Where are the Web Work tools?

I’m writing this on Friday afternoon. Through the magic of social networking I know that several friends of mine have “checked in” at local pubs and are already imbibing Portland’s finest. I also know that a former colleague now living in Denver is stuck at JFK. I know that one of my favorite VCs returned to San Francisco this morning from North Carolina via PHL and ORD. He shopped at Whole Foods for what I assume are ingredients for a dinner that I am sorry to be missing. Plus, a friend pointed me to the latest thinking on the possibility of parallel universes.

What I don’t know right now is whether my Web designer has picked up the latest copy I posted to our shared server. I don’t know if our dev team has decided to push the latest changes over the weekend. Tomorrow I plan to prepare our financials, but I don’t know if our accountant has made the updates to the chart of accounts. I have no email from him; I should have called him before he left for his beach house.

Like most people, at any given time I focus on three or four objectives. Why can’t I know as much about those as I know about the drinking habits of my friends? Why don’t I have activity streaming, location updates, automated availability, ubiquitous micro updates, and integral ratings and feedback from my colleagues and business partners working with me on my priority objectives?

I need something that will allow me to identify the group of people with whom I share objectives. We need to self identify the tasks we are contributing to and identify our dependencies. When I need something from someone in the group I should be able to request a task/deliverable from them. They should be able to accept or reject the request with feedback. My ideal tool would let me see the availability, location and status of everyone in the group. I should receive real-time updates for all activity related to tasks that I depend upon. Everything I do related to our shared objective should be available to the group and streamed proactively to those dependent on me.

Technology to do all of this exists today, but no one has yet packaged it into a useful tool. Microsoft’s lame attempt at collaboration services requires a bizarre collection of servers that can only be assembled by a certified SharePoint integrator. The result is overly rigid and can’t accommodate free-form workflows or easily accommodate participants outside the organization. Collaboration and unified messaging from IBM, Cisco, and Avaya are no better. So where’s the Zukerberg who will fulfill this 400 million user opportunity?

Today, while waiting for new tools, I’ll send out a couple of emails requesting updates from my web designer; I will leave a voice message for my accountant; and I will send a text to the head of our dev team. I’ve checked our project management dashboard: the last updates were posted Wed. The shared server shows the latest version of the Web copy is the one I posted yesterday; I have no idea if anyone looked at it. On IM, most of our folks are unavailable and two have status notes clearly posted during the Mesozoic era.

I know with the right tools I could have gotten so much more done before heading out for a beer.

The Need For A New Work Web

It is time we came up with a new set of web and mobile tools that transform the way we work. User-generated content and Web 2.0 technology has completely changed the way we relate to each other, but it’s done nothing for work. A recent Harris Poll confirms the workplace is still mired in Web 1.0 tools. And, while social networking technology is entering the workplace it hasn’t transformed anything.

We know how completely social networking has transformed the way we interact outside of work – Michael Andrew at Media Metrics Insider points out:

“…there are now over a trillion known Web pages, more than 500,000 Facebook apps, 140,000 iPhone apps, billions of videos on Youtube -- and more have been created since you started to read this sentence. “

Everyday we post pictures, videos and updates on Facebook, tweet on twitter and check-in on foursquare as our primary way to communicate and share with family and friends.

But at work we still use technology developed two decades ago.

Harris’ findings on frequency of use:

91% email

66% shared spaces

66% voice calls

66% teleconferencing

55% web-conferencing

Social tools have entered work (with 17% of workers using them) but they’re not transformative. These tools merely allow us to find coworkers and more easily identify individuals with related interests and projects. At best this facilitates additional collaboration and potentially innovation. But as Forrester finds our day-to-day interactions are still mired in slow replies, redundant meetings, and irrelevant conference calls that take too long to arrange in the first place.

What we need are tools that support the real work we do – the dynamic interactions between us and our co-workers. Providing management of deliverables - the output - like that of SharePoint, Notes/Domino and OpenText, is important and necessary. But we need to accompany these platforms with something to support the actual work as it unfolds.

I’m not talking about shared white boards or avatars hopping around some virtual world. This new tool will be organized around the shared objective and tasks of a group of participants.

To be productive I need to know:

• what am I working on?
• who am I working with?
• what is my role and responsibility?
• what are everyone else’s roles and responsibilities?

This provides the context for all the tasks we are working on:

• what am I doing and who is dependent on it?
• which of my coworkers tasks am I dependent on?

It needs to support the dynamic nature of the work we are doing:

• It must support organic spawning of new tasks by each member of the team and dynamically identify new dependencies
• It must let me prompt my coworkers for things I need from them as they prompt me for things they need from me.
• I want to know in real time about the activity on which I depend
• I want to provide continual updates on my activity to those that depend on me

The big misconception - this is project management. Many think it’s just a matter of getting PM capability in the right form online. There are now scores of online project managers from AgileTrack to XPlanner. But these tools fundamentally miss the mark. They manage resources when what is needed is something that lets groups track and manage their interactions. What I’m looking for is more akin to World of Warcraft's support of a guild on an epic raid, than a PM tool’s reports and dashboards on action items.

In future blog posts, I will explore these concepts further. For now I just throw out the challenge: how do we use web/mobile technology to radically transform work? Orders of magnitude productivity increases and a profound increase in job satisfaction await.

What amazes me is how little development is going on in this regard. Cisco talks the best game, but they still are just selling repackaged versions of stuff we saw from Lotus and Microsoft in 1995. No one should waste money on something labeled “unified messaging” or “collaboration.”

The only company I have seen that even seems to be building is something interesting is Asana. We will see if they can actually move the needle when they release something later this year.

Someone with a far better marketing mind than mine will come up with the new terminology – “interaction tools” clearly doesn’t cut it. But, I will know it when I see it. And the companies that adopt it will gain an advantage over all others.

The Next Big Thing: Newspapers

In a parallel universe, one with all our technical expertise but none of our publishing, a business plan is presented. Its title: News Company – All The News That’s Fit To Print.

Entrepreneur: We plan to marshal all the best journalists and band them together to create a comprehensive news source; one that will cover local news, regional news, national news and international news. We plan to develop and staff bureaus throughout the world, so we can originate all our own news. To fill any holes in our coverage, we will purchase the best reporting from other agencies and freelance journalists. We'll include community features, event reviews and lifestyle pieces. We will become the voice of the communities we serve. We will bundle all this together on a daily basis and call it a “Newspaper”.

VC: How will you ensure the quality of your news coverage?

Entrepreneur: We will have experienced editorial staff to guide, select and edit the stories we present to our customers. We will combine broad coverage with “best of bread” expertise.

VC: And who’s your target market?

Entrepreneur: Every household in the areas we serve.

VC: Really; and how will you present this "newspaper" to them?

Entrepreneur: We plan to print it. But the daily volume will require a process completely different than any physical printing done before. We intend to create newsprint – a thin paper produced in broad rolls from which we can print and cut pages. We will mine our forests, pulp the wood, and produce the paper. We plan to print the news on this paper with dies derived from vegetables.

VC: Very interesting. So this newspaper will be a semi-permanent product. But why go to such lengths to render your newspaper onto an enduring product? Do you really think your customers will want to keep it for future reference?

Entrepreneur: Not at all. We expect each edition of our newspaper will only be of interest to our customers for 24 hours. This is critical to our business model; we need them to buy a new one everyday. We have established a way for the newspapers to be recycled into cardboard and other paper products. We are working with municipalities to force our customers to separate these newspapers from the rest of their trash and have the trash collectors handle them as a separate waste stream. If any of our customers do wish to look at old editions, we plan to make them available in community centers. There we intend to capture the images of our newspapers on a special film that when magnified let’s you see an image of original newspaper.

VC: So, to really be of interest to your customers it will have to be presented in an extremely timely fashion. It seems that by the time you collect, edit, print and distribute these stories the newspaper will be anything but new.

Entrepreneur: We intend to create a culture that presses our journalists for stories by a daily deadline. The editors will turn and mix the stories quickly each evening. We will run our presses through the night. By diverting some of the local shipping capacity, we will move the final newspaper from the printers to distribution locations throughout each of the metro areas we are targeting. And then, this is the really cool part; we have worked out the legal requirements to employ child labor in the early hours of every morning before school to deliver the newspapers the final mile on their bicycles to each person’s home.

VC: And what exactly is the monetization model?

Entrepreneur: We intend to combine subscriptions and advertising.

VC: This sounds even crazier than the guy who was in here yesterday claiming that the world wanted it’s stories delivered in printed tomes; he called them "books". He was going to fill buildings with these books as monuments to our intellectual brilliance and creativity. I just don’t understand why we would want to so encumber our stories and news. Everyone gets anything they want today instantly on their electronic tablets. I think we’ll pass.

Augmenting Our Reality

We have transformed our world by automating our everyday tasks with computers. We replaced calculators, accounting ledgers, and typewriters. Computers help us consume, create and deliver information. Letters, memos and reference books are a thing of the past. Increasingly we have crawled into our computer screen to work, play and communicate.

Last year I wrote about wearing our computers and embedding computing in ourselves. I firmly believe the next big thing is computer augmented reality -- bringing us out of the screen and putting the screen on the world around us. A future where rather than doing things on the computer, the computer does things on us.



Pranav Mistry demonstrates this future. It is worth a few minutes to check it out.

Change We Can Believe In

Don’t you just hate influential vested interest groups that make change impossible?

“What’s wrong with our country?,” we wonder. It’s not just that the numbers are bad – unemployment, foreclosure rates, uninsured and segment after segment needing rescuing. We know something is wrong. We want change, but change in this country – where every vested interest is armed with lawyers, lobbyists and PR experts – is hard. We suspect that we are up against something big and influential.

We are on a hunt for the culprits who are keeping us from this needed change: greedy bankers, corrupt financiers, evil pharmaceutical companies, corporate lobbyists, and the list goes on. But the vested interests that keep us from meaningful change are much closer to home. In fact they include my home and probably your home.

Our system is rife with structural distortions that cause or aggravate our problems and prevent urgently needed changes. One reason this is hard for us to see is that it deliberately favors people like us: educated and employed. We who own a house, have employer-provided health care, and figure we will survive our later years even if social security is ill-funded.

We have long enjoyed a system that significantly subsidizes these basic structural supports. We pay no tax on our mortgage interest or health care payments and – amazingly - contribute only the same fixed amount to social security regardless of income.

There was a time when these subsidies served a purpose. But since the middle to upper income families will buy houses, have health insurance and invest in their own retirements even without these subsidies – they have outlived their usefulness.

Bernie Madoff’s culpability may be more singular and despicable than our quiet political insistence on mortgage deductions, but that deduction is what distorts home prices, encourages risky mortgages and fuels mortgage backed securities.

It is impossible to justify disincenting rental property given rising homelessness coincident with nearly 70% home ownership. We have reached a point where the disproportionate support of owner-occupied suburban communities is destroying our social fabric.

Similarly, tax advantages for employer-paid health insurance effectively make those uninsured and under-insured impossible to cover with cost-effective private plans. As long as employer-paid health insurance is subsidized, we are disincenting other options when we need them most.

Capping social security deductions – pretending this is actually a public retirement plan instead of a tax-supported social safety net – is a cynical regressive tax that will do nothing in the coming decades to aid retirees.

Meaningful change starts with correcting the structural distortions we take for granted:

1. Phase out the mortgage interest deduction. Start by capping it at some comfortably high number. Reduce the cap each year until it is phased out all together. Five to seven years should give everyone time to make adjustments in their financial and tax planning.
2. Make employer-paid health benefits taxable and individual premiums non-deductible. This will level the financial playing field and make it possible to address more affordable health care and broader access.
3. Eliminate the cap on Social Security payments.

Fixing these foundational issues paves the way to the change we truly need. Putting a small amount of good regulation back in place at investment banks and in other key spots to help ambitious types focus on long-term goals should be easy by comparison.

Conversely, if we do not change these distortions nothing else we do will make much difference.

Cooking - A Genetically Encoded Evolutionary Adaptation

Always a Michael Pollan fan, I jumped to his New York Times Magazine cover article on “decline and fall of everyday home cooking.” It without a doubt struck a nerve in our collective consciousness. Since it appeared, I’ve herd multiple interviews of Pollan motivated by the article. Even today’s NYT Magazine two weeks later has Pollan as the lead subject in the Letters section.

I love cooking: partaking probably 4 times a week. There is something profoundly satisfying about it. And, apparently with good reason. In Pollan’s NPR interview last week he reference research by Richard Wrangham at Harvard. Wrangham conjectures that cooking is what allowed us to redirect our biological energies from digestion to thought. Not needing the extensive digestive system required to process raw meat and grasses, we evolved a simpler gastrointestinal track and diverted the nutrients and oxygen to our now expanded brains.

Wrangham goes as far to posit that cooking is what separates us from primates and all other animals: Not thumbs, language, tools, or social organization. Without cooking, he argues, we don’t biologically achieve human intelligence. His theories and research are summarized in his book, Catching Fire.

Intuitively this makes a lot of sense to me. Memories from my childhood of the family crowded in the kitchen with my mother cooking dinner are indelibly burned in my brain: the mere whiff of browned butter brings them rushing back. And today I find no greater pleasure than hanging with friends around the BBQ, wine in one hand, and tongs in the other. Cooking connects in our psyche at a very deep level. It is easy for me to accept that this is genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation.

So I wonder what it means culturally if we stop cooking. Is it, as Pollan implies, evolutionarily regressive--a step toward Armageddon? Or is it further adaptation – replacing expensive (biologically and materially) individual cooking with collective food preparation? With a population of 7 billion (heading to 9.5 billion), a strong argument can be made that factory farms and processed food are critical to our next evolutionary steps. Even if true, I am happy to revel in my relatively Neanderthal ways, getting profound pleasure in searing meat on an open flame in my own back yard. Here’s to our frontal lobes.

Cheers

All the news that's fit to print

Yesterday, I returned from 10 days in the mountains – fresh air, sailing, long hikes, lazy mornings. Nestled in the forest on a high mountain lake, our cabin has no cell coverage, and only dial up Internet. For my family summer vacation has come to mean forced withdrawal from electronic communication. But what I miss most when cloistered in our mountain retreat is the daily newspaper.

Friends joined us mid-week and parlayed the goings on of the outside world – the Obamas went to Russia, Billy Mays died, GM came out of bankruptcy, and Goldman Sacks was making more money than ever. Nothing earth shattering, but I still felt out of the loop not knowing.

We are living in the dawn of the digital age, a modern renaissance, but the decline and death of the daily newspaper really bothers me. I like holding a paper in the morning. I just absorb more info in my groggy morning state looking at news print rather than staring at a screen.

But the bigger issue is the news itself. The online sources that are displacing newspapers are largely opining about the news and not reporting. Researchers at Cornell analyzed some 90 million online articles during the election cycle last year – Aug to Oct 08. Of all the discernable story lines only 3.5% originated from an online source before appearing in a traditional news outlet. So 96.5% of all stories originated with traditional reporting and were later picked up and discussed online.

The implications are obvious. We need to find ways to preserve and support real reporting, real journalism. We can’t let reporting die with newsprint. Blogging as it exists today is not professional journalism. This is the challenge of the modern information age – come up with a business model that can support broad professional, diverse, independent journalism. Until that emerges, I will happily pay the recession driven higher subscription rates for daily delivery of the New York Times.

Startup Now: The Oregon Opportunity

While we obsess over the impact of the economic downturn and the State’s unemployment, we risk missing the incredible opportunity Oregon has. Obama recognizes this crisis is a once in a life time opportunity. Marching to the tune of “never waste a crisis”, the nation is collectively spending $1 trillion on not just solving the credit crisis, but recreating our social economic landscape.

We are going after climate change; international instability and terrorism; energy scarcity; and the aging population in the developed world, just to name a few. This combined with the international economic downturn is driving unprecedented global change. Oregon has the opportunity to play a lead role in this change and drive job growth at the same time.

Oregon has the expertise and experience in the segments that matter right now:

• Alternative Energy
• Urban Design
• Medical Records
• Opensource Technology
• Mobile Technology
• Elderly Care
• Universal Health Coverage
  

Oregon has attracted young highly educated people who flock here for the quality of life and affordability. For instance Portland has among the highest percentages of college degrees, spending on book purchases, and broadband penetration.

Venture Capitalists invest in Team (the skills and drive of the individuals involved) and TAM (total addressable market – the size of the opportunity). Some smart funds like Voyager and Madrona see Oregon’s potential and have put people here. In the past Oregon has lacked the will to drive growth. Voyager and Madrona are here as not to miss a potential opportunity: they won’t drive anything. The initiative has to come from the Oregon community.

Local money has been shy and scarce. Worse, to date, the state shows little support for its own potential. Only trivial amounts of capital have made their way to Oregon startup ventures.
If we don’t invest in ourselves it is worse than just missing an opportunity. We marginalize our entrepreneurs and starve them to death. Why would anyone else invest in Oregon companies if we can’t even see fit to do so? It is like a mother not supporting their child, you start at less then zero.

Small businesses drive employment. Venture models have demonstrated the potential return of small growth companies. We have the opportunity to spawn high growth businesses that will deliver additional employment and high return on capital. These businesses will succeed because the crisis we face will economically reward new businesses the deliver solutions to our problems.

A proposal is a foot to direct $100 million of State controlled capital to Oregon startup ventures. This is the right move at the right time. This effort seems to have prodded our State Treasure Ben Westlund into action. He is now hosting an event on April 29 to catalyze Oregon investment.

The big question: will this result in putting Oregon’s talent and money to work? It is the right move at the right time and it deserves our support at every level, especially that of our elected representatives. Or will it just be an exercise by all parties involved to look like they are playing lip service to this grass roots push while fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility and maintaining the status quo.

Stimulate VCs

I am amused by the controversy caused by Tomas Friedman’s comments on stimulating venture capital. The discussion is missing the point. We shouldn’t be arguing if government money would help or hurt Venture Capital. Nor should we be arguing about whether funneling money through Venture Capital firms would create more or less jobs than giving it to GM or Ford. The discussion about venture capital is relevant because we should be discussing what kind of world we want to build.

The old world is dead. The one dominated by industrial giants. The ones listed on the Dow. Yesterday we sold that world and no one was buying. Today we are willing to pay less than we did more than 10 years ago. And all indication is we will discount it more.

So the question is: what's next? The die is cast; the government is the economic engine of the next several years. We the people get to decide what we put our collective capital and efforts into. We will invest in infrastructure and services. We will invest in bolstering manufacturing. We will remake the systems that deliver education, health care and social services. We get to reinvent and reprioritize how we produce and deliver food, water, transportation, and energy. And in our choices of what we build and how we employ, we will create a new world.

So I really don’t care if government money goes to any particular VCs. If Gurley can do better with just the private, pension, and endowment money, more power to him. What I do know is venture money a couple of decades ago funded people and ideas. Now it seems to go much more to companies with established revenue: companies that have little market risk. This use to be referred to as expansion capital. It was second round capital and came after development stage funding. Venture money use to focus on building great companies that create new emerging sectors. Now it goes increasingly to creation of products and services that may be attractive to large companies; essentially nothing more than off balance sheet R&D efforts.

I am all for stimulus dollars for VCs if it puts venture back in venture capital. Small growth companies have always been employment engines. There is perhaps no better way to create jobs than to invest in high growth companies. But the real win - new ventures will innovate and create the world we need. Saving jobs at GM won’t do that.

Like the New Deal and the Marshal Plan, this stimulus and recovery needs to be about building and recreating, not saving what was. So what kind of world do we wish to recreate. Let’s have that discussion.

Lessons from the meltdown – the limits of modeling

I am amused to watch the debate over who was right and who was wrong in the meltdown. Of course the naysayers get their day, as if they were right all along. It is kind of like if you were to drive from San Francisco to New York and your travelling companion is convinced that you have to go south. You get on Interstate 80 and drive east. But shortly after you pass through Winnemucca in Nevada the highway swings south to Battle Mountain and for the better part of an hour you have to put up with “see I told you it was south”.

One of these annoying passengers is Nassim Nicholas Taleb who was profiled in an article by Joe Nocera in the New York Times today. Taleb makes that case that all our modeling, most importantly Value at Risk (VaR) is a fraud. He makes the point that he has made a killing on the market down turn because he saw past this fraud and truly understood the market.

Like anyone who bet the markets would collapse, I have no doubt Taleb did well in the downturn. But his strategy is like a broken clock that is right twice a day. He even reinforces this point by pointing out that he has only made money three times in the last 25 years: Black Monday in ’87, the dot com crash in 2000, and in this recent market collapse.

Arguing who is right on a given day misses the point. There are very important lessons to be learned, not the least of which is that all models are limited and therefore in many circumstances they’re wrong.

I love this debate because it highlights the most crucial difference between mathematicians and engineers. I have a degree in Control Systems Engineering. Engineers are practical, we call it applied mathematics. Mathematicians and, their less academic colleague’s, economists, like to deal in concepts and principals. It is obvious to an engineer that any model, like VaR, is limited in its practical application.

First models work in narrow bands. Any financial model is an approximation of a very complex system. It is intuitively obvious that a simplifying model that ignores a good deal of the complexity will only work for a limited range of motion. Mathematically there is good reason for this: the behavior being modeled – price movements of complex derivative financial instruments – is nonlinear. But to create math to describe it you need to create a linear approximation.

It is easy to mathematically calculate the range for which any particular linear approximation is valid. Go beyond this range and the model tells you nothing valid. Think of a spring; you pull on it and it pulls back. But if you pull too hard that spring deforms and no longer pulls back. We call this saturation, and once you pass saturation the equation that once gave you the force of the pull very accurately is now completely worthless.

Second, models assume a continuous market. In engineering systems this is continuous feedback that stays in phase. In the markets this means that when you create a model of financial instruments which don’t all mature at the same time, you can create a hedge by executing the right trades at the right times for various instruments in a continuous market. If you have a discontinuity in pricing everything in the model goes haywire. If the market experiences a sudden jump or fall, or if you can’t execute a trade as it moves through a given price point, your model is invalid.

Third, models are only as good as the data you feed them. Here engineers agree with mathematicians – garbage in, garbage out. In the case of the mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps, historical data was used that was not valid for the underlying subprime mortgages contained in the instruments. And, the models proved invalid – garbage out.

Taleb does make one very interesting assertion that if true could be used to better understand the market. He contends that his “fat tail”, the dramatic market crashes that happen infrequently, out weigh the potential positive results you get cumulatively all the other times in the market. He is articulating a model that might prove true and can be used to modify VaR. That is if VaR is meant to be the potential assets at risk on any day 99% of the time. Taleb is saying the other 1% ruins your return.

So VaR normally looks like:

VaR = (.99 X ‘expected asset loss’)

Taleb’s VaR is:

T:VaR = (.99 X ‘expected asset loss’) + (.01 X ‘exceptional asset loss’)

He is basically saying that T:VaR is much bigger than VaR and thus overwhelms any potential profit in the market.

Maybe he is right. But I think it is worth testing the limits of his model. Historically the market goes up over time as value is created in the economy. I find it intuitively difficult to accept his assertion that crashes will always overwhelm any market gains. I think he is fundamentally misunderstanding the limits of his own model.

We the Lobby

I just received and email from Barack Obama. It is my fourth from the President Elect’s transition team since he won the election. He invited me to track his progress at www.change.gov. I think government needs a lot of change, a lot of renewal, and I like that I am being asked to be a part of it. Our next president is keeping me up to date and has even promised to talk to me on Youtube every week.

We are reinventing participatory democracy. I was one of 1.5 million people that voluntarily financed Barak’s campaign. When 1,500,000 people write checks, that is public financing – that is participatory democracy. I followed the campaign on the Internet at my.barackobama.com and www.johnmccain.com, and on youtube and cnn.com and twitter and countless other sites that have seamlessly become part of my daily routine.

Critics may say that this “social networking” is just pandering to young; it is treating Internet users like a special interest. This is just flat wrong. 74% or the US population is on the Internet. My mother is on the Internet. (I wont mention her age but a demographer would not call her young.) More people use the Internet than have ever voted in a US election. Access is free to the public at every taxpayer funded local library. Orders of magnitude more people get information from the Internet every day than have ever ordered a publication from the government printing office. This is the new participatory democracy.

But an interested, active, informed public is only half the equation. Our representatives need to do their part. We need leadership that will similarly change, redefine and renew representative government. We have seen in the last 8 years the result of isolated and out-of-touch leadership: one that loses the popular vote and boasts of a mandate; one that blatantly practices cronyism and divides and disenfranchises the populous by claiming that dissent is unpatriotic and un-American.

Leadership in the Internet age communicates on the Web and through email. It restricts the role and influence on corporate lobbyists while soliciting continual input from the people. I want a representative government: I don’t want to vote on legislation directly. Abdication of legislative authority, like that seen in the ballot initiative process in states like California, is a travesty of democracy. I want strong political leaders that will listen to the voices of the people and represent our interests. So I will post my comments, write my blog and respond when Barack or any of his team send me an email. We the lobby: for the people, of the people, by the people.

Alan's World

I am more than ever struck by the ubiquity of the iPod. Walking the streets of San Francisco, I am assaulted by Billboards pushing the device as a fashion accessory. The Olympics were dominated by images of Michael Phelps stretching on the pool deck with buds in his ears. What I have noticed most lately is how we no longer notice.

I upgraded my iPhone to the latest 3G model. It is an amazing device. With it, I text, tweet, buy, browse, blog, read, search, mail, mix, mash, locate, direct, calculate, and play. Unlike my lap top that I set up, this device is always with me--always on. It seamlessly extends my capability and constantly connects me to the people and the information I care about.

This is different than the Palm I use to carry. It is more about me than work communications. Back in the ‘70s I heard Alan Kay talk about wearable computers. He saw them as the true personal computer and that they would revolutionize the way we live and work.

At some point the automobile became more than a fast horse cart and led to a new industrial infrastructure. Similarly the desktop computer became more than a powerful typewriter and calculator and lead to the fundamental restructuring of the workplace. Each of these led to fundamental shifts in lifestyle, quality of life and commercial productivity.

We are in the midst of another such phase change. We are just beginning to understand the importance of what this device (and others like it) can do. We are beginning to weave it into our social fabric. Alan’s world is finally emerging.

Sound of Silence

Besides porn, music has been the biggest driver of technological advancement. Ever since the Victrola, the latest sound system has driven consumer electronic sales. All the while the world has gotten progressively noisier. Locomotion, automation, overpopulation, mechanization, urbanization and countless other “izations” have created a continual sonorous assault.

Rather than alleviating my auditory pain, today my technology amplifies it. Are ear buds really the best we can do? While exercising, I can barely hear my Market Place podcasts over the clamor of the treadmills. I know this may have something to do with my birth date and a million logged flight miles, but there must be something to help. Forget the jetpacks, where’s my bionic ear.

New gadgets hit the market daily that are meant to address the challenge of hearing our music, cell phones and neighbors over the ambient noise that envelops us. Proud technologists proclaim advances in adaptive noise compensation, advanced wind protection, noise navigation, voice capture, etc.

None of it does the job. Here is what I want--

• wireless, in-ear hearing extensions:
  
  + Mold them to fit comfortably all day in my ear canal. Make them no more unsightly than flaps of cartilage that already protrude from my head. Yes the model is hearing aids, not headphones.
  
  + Make them work intelligently with my ear. You can completely control what noise goes to my ear drums and inner ear: make it clean and ensure it is never a damaging volume.
  
  + Have them work wirelessly with my myriad devices: cell phone, computer, IPod, home theater, car navigation, and other people with inserted ear extensions, etc. This is not a technological problem but an implementation problem. I don’t care what is used, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 900 Mhz, or trained ants delivering little tiny mag tapes. Create an interface (user and network) that makes sense and get on with it.

That’s it. Doesn’t seem that hard. Nothing but hearing aids with wireless receivers combined with a voice recognition operating system in a miniaturized embedded system. I have a place for the charger on my bed stand. When they are announced I will stand in line like a Star Wars conventioneer in a Wookie costume. Look at how many IPods and cell phones are sold each year. This is a massive business opportunity and, given the rate of hearing loss, one potentially fueled by insurance reimbursements.

Ear implants are the most obvious technology to extend my physical capabilities. Steve Austin can keep his legs, but it is time I had his ears.

Gen Shift

My son is in California enjoying the summer: spending time in the Sierras, visiting friends, just goofing off. He barrows a phone every night and calls me to complain that his cell phone is broken. This is ruining his summer.

My son is a high school senior. He and his friends don’t just use computers and cell phones, they depend on them like they do their arms. To them their laptops and cell phones are not better typewriters, faster mail, and more extensive “ten keys”: they are communication, entertainment and social connection. They are extensions of themselves. With them they manage their various personas, chat with friends, hone their skills and show off their capabilities. These devices allow them to express themselves in ways otherwise impossible.

A few minutes in the twitter-verse, on Facebook or in World of Warcraft demonstrate this new social order. We are just beginning to see the profound shift taking place. Don Tapscott, calls this group who are now just entering the workforce the Net Gen. Clay Shirky documents the power of their dynamic social groupings. You should also check out Kevin Kelly who muses convincingly that the Internet in the coming years will by completely different than what we have today.

Attending tech events lately, it is clear I am one of the old guys. But I am an old guy that grew up with technology. I had an HP calculator in 1969. Unlike my friends at college who paid to have papers typed for them, I had an Apple II. I bought a Mac the first day it was available and founded DMUG (Davis Macintosh Users Group).

I know I am old because at my first corporate job in 1986, I was given an office, a Dictaphone and secretarial support. I was expected not to waste my time typing myself. Everywhere I work, I notice that people younger than me use PCs and people older tend to not. I was on the cusp of a generational shift that has helped fuel the greatest increase in productivity ever experienced. But it will pale in comparison to the next one.

We are only just beginning to see is how this generation is going to change the work place. They will get things done in ways the will make today’s meetings, emails, reports and annual budgeting cycles look like Dictaphones and typing pools. Adopting these new work styles, adapting our work environments and putting this new generation to work will be the competitive advantage for the foreseeable future.

Taking my own advice

When should you start a company? This is the quintessential entrepreneurial question. A running debate rages: when do you have a feature rather than a company? When is a company being started because it should be rather than when it merely can be? What does it take to make a company successful? This debate heats up appropriately when exits are plentiful and lots things get funded that shouldn’t.

When potential entrepreneurs ask me when they should start a company? I tell them you should start a company when you can’t do anything else. When you have an idea that has such a grip on you, you can’t sleep at night. When you know it would be far worse not to pursue a venture than to fail miserably trying. If you have any intelligence at all, it is the only way you can do such an irrational thing as start a company.

It is called risk capital for a reason. Over half of all funded ventures fail: by most accounts fewer than 30% succeed in any meaningful way. The exercise of venture investment only becomes rational when 20% of the ventures in aggregate can provide ridiculous returns (better and 10 to 1). With diversity and persistence this looks somewhat rational and perhaps even highly lucrative when managed across multiple funds with portfolios of companies.

But take a specific venture, there is no rational for it being a good idea. In my experience companies succeed when they are meant to succeed; when all the stars align. It is like the old advertising adage: “we know half our advertising is a useless waste of money; we just don’t know which half.”

Don’t get me wrong, you need to do all the right things to succeed: identify a market; develop a compelling value proposition; get the right people; manage your cash well; keep maniacally focused, etc. etc. But all that’s not enough. You also have to have uncanny instinct (or maybe just dumb luck). When a prospective venture posses you, dominates your thoughts, doesn’t let you sleep, and jolts you from aha moment to aha moment yielding seeming clairvoyance, then you know it is time to start a company. New Stealth Co has that grip on me. I am going to build a wildly successful company and it will change the world.

Rufus Cappadocia

Great music. He makes sounds I have never heard from the Cello.



Rufus Cappadocia - "Transformation" from Velour on Vimeo.

He has added an extra string to extend the base. Truely cool stuff.

The creative, innovative and brilliant

Occasionally you see things that are so good they stop you cold, render you dumb, and bring tears to your eyes. These rare things are accessible, incredibly innovative and elegant in their execution. They are in their very essence beautiful. Here are two such things.

The first is an experience in the virtual world. Jonathan Harris is an artist with information. He creates truly amazing explorations of the online world. His work is as mesmerizing and addicting as anything I have seen on the net. - http://wefeelfine.org/



The second is a physical experience: True innovation is making something great with very little. Jonny Lee is perhaps the most brilliant human factor engineer of our time. - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/





Both Jonathan Harris and Johnny Lee were featured at TED, the annual confab that now posts its session online. You should check it out and go back often. TED gives voice to the creative, innovative and brilliant. We all should listen. http://www.ted.org/

The Urban Future

The Urban future has arrived. We entered this century with about 45% of the Global population in cities. The pace of migration from rural to urban is continuing unabated. We may already be at the 50% urban mark, if not we are approaching fast. This is likely a tipping point.

Why are people moving to the cities? Stewart Brand started looking and writing about this several years ago. He sums it up nicely – cities provide education, work (i.e. income) and services. The city provides a better quality of life and higher standard of living than any rural alternative.

The cities are also the planets salvation. A person in a city requires fewer resources to support a comparable quality of life. But most important cities, are population sinks. Birth rates in cities naturally drop from above 5 births woman on average globally in rural areas to less than 2 in developed urban areas. Today birth rates are only 2.1 in developing urban areas in Brazil and India.

Because of accelerating urbanization and an unprecedented change in birth and survival rates, standard population forecasting is proving unreliable. The sky-is-falling “population bomb” predictions of the past are yielding to a growing consensus that we are within a generation of reaching the maximum global population. Many now suggest that the maximum may be in the 8 billion range. Even the UN has declared it is not likely to exceed 9 billion.

Population is not a problem, it’s an indicator. More to the point, “overpopulation” takes care of itself. Our challenge and opportunity is developing new ways to provide productive employment for the high density urban workforce. What does it mean if your potential workforce is not limited to the suburbanites that live within 50 minutes drive of your tilt-up office park? How do you tap the increasingly educated, highly connected, highly motivated workforce in the vibrant urban centers of Shanghai or Dubai; or San Francisco or Portland for that matter?

The housing and education of Shanghai’s exploding population is remarkable. The new Shanghai is more connected and has greater availability of intellectual (and arguably creative) capital than any city in the US or Europe. Mumbai, Dubai, Rio and dozens of other developing urban centers represent the same potential. What could this mean for the business of the future? It changes all the rules. That is why Shanghai is so interesting.

To see the future go to China

I spent the last 10 days in Shanghai. The first thing you notice is scale, the second is smog. Shanghai makes places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle look quaint. It has the density and building size of Manhattan but rather than Manhattan’s 13 by 2 mile foot print with 1.5 million residents, the central planned area of Shanghai is square, about 26 miles on each side, and has over 10 million people. There are 5000 buildings over 18 stories tall in this one city alone.

China is moving large percentages of its population from rural areas into its cities. Their cities have increased by 300 million people in the last decade. This means that China has built urban infrastructure to accommodate a population the size of the US in only the last 10 years.

The governments of China and Shanghai developed the master plan of Shanghai in 1995 and they are on track to complete it by 2010. They are planning an International Expo in 2010 to celebrate this accoumplishment. You can see the master plan at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, a must see if you visit Shanghai.


I was in Shanghai in 2006 when it had 3 subway lines. On this visit they had 8 operating subway lines. They know transportation, especially in the inner city, is one of their largest challenges: so they simultaneously built 5 additional subway lines through an already developed city.

Just to show off they put in a Magnetic Levitation train that runs from the airport some 16 miles into town. It takes 8 minutes for an average of 120 miles per hour. Its top speed is 435 km/hr making it the fastest train on earth.



You can judge China to be good, bad, idyllic or evil: there is no question it is a totalitarian government with a sketchy record on human rights. However you should appreciate the magnitude of the challenge of developing a country with 1.2 billion people. China has literally built a city from the mud that is one of the most highly productive and cosmopolitan on the planet. And in so doing, it is raising the standard of living and quality of life for 10s of millions of Chinese people.

Innovation

Innovation is not about making something different or even better. It is about fundamentally changing our behavior. It is about creating a future: envisioning ways of doing things that are so compelling they are pervasively adopted. It is easy to forget how much innovation we have experienced in the last 25 years. Yesterday TED released the pod cast of a talk by Nicholas Negroponte from 1984.



Despite Orwell’s prescient book, 1984 was a time of command lines and green screens. The IBM Selectric ruled the office and producing office communication generally involved a Dictaphone. Negroponte made convincing arguments for interacting with computers using touch screens and breaking from the linear information delivery of books and journals by adopting electronic hyperlinked information techniques.

I watched the lecture while exercising on a Stairmaster and appropriately used my touch screen IPhone to consume the talk. It is hard to imagine that the potential for an HTML information platform or an elegant multi-touch interface would be questioned as preposterous, improbable, or at best way too expensive to develop, produce, and deploy. But we must remember that the computing power required to drive the interface of an IPhone is many orders of magnitude greater than the entire compute capacity of the 68000 processors of that day.



It is impressive how well the I-touch technology from Apple implements the vision the Negroponte articulated so vividly 25 years earlier. And it’s surprising that it took 25 years for it to happen. The year after he delivered the TED lecture Negroponte opened the Media Lab to explore and commercialize these and other innovations.

Watching Negroponte talk provided some perspective on how dramatic the innovation we will likely experience in the coming years can be. Some innovations like the television or the i-touch interface are serendipitous, allowing us to casually adopt new behaviors based on desire and not imperatives. I am suspect the innovation that dominates the coming decades will be more akin to Jonas Salk’s discovery of the Polio vaccine.

The defining characteristic of human beings is adaptation and our times demand adaptation: the resources we use now are scarce and expensive; populations of the developed world are aging with declining birth rates while the exploding economic demands of the young burgeoning populations of the developing world are warping the global economy; the climate is changing rapidly irreversibly altering our ecosystem; and these are just a few of the challenges we face.

We now get to imagine the future that accommodates these realities and improves our lives at the same time. That’s innovation that maters. We get to do anything but stand still.