving ads and owning an app store as the medias interpretation originally thought. (he always seemed to be slinging from the hip to be ahead of next years curve, and a year or so later we would always end up seeing how short sighted we were and how well planned out and far reaching he was.)

Apple is a new way of computing. Every system in its own sandbox to avoid problems across the board like viruses, or poorly programmed apps and utilities. It also abstracts away from silly notion that we need to manage our “hard drive” or system.

On a side note, a few notable additions in iOS 5 (on both the 4 or 4S): Rich media in notifications, friend finder, airport utility, photo stream, and single button photography. Also, the change to the blue on/off switch, and some new design implementations of text messages and background processes..Your computer is apps and your apps are on the cloud, and before you know it, bam, we are here – the future – without vaporware and prototypes solutions – actual solutions in a very real direction and easily achieved “next step” plan. Our devices run smoothly, cleanly, beautifully, innovatively, and as Steve would say “it all just works.”

Sorry for the brevity. Sent from my iPhone.

My Presentation on the Evolution of Geeks (Where did geeks go right?)

Excerpt:
Nothing can evolve when everyone sees things the same. A teacher simply teaches what they are taught, but an observer, a thinker, a new mind -­‐ a geek -­‐ is the one that pushes the seed of thought that goes from unnecessary, to foolish, to laughed at. And they endure through those stages due to their intense passion, un-l it blossoms, becomes admired, and eventually takes over as the new school of thought.

Enter here please. How does mobile change the browsing experience?

As the PC experience  keeps pushing away from the OS and into the browser as the main entry point for data, with web sites being those data points – the mobile experience is doing the opposite. It keeps pushing users back to the OS level as the entry point to get to data, with those data points being apps.

One consequence of that experience: how will businesses harvest value from the users interactions when a user is not in their app? That problems has manifested itself into things such as app discovery, re-targeting, etc. Where before serendipity and injection in the browser experience had value for advertiser, the mobile user is more specific with their actions. Entering the phone to get specific data from specific apps.

Unfortunately the OS level of a mobile device isn’t in itself serendipitous, and therefor many business must rethink how they get injected into a users experience, before the user knows they want it.

The idea of “browse” has changed considerably in mobile, and one must focus on the change in foundation to re-think how to create new solutions to old problems.

One way to look at this through the lens of solutions: If the mobile device, which is primarily intent based and very rarely spoken of in terms of browsing, pushes its content to the web; And the PC, which is primarily referred to using the word “browse”, pushes users serendipitously to a device; then having the two work with one another as an ecosystem allows both sides of the puzzle to fill in for weaknesses and leverage strengths, and most importantly solve problems with tools that cross the device/tool/experience chasim. This is a true form of making vertical fragmentation (single user cross many devices) work for you.

Do you see what I see?

Can you guess who that famous person is in the image on the left? Not a clue huh? Well it’s Steve Martin in a scene from the movie Pink Panther. But it isn’t exactly straight from the big screen film, and it isn’t exactly not from the movie either. Confused? Well, it is a mind boggling concept. The technology that Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C., has developed is able to produce a video from what a persons mind is seeing or thinking.

It really is hard to explain the amazing nature of the this technology so I attached a video below showing it in action. It’s is a must see, and probably is THE most amazing technology I have seen in my entire life.

It’s is interesting how many of the representations of people look primarily the same from the minds eye, and how there are strange over laps of data on others at times. Almost like you can see the minds eye wander, or you can see the related emotions that are associated with some visual queues.

You also have to give allot of credit to the impressionist movement. They were way ahead of their time. As you can see they completely got the nature of the difference between what we “see”, and what we remember or interpret even though we don’t realize it. The videos also remind me allot of what it feels like when I am dreaming.

 

Video: Left side what was actually seen, right side what the technology decoded from the brain:

Video games may rot your brain, but those gamers may help find the cure for AIDS

Just when parents and wives everywhere finally got thier point across to get their loved ones out from in front of the large screen TV and unplugged from their beloved game console, a twist emerges.

As it turns out even our most powerful computers have problems figuring out the right combinations, patters and sequences necessary to solve large complex problems. AN example of these complex problems that baffle our silicon constructed counter parts is defining the model of many viruses, and you can’t defeat what you do not understand. By leveraging the power of crowd sourcing and the serendipitous realizations that only humans can have (so far,) creating a game to engage gamers to figure out the unique characteristics (folds) of  the simian AIDS-causing Mason – Pfizer monkey virus retroviral protease (AKA M-MVP) is having some great success. It’s kind of like Tetris meets chemistry class. Move over xenga, no virtual good in the world will trump the prize of being the person who helped conqore aids!

Even after this gaming experiment ends, the analyzation of the methods and patterms applied to the game by the gamers will be adopted by the computer algorithms, thereby furthering our ability to solve problems at scale.

 

Check out the video:

Google Labs is Shutting Down :(

Early on in transformation into an official entrepreneur I began preaching the benfiist of focus, and the trap that any small task will invariably have the potential to become a time suck from what you should be spending brain cycles on instead (what has now been known as ABBA in our circle). But I am still left with a small sense of saddens to find out that Google Labs is shuttung down. 😦

Check out the list of many of the apps that will be phased out, and find those are already gone: http://www.googlelabs.com/

It was a good feeling to know that Google maintained their, seemingly altruistic, attention to the experimentation of new ideas for the sake of simply knowing more, and fixing our uneeded hudles in data through tech and science. They were the “casual NASA” of our dat, and althought I understand the need to focus, I had always hoped Google would remain the exception to the rule, and give us something to map our ideals to.

Farewell Google Labs, I hope what you represented does not fall by the wayside in your company or our tech community as well.

A new take on flight: One wing is all you need.

Check out this video. It’s kind of geeky, well it’s very geeky, but still neat-o. These guys at lockhead took a short break from creating deadly weaponry and re-invented flight.

From divincis screw shaped helicopter, to the right brothers wheeless test flight, flight has been a display of symetrical balance. Most likley due tothe need to ma the air craft as part of the prerequisites. But as unmaned aor craft becomes moreand more of a mission of our miltary, the premises are thrown out the door, and the ability for our engineers and deisgners to get creative beings in the begining of a new era of what we see as flight.

Here, the helicoprter-ish-one-winged-airplane spins in cricles to achive all raged of motions, as well as take of and langing. With this design laucnhng by flingin
 the aircraft into the area is also a falry easy manuver. 

Short Cycle Scrum: A leaner, meaner, scrum.

Here is a summary of how we implemented a leaner, more efficient Scrum at Socialize coined Short-Cycle-Scrum. We have added some rules of thumb, and processes around ou Scrum to deliver stories with a surprisingly good amount of efficiency. This is a style we have specially tuned for short sprints (usually one week.)

Short Sprints Cycles
Sprint plaanning meetings can go long. They should definitely go as long as the need to, but no longer. One of the main reasons to have a sprint planning meeting at the beginning of yur sprint with the whole projects team members is that having a system that relies on having meetings throughout the week are like death by a million paper cuts for each developers time. Many times, those metings throughout the week are unfocused, not involving all the members of the team needed, and breaks up a developers day. most likley one devlopers need for a quick meeting means another developers inability to focus on delivering their story. So, with a single, team wide, sprint planning meeting you take care of all the discussions scheduled for your sprint as a team, all at once, when every one is in “meeting mode”. The goal is to get as many questions out of the way as possible. By the end of the meeting all your developers should be confident enough to solve their own questions or problems, as much as they can, throughout the sprint. If your sprints are short enough, and your stories are as atomic as possible, your devs will never truly implement something so wrong, due to a quick judgement call, that can truly ruin your the product. They must make judgement calls on their own to get the story delivered, this will get features out, allow for interative improvements, and avoid analysis paralysis.

A good rule of thumb is: If you can’t do it in a week (or your sprint’s time span), it is a sign that the story should be smaller. This takes a little convivcing when going over new features or stories with your team, but for us, even if at first it does not seems so, it ends up being the case time after time.

This and Next Sprint Need Only Apply

Another way we have made our planning meetings even more efficient is by asking the team to only address issues in terms of “this sprint” or the “next sprint”, every other situation can wait. People have a tendancy to use planning meetings, their PM tool, and stories to “remember” things that are”needed”. We have found that things that are truly needed are rarely forgotten and adding them to the plan do nothing more then create noise. If the concept or feature will take more than 1 sprint or is something that needs to be done, or done at a later sprint, then create a thread or discussion abut it, but do not take up sprint planning time, or your queue with it.

Asynchronicity and Simplicity

Using sharable threads (for us we use basecamp) for asynchronous conversations helps us hash out discussions, and preserve the sprints for only things that are ready, or close to being ready, for implementation. This helps your team sperate planninng and ideas, from implementation and delivery. A good tip for a synchronouse discussions is to make sure new threads are created for new topics and that the title of the thread is the topic to close and focus on. Again, only after there is a clear concept formulated and ready/need to be implemented in tis or the next sprint, should it be added the icebox or queue.

Planning Meeting Agenda

So how do we set up the agenda for the next sprint so we know what to talk about? We create a sharable doc that devs can add the link to a story they want to delve into, or they want moved from the ice box into the backlog or sprint. Again, only things that need to go into the next sprint are added here. At the sprint planning meeting we go over the sprint we are starting, and maybe a few stories into the backlog, just incase we have a high velocity week, and then links added to the sprint planning doc. This keeps the sprint plannig meeting tight and focused and works very well for short sprints.

Tools

We use pivotal tracker and google docs to manage all this, and base camp for discussions and group notifications. I will go more into the use of these tools in subsequent posts.

Summary

The main take sways: if it is not for now then it does not exists in the panning world. And discussions together things onto the planning world should be as asynchronous as possible. Finally, completely sperate high goals with systems that are used for accomplishing the next step.

Release Notes Generator (For Pivotal Tracker)

Here is another quick tool built on GAE. It takes all your PT stories and bugs, scrapes out chores, and release stories, leaving a listof features and bugs available to copy and paste in to your release notes, emailer, or README file.

Often departments always asking if a release is out, what features are included, and if it is not out how long until it is. This tool will also print a header letting the person using the tool know if the release in question is out, and if not how far down the pipeline it is.

To use the tool most effectively you should check out my post on releasing versions through PT. (coming soon)


Download RNG for PT


Or fork and contribute on GitHub