I built an Accountabiliteam GPT. This allows you to organize your current network into an awesome team of advisors. I know this thing could use a lot of polishing and there’s a solid number of ways to improve it. For now it’s pretty cool to have an online working version of the tool that does a lot more that other MVPs of the same concept, a google form or just a scrap of paper and a series of questions.

Some years ago I had an idea for an accountability service called Accountabiliteam. The idea was pretty simple, subscribers would say what they are working on and then we would check in to make sure they would be doing what they said they’d do. Not a bad idea, it just needed a mountain of work in order to turn it into the revenue generating beast it has potential to be.
The idea evolved into a tool that would help you organize your phone contacts into a powerful team of advisors. The vision was to build a phone app that would allow you to sort through your contacts and place different people into a range of advisory categories. Relationships, health, finance, career, creative, fashion, education  and other categories. 
Once your advisors had been picked, the app would prompt you to check in with your different advisors with some level of frequency. The app might help track or log your connections so you could track your progress.

This was also one idea in a series of ideas that encouraged connecting with actual people and strengthening your current network as opposed to adding more people to it. Other ideas in that series included…

• Urban Animals: Cycle the blocking off of various neighborhood streets in order to have various animals freely roaming around. 
• Neighborhood Delivery Person: This is just a system that organizes neighbors to offer and receive pick ups / deliveries of things.One big idea here was to build a system that replaces Uber Eats or Door Dash. 
• Food Stamp Collective:  A system to share food resources to help provide healthy and hearty meals to people who might need help with that. 

Accountabiliteam Revenue Plan: 
If a user didn’t have a decent contact they could assign to a particular role, then the app would connect an “expert” in whatever area to advise you and be part of your Accountabiliteam. Basically a Fiverr style model for consulting.
We may charge a small monthly fee for the app to help organize, book, track your Accountabiliteam. Users can text, email or call an expert or AI in order to opt in to additional costs.

There are certainly a few ways to make money with this.
Check in! That’s it. That’s the simplest form of this idea, check in with people. 
When AI became publicly available, I rethought how the Accountabiliteam might work. This is a concept doc of what that might look like.

While AI is super amazing, the beauty of the Accountabiliteam is that it involves  your current network, while AI can be helpful with organizing it, it’s not really needed. 
Here are the basic steps to make that happen. 

1. Identify Your Needs: Assess which areas of life you need guidance in (e.g., finance, health, career).
2. Match Advisors: Assign each role to someone in your network who excels in that area.
3. Fill Gaps: If an area is lacking an advisor, seek out a knowledgeable individual to fill that role.
4. Regular Check-ins: Schedule consistent interactions with your advisors to receive guidance and feedback.
5. Reciprocal Advising: Identify areas where you are the expert and offer your advice to others in your network.

The Accountabiliteam GPT from above will also walk you through this and more. 

Here’s a great game to play whilst going on a walk with a friend… It’s called “That’s not a crow.” 
Here’s how it works.
This is a multiplayer Mad Lib game. The game starts when you hear a crow. 
The first player will start the game by inquiring about the bird sound. 
Player 1: “Wow, listen to that, I wonder what kind of bird that is..” 
The second player responds.
Player 2: “That’s a crow.” 
The game is on. Now there a simple formula to follow.

The first player will say… 
That’s not a (whatever the previous person said) that’s a… 
Pick a Color + Select the Past tense of a body part +select a Location+ Warbler. 

Below is a simple form selector for ideas…

For example… 

That’s not a crow, that’s a blue-eyed Kentucky Warbler. 
Then you take turns repeating the previous bird name and replacing it with a new one. 
That’s not a Blue Eyed Kentucky Warbler, that’s an Orange fingered Mountain Warbler…. 

The game continues until all possibilities are exhausted.

The day after I read a news story about a man being arrested in Florida for having an “I Eat Ass Decal” on his truck. I thought it would be a savvy way to make some money.  I do have this decal machine just sitting here. 
My thinking was to make something slightly more eloquent than the available I Eat Ass decals and stickers on the market. So I found a font I liked and quickly produced a batch of decals. In the shadow of this news story, this was bound to make a substantial amount of money…. an easy sell, that is if I act quickly to get the product up for sale, maybe some photos, marketing, advertising, and all that other stuff. That was like a month or so ago. 
While the news story buzz kind of died down and I probably missed out on some quick sale, I still think there’s a great demand for these decals. 
People seemed to enjoy the decals and I’ve given a lot away. In this customer research, I realized that some people didn’t really like the I Eat Ass decals and that I might be able to reach a larger audience creating another decal. Someone suggested that I do a “You are Beautiful” decal and said that people like to be reminded of that, I agreed. 
In order to maximize time and resources, it made the most sense for me to get rid of the “are” in You are Beautiful. The resulting “You Beautiful” decal still makes sense and I learned the linguistic term for this is called a copula deletion or zero copula. It works and also allows me to make a decal that would fit into the 6” envelopes I already owned making shipping a lot easier. It also cut back on production time for the decals and I think looked better too. 

I’m guessing anyone offended or upset with the I Eat Ass decal will most likely purchase a You Beautiful decal. This is known as a “double bind”, creating a false sense of choice… similar to when you go car shopping and the salesperson asks if you will be paying with cash or a card but intentionally excludes other options. 
The two decals are both available online.

I Eat Ass decal

You Beautiful decal

An Ignite talk I gave through the TAO.

Click here to see on YouTube.

Despite my admittedly horrible game concept that I shared with a select few, I got some good support from some people I had just met. This demonstrates to me a wonderfully open and resourceful community of game makers who are willing and able to be supportive of even the dumbest of ideas presented.

I had my video camera with me to capture some of the feel and excitement of the PIGSquad meeting.

A lot of people at this PIGSquad meeting used Unity to help produce games. I saw some space shooter game that this guy cranked out in like a week using Unity and free open source graphics. I was impressed.. although I wasn’t a fan of how the guns shot.

I saw a lot of people with pens and paper and that’s kind of the way I like to work when it comes to developing stuff. I was sort of drawn to flashing lights though.

Mimic was one multiplayer game that I totally destroyed someone I was playing against. It’s sort of hard to explain but basically your character that you are playing comes back from the past as a clone and plays for you in the future if that makes any sense. It makes for some awesome strategy when it comes to playing against someone.

I talked with someone that helped release a game called Starship Rubicon, it’s a pretty awesome looking game too that seems to combine some of my favorite aspects of games, shooting and strategy.

For the next PIGSquad meeting, I hope to have a working prototype of my dumb game and perhaps a couple of awesome ideas for it.

“Two Kates” is a 7-part monthly web series that can be seen for free at TwoKatesShow.com, with each episode also airing on Portland’s local community-access television stations.

After watching the first episode, I have to say it exceeds my expectations and left me wanting more.
Watch the first and future episodes here…
http://twokates.tumblr.com/episodes

I had a chance to talk with the creator and star of Two Kates

Initially I saw a video Zach put up on indiegogo after watching that video I was sold on this project. The show is well produced and obviously Zach, Kate and everyone involved have dedicated a lot of time and energy to make this happen.

Currently the Facebook page for Two Kates has 82 followers as I write this. The show has just been released, I would imagine that number to grow as more episodes follow. It intrigues me to think about how difficult it is to produce anything and to grow a large audience for it. Right now I feel somewhat elite in knowing that this show has just been released. I’m looking forward to following the growth of this show and the audience along with it.

I’m guessing that it won’t be long before Netflix or Hulu comes along and start giving creators like Zach decent budgets to run with.

Don’t forget to check out the first episode and like the Facebook page…

Mike is a cofounder of a startup called Chroma that helps distribute royalties to investors and contributors who produce products. So basically a simplified way to manage something that is somewhat complex.

Chroma is part of the Oregon Story Board accelerator program and they are demoing their product along with others on January 9th at Hollywood Theater.

Mike is a perfect person to help me bring back the boring conversations with interesting people series. Our walk takes us along the SE Esplanade, where we experience interesting technical issues that I hope to sort out in future videos. Enjoy…

I’ve been loving the Vine app from twitter lately. It’s an app that allows you to share short videos and animations with you friends. Check out some more vines I’ve made.

Going to the movie theater costs more now than ever before. Shouldn’t you be able to see every second of the movie you pay for?

The solution is to have the theater set up more like home  and simply providing each member of the audience the ability to pause the movie when needed, this would allow audience members not to miss a second of their favorite films. With a theater like this even those with the smallest of bladders won’t be afraid to go out to the movies any more.

Each seat in this revolutionary theater would be equipped with some simple controls that would allow the viewer to pause the movie when they might need to.

When a viewer needs to go to the bathroom for instance, they would simply hit the pause button on their armrest then proceed to the bathroom. When they return to their seat, by pushing the “resume” or “play” button, the movie will continue right where it had left off.

In order for the movie to play, every seat must be in “Play” mode. This give everyone an opportunity to freely go about important business that may otherwise disrupt the movie.

For epically long movies like the Hobbit this type of theater is a must.

Nature calling will no longer be an issue for such long movies, hitting the pause button will give you what ever amount of time you might need to carry out your business.

If you are hungry and need some healthy snacks from the concession booth, pause the movie, get some snacks and return to continue the movie right where you left.

I know at home it’s nice to pause the movie to fact check things pertaining to the movie, so now you will have time to do such tasks.

With a theater like this it really puts the audience in control. When you pay top dollar for a movie experience you shouldn’t have to miss the movie just because you have a tiny bladder or have important phone calls coming in.

You are probably wondering what might happen if the movie is paused and you are part of the audience who doesn’t need to go to the bathroom or get a snack or whatever…

Well, in addition to pausing the movie the remaining audience members in the theater would be shown a variety of consumer opportunities until the movie resumed again. It’s really win win.

After meeting with David Butts from Mad Dog Garage. I was inspired to develop something with working gears, my initial idea was to build a wristband fidget device. Since wristband watches seem to be more of an accessory items, I figured a device on the wrist doesn’t really need to tell time. A wristband watch is kind of a stylish way to stay connected to the past really.

While rethinking the purpose of a wristband device, I thought it might be interesting to have a small printing press that would print out something simple like a small strip of paper with your name and phone number on it. Business cards are also not totally necessary anymore so anyone who has them must be important. With this printing press you will be able to quadrupally impress someone by having your own business card, wristband watch type device, your own printing press and the simple fact that you can demonstrate you know how to be stylish and practical.

The simple device would be fed a piece of paper where it would then be trimmed and printed on with a few turns of a wheel.

Printing presses are quite impressive.

It will be a lot of work but with this idea, I’m going to try to make some prototypes and perhaps get a kickstarter going for it in order make this idea more of a reality.