User Generated Content

My Top Music from 2012

2013-01-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

Around the holiday break each year I try to spend some time listening to the best music from the previous year and I spend the first month or so trying to come up to speed on what was new in the last year of music. While many of my friends think there has been no good music since Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, I would beg to differ.

So for those friends who want to put down the cassette tapes and try something new, I humbly submit that these were some of the best artists making music in 2012 in no particular order other than loose groupings by take of music:

Hillbilly / Country / Yalternative

Mumford and Sons - Not only did the sell a ton of music, it was a ton of awesome music. In my 20s, if you told me that I would be vaguely listening to hill billy music I would have laughed. Somehow, here I am. I blame the Grateful Dead. Mumford and Sons followed up their last awesome effort with an almost as good follow on. This is a must have.

Avett Brothers - I don't like them nearly as much as Mumford, but they have a great sound and I find that the more I listen the more I like.

Hippie

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Not as good as the debut but still full of a lot of hippy 60s good lovin.

Blues and R&B

Jack White - Jack White is amazing. Whether it is The White Stripes, The Raconteurs or any of his other projects, he is always top notch. I am sure we will look back over time and he will be thought of as one of the top notch artists of our time. Blunderbuss is an AMAZING work. Buy it.

Alabama Shakes - My neighbor and camping buddy Dave turned me on to them and while it took a bit to get used to the voice the first go around, it really grew on me and I like it a lot. It is consistently on a ton of top 10 lists all over the place.

The Heavy - Following up from the work that had "How you like me now?" from the movie The Fighter, this one continues in the rocking tradition of music that I swore was James Brown. I recommend What Makes A Good Man.

Frank Ocean - AWESOME album. Not something I would normally listen to but really infectious. Pretty much a consistent top 5 on people's year end list and if you listen you will get it.

Electronic / Indie / Experimental

MNDR - Ok, it is my sister in law, but I swear, check out this performance from The David Letterman show. Her debut work had a ton of great tracks and I can't wait to see what she does next. Great remixes on Hype Machine too...

Santigold - The artist MNDR is compared to a bunch. The band has a great sound that is really catchy and puts them at the forefront of what is happening in dancehall electronic etc.

Passion Pit - Loved the last one and love this one too. I Take A Walk has got to be the happiest song of 2012.

Alt J - Eclectic and very listenable. It is one that grows on you and drives you to obsession.

the XX - One of my favorite bands of the last several years. Wonderful, rich, haunting music with a voice to die for.

Bat for Lashes - New to me this year like a couple of others. Really well done though with lots of great tracks.

Of Monsters and Men - I am still not sure about the whole record but I am still in the early part of this growing on me and might even throw it in the same grouping as Mumford.

Gotye - I don't like most of this one. I do love the big track Someone I Used to Know. That sounds just seemed to play all year long last year and I still like it...

Punk and Rock

I will admit that I didn't get to spend as much time this last holiday break digging in the crates for my fill of what is truly my bread and butter music, but these three jumped out and even hit the mainstream to some extent...

The Mars Volta - I was dying for the new record and it didn't disappoint. Unfortunately it seems that the At The Drive In reunion might have taken them off the circuit for touring in support of this one but nonetheless it is a great addition to their discography.

Japandroids - Holly crap, these guys hit it out. I loved the track Art Czars from their last go around but this whole record is rocking and awesome and on a ton of top 10 lists all over the place. Must buy.

Titus Andronicus - Not as strong as the last one, but still a rollicking fun punk rock kind of record.

All the links here are to Hype Machine, my hands down favorite music discovery tool. You can play songs from all the artists there but I highly recommend you click to the blogs who wrote about the bands and find some more awesomeness of your own.

Google+ for iPad

2012-07-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

I want to like Google+. Seriously. I am an Android user on mobile even though I use Apple everything else. Mac, Ipad and AppleTV (both of them). Google+ highlights the value of "the conversation" for me. For most of my friends and family, the conversation is on Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. Since that is the case for me, Google+ is like talking to myself, in a weird room where only Robert Scoble and Bill Gross post. Good stuff though for what it's worth. The most valuable thing for me so far has been Google+ contact integration in Android and hangouts.

Hangouts are a really good collaboration tool and to me it kicks the shit out of Skype. When I have to talk to more than one person I always use Hangouts.

Google came out with a new iPad version of Google+ today and while it looks great and does all the stuff you would expect of a higher end tablet application, it is Hangouts that has me excited. We did a 3 way conference call at work this afternoon and it was amazing. The iPad seamlessly handled all the audio and video and was drop dead simple to use. The best part for me was the nice switching between the various speakers during the conversation. If you do remote collaboration and have an iPad I would highly recommend using it.

Random Things I Am Using

2012-07-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

Started using two new applications in the last couple of days and thought it might be fun to share some of the stuff I have been playing with that is new/cool.

Voxer - I had this on my tech to do list for a long time but couldn't really figure out why I would want to use Push To Talk Technology (PTT). One of the fantasy football leagues I am in insisted that we all use it so I signed up and overnight had something like 70 messages where two guys were going back and forth about how awesome they are and then talked about all kinds of nonsense. You have to love starting out with Spam. Aside from that though, it is a really cool tool for doing asynchronous group messaging and once we get the other guys to figure it out I am sure it will be frequently used.

Google Drive - Saw the Fred Wilson post on Dropbox vs. Drive and installed the Mac client. So now I have Dropbox, Drive and Pogoplug. Interestingly Pogoplug is the only one that I think really helps me with anything as the others have such a small size ( 5 gigs) and the main use for me is to do things like archive photos and movies which require 10s of gig.

Waze - Waze rules. I am not even going to tell you what it is, you just have to get it. There. Just kididing. Waze is a crowd sourced navigation tool that does really cool stuff like tell you where the cops are and where there are accidents etc. The speed trap finding capabilities and the smart traffic routing when you are driving in places like LA make this a very frequently used app for me.

My new company - ScoreStream

2012-04-23T10:36:00.001-07:00

I just recently started a new company called ScoreStream. I posted our first post here. Please take a look and check out our application here.

Theme: Personal Automation

2011-10-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of posts about technology themes that I outlined in my last post. This post is about Personal Automation.

To begin, what is personal automation? When I first think about personal automation, the first thing that pops into my mind were the "intelligent agents" people spoke about when the Internet was just coming into vogue. People would wake up and the news tailored to them would be delivered to them by programmatic agents that gathered things of interest to them.

Today there are no shortage of services that offer features like that, but when I think about personal automation I think about it at a more nuts and bolts level. By that I think of it as a fairly straightforward combination of programs, rules, notifications and web services. I will explain that more, but I think that this way of thinking about it is fairly broad and allows for personal automation on a broad scale and this also highlights how big the opportunity is. I plan on walking through a number of examples and services to illustrate the point.

Why does personal automation matter or more specifically what is the benefit? To me there are 3 key benefits of using personal automation. The first one is that you can adjust your technology or delivery of information based on context. Examples of that might be "turn my phone on silent between 10 PM and 6 AM", or "If I am home or at work turn on the wifi of my phone on and turn it off when I leave" or "If there is any new information about my fantasy football roster send me an instant message." Context is huge. At work or at certain times of the day I may want things sent to me or blocked based on the work context.

The second benefit to me is that you are able to shift off work into the background and allow your technology to work for you. I don't need to scour blogs for information on a topic. I can have them sent to me. I don't have to wonder what the weather is going to be like today, I can have my phone read my the forecast when I wake up.

The final benefit which is closely related to the 2nd is the benefit of set and forget. If I am willing to do some work on the front end, I can enable a variety of services to perform in the background and know that they will continue on unless I intervene to stop them. While that may not seem like a big deal to some, using these types of technology allows you to structure how you work and also allows you to protect yourself by giving you self imposed "time outs".

Ok, so lots of jargon speak. What EXACTLY are you talking about. I think the best way to do that is to walk through the services I use as an example. In general I am going to discuss this as it relates to web services, mobile devices and other devices.

Web Services

Notify.me - A couple of my friends who are some of my favorite entrepreneurs started a service called notify.me that unfortunately they recently shuttered. I was an advisor to the company and I totally got the value proposition but unfortunately they didn't come to a clear business model and other projects ultimately led them to the conclusion that it was better to shutter it and refer users to other services. When it was up I used Notify.me almost every day over a 2 year period. The basic service allowed users to subscribe to a feed or some information source and then direct information to some communication output. The output could be email, SMS or instant messaging. In my case I used instant messaging which allowed me to not get text messages around the clock, only when I was at my computer working.

My three main use cases were A. Realtime fanatsy football news, B. Hacker News updates and C. Updates to a wide variety of music blogs I follow. In each case there was a different value proposition to me. Recency of information is an advantage in fantasy football. Hacker News is a good way to monitor real time tech stories and the music blog subscriptions was a serendipitous way to remember some great sources of music that I rarely visit. For other users certain use cases were stock prices, ebay bidding, craigslist postings and system administration notifications.

While I am bummed for the guys that it didn't work out, it was a great inspiration for me in thinking about how this sort of automation is valuable.

IFTTT.com - When notify.me went dark, they directed users to two different services, one which wasn't live yet and IFTTT.com which stands for If This Then That. The scope of what they are trying to accomplish is much broader than what Notify.me set out to do. On the one hand, I think that makes the tool more powerful, it also creates a slightly higher bar for users to get up and running. To me this is driven primarily by the fact that the sources of data and output are so broad that it may be difficult for a casual user to get their head around it. One way that the founders address this problem is that they allow users to create recipes that are a blueprint for others to use the service. If you have any interest in the topic of this post then I highly encourage you to check out the service, it is super cool and very useful and the investment of time has a great payoff.

For me, I sue the service primarily to replace the fantasy football aspect that I used with Notify.me. It covers off the exact same feed with the only difference being that the output is directed to a Google Talk client and not a generalized jabber client. Because it is Google Talk and I have an android phone, I get the messages on my phone 24/7 and not only when my computer is on. I am sure I can figure out a way around this but hopefully there will be a general solution that I can use later on my iChat or Adium client on my Mac.

Several other examples of tasks I have created are as follows:

If the forecast for my home is rain tomorrow I get a text message

If I send a text message to a certain phone number provided by IFTTT, a google calendar event is created on my schedule. In this case I can say things like lunch tomorrow at noon with Shawn and it works flawlessly. I also use Google voice recognition to send the text, sort of like what has been demonstrated with SIRI.

If the temperature at home tomorrow is going to be above 75 degrees I get a text message telling me that tomorrow will be a warm day.

If anyone I follow on Twitter posts a link to an article, the article is saved to Instapaper for reading later. I have to turn this one off alot and I also have been unfollowing some folks who overshare.

Finally if anyone new follows me on Twitter, I get a phone call to my cell telling me.

While not all of these are entirely important to me, the breadth of what they are doing is really impressive and if they can get the user up to speed quickly I think they will have success although I think a lot of the business model issues that notify.me faced will be similar but hopefully scale helps to solve that problem.

Originally I had intended to address several other services but in the interest in not rambling on I will just mention that I use Google alerts almost daily to track specific news items and topics and I also use Last.fm both to chronicle what I am listening to but also to check out what my friends are listening to as well.

Mobile Services

The advent of smartphones has had a transforming effect on mobility from simple communication to full blown computing in the palm of your hand. In terms of personal automation the intersection of this computing combined with GPS and other device capabilities has created some interesting services and opportunities. I'd like to mention a couple of the services that I have found useful in this regard.

Locale - When Android debuted with the G1, Locale was without question the coolest application on my phone. While I have a Macbook Pro, and Ipad2 and an Ipad Touch, the ability for Android to run things like Locale in the background has kept me a die hard Android user since the beginning.

Locale has changed a bunch since I first started using it, but the first couple of use cases for me were to post a message to Twitter every time I arrived at an airport. This was pretty cool when you think about it because Locale would use the GPS to determine my location and then use the Twitter application to send a pre set message based on the airport I was near.

Locale events are triggered off of conditions. Default conditions include Battery level, a contact interaction, location, device orientation and time. Based on those conditions you can change settings for Bluetooth, screen brightness, ringtone, screen timeout, volume, wallpaper and wifi settings.

Currently I have a couple of settings enabled. My primary one is to turn wifi on at home and work and then turn it off when I am not in those locations. This saves my battery and also enables wifi calling for me at home as my reception with the carrier is not that good at home. The other main setting I use is that when my phone is face down on a desk, the phone turns to silent. When I set it face up it turns on again.

This is simple out of the box Locale. Locale also created a developer framework that has resulted in several hundred plugins for Locale to do things like send messages on Twitter, integrate with email programs, integrate with productivity software and do some cool stuff with a variety of the phones device capabilities. Bottom line with Locale though is that it is really simple and easy to use.

Tasker - Tasker and Locale share many of the same types of features and in fact support a lot of the same plugins. The big difference with Tasker and Locale is that Locale is like a Mac and Tasker is like Unix. You can do almost anything to your phone without a plugin if you can learn to program with the Tasker scripting UI. It is super powerful and really hard to use if you don't spend the time with it. It is, without a doubt, bad ass.

I have spent some time with Tasker and currently use it for the following:

My phone turns off the ringer, wifi and bluetooth everynight at 10 PM and turns them all back on at 6 AM.

At 7AM each morning, my phone speaks the weather forecast for my home.

I had Tasker doing some more of the wifi stuff but found that for some reason the GPS setting are more responsive on Locale. For the less technically inclined, Tasker has "profiles" which are like IFTTT recipes but you can download them to your phone and configure them. A ton of the coolest ones like turn on my bluetooth and go into car phone mode when driving (using your speed as the variable) were disabled by Gingerbread which made it impossible for non rooted devices to switch the GPS receiver on and off.

There are other cool mobile personal automation applications but these are by far the most noteworthy to me at this time.

Other devices

There are a grab bag of other devices that I would consider personal automation and will briefly highlight a few of them including our chumby devices.

chumby - Why not start with my most familiar? ;-) I would argue that chumby is one of the most awesome personal automation devices in that it brings stuff to you like the "intelligent assistant" example at the beginning. More directly though I think there are some clever ways I use my chumby. My sister in law is a rock star and one of the ways we keep track of her is to subscribe to all the Flickr photos that are tagged with her name MNDR. At my desk at work and in my kitchen at home we periodically get to see new pictures of her when she is out on tour.

I also subscribe to things like Foursquare on chumby which keeps me notified when people happen to be around in San Diego and it is a reminder to reach out. Others use chumby to wake up to Pandora or in some cases run things that monitor their home power consumption!

Eyefi - My friend Mike who is a professional photographer turned me on to Eyefi a while back. Eyefi is essentially a wifi enabled SD card for your camera. No more forgetting to transfer pcitures. Whenever my caemra is on and in wifi range, it starts automatically uploading the images to my computer. How sweet is that?

Time Capsule - After one near epic photo-apocalypse, I became a devoted backup fan. Unfortunately until I had a time machine backing up actually meant remembering to back up. With Time Machine I have a hard drive at home and a hard drive at work that automatically keeps an up to date image of my laptop at all times.

Two last mentions to conclude. One is X10. I have three unopened boxes of X10 home automation devices that I can't wait to install in the house. Unfortunately I have had them for over 6 months and I can't seem to find the time to break them open. One day soon.

The last one is Google Power Meter / SDGE smart meter. My home has a smart meter and I apparently am the only person who used this service so Google has shut it down. the biggest drawback thus far has been that all of the data come to you several days later which sucks. You need the information real time if you want to get people to conserve power. Show me burning money on a bonfire pile and I will turn off the dishwasher. Let me do it from my smartphone on the road? Even better. There is still a long ways to go on smart energy but at least companies like SDGE are laying the foundations to make it possible.

Conclusion

This is only the tip of the ice berg. As computing becomes ubiquitous and embedded in all of our devices, we will be able to do some amazing things. Many of the sci fi scenarios from old movies won't just be possible, they will be a daily part of our lives. As a consumer I will continue to keep a close eye on this and keep on the front end of seeing how this develops. I would welcome any tips or pointers for other great services I might be missing in the comments.

Themes in Technology

2011-10-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

A friend the other day asked me what sort of stuff is interesting to me in technology right now. I said a ton of stuff and started rattling off a lot of things I use or things I am interested in. As I thought about it more it sounded like a scattered list of things but fundamentally there are some commonality and classification if I spent some time thinking about it. Actually one of the most articulate ways I have seen this sort of classification presented is on the Foundry Group VC website where they talk about what they look at from an investment standpoint. Other VCs refer to this as their "investment thesis" in certain categories but I think Foundry does a great job laying things out and giving good examples of what the theme means and a selection of companies that represent the theme.

In addition to the conversation with my friend, I also realized that when Google + launched that I had some boiler plate about me stuff that represented what I was interested in back in 2004 and not necessarily what I am interested in in 2011. That is not to say that I am not still interested in those things, which in many cases I still am, it is just that with time and the change in technology I think a lot of those things have either been refined or have changed substantially. In any case, I have sort of hit the wall with the social networking sites and miss my blog so I thought it would be fun to share the themes that occupy my free thoughts and share some of the things that I either purchase or use on a frequent basis that are examples of those themes for me.

So going back to that old profile stuff from 2004, I think a recap is a good place to start. My blog description says "regarding things like user generated content, content in general, technology and media." Nice and broad I suppose. At the time there was an explosion of things like blogs and photosharing sites and the early SNS sites like Friendster and Ryze and Linkedin. I was certainly interested in those things and still find that with the exception of my blog, these things are still big powerful forces where I use the products or consume information from sites like that. Having worked in digital media and both the music and film business, I still find content very interesting and certainly am still very interested in media, both in the sense of media as something a consumer watches, sees, reads, etc. as well as media in the way of advertising and advertising technology.

With that said, at chumby there is a lot of work that has been done with getting content onto interesting CE devices and also working with TV and TV related products. We are also working to create advertising opportunities for our partners and think that there are some novel and interesting ways to do that. In hindsight then, I really have spent a lot of time on the things I thought I would and hope to continue to do so.

When I stop though and look at what else I am interested in today, I see things grouped into a couple of categories that I think are worth sharing with my friends and others who might be interested. I hope over the next several weeks to write a couple of posts that walk through these in detail but for now I would like to highlight these themes that occupy my waking hours when I am not busy at work.

The following is a brief classification and explanation of those areas for me:

Personal Automation - There are a number of services and products that automate tasks and make my life easier. They range from online services like ifttt.com, to mobile applications like Tasker for Android, to actual hardware devices like Eyefi SD cards and X.10 devices. Some of these are extremely powerful and I think that there will be an increase in new developments in this area as connectivity becomes more pervasive and computing becomes ubiquitous in devices below the traditional computing platforms.

Quantified Self - Not really sure how to describe this category other than to pay homage to the website that hits the crux of this category. I have been using Nike+ since July of 2009. I love this service and even though I am not a fan of Nike shoes it has converted me into a repeat buyer. Other items like scales from Withings, hear rate monitors with web integration and devices like Fitbit are all at the front end of a wave of personal measurement for health and exercise related activities. As a power user I see a lot of opportunity in this category.

Smart Parsing - The proliferation of developer platforms and API access has created amazing opportunities for people to integrate on top of existing data-sets and social graph information. While gaming is huge, I am very interested in what I would refer to as "smart parsing". Examples of this are products like Tripit, which integrate Linkedin with an awesome tool that ingests information from a variety of sources, or Expensify that takes credit card data and integrates receipt gathering from smartphones or Instapaper which takes articles and cleans them for reading on devices like tablets. I think that there is an infinite amount of opportunity for people to create exciting and interesting derivatives that results from the free flow of data between applications and that the critical piece is how you use parsing to create a good end user experience.

Post PC devices - You could say tablets but I think that is a part of it. I use my Ipad every day. I also use a smartphone every day. I use an Ipod touch most days. As we move to using these devices more frequently, or also start using things like Chrome netbooks, there are a number of problems that need to be addressed that are created by theses devices. A big chunk of it falls into the "cloud" bucket, and I think that there is a lot to be done there, but there are also a lot of things that need to be dealt with around user experience and UI. Computing beyond the desktop is a huge opportunity.

Productivity - There are so many awesome services that I use every day that make me more productive. I use almost all of the Omni Applications products daily. People on my teams have used 37 signals products at the last three companies I have been at. I use Pogoplug, Dropbox and Evernote almost every day. As we increase the amount of information we consume and increase the various ways we consume it, relying on productivity tools to manage the flow is going to become more critical for more people and that seems like a big opportunity to me.

There are several other areas that are of interest to me, but I think that they are a bit more nebulous to me in terms of how I define them so I am going to skip writing something long about them them for now but will share what I think they are.

Sports and technology - As a fantasy sports addict there are a number of tools that make my life easier and yet them still generally suck. Lots of upside there. Also, with kids in sports there are some amazing tools like Hudl that allow us to go through gam film with my son that re really cool but really rudimentary at this point.

Identity and Privacy - This is huge, very difficult, and one of the biggest challenges the tech community faces. It is also still early days and one could write on this forever. It certainly is something I think about all the time but can't say that there are a lot of awesome services or products I am happy with right now.

Startup of 1 - This is really a mix of a lot of the things in the other categories but bottom line a person with a great idea has so many tools at their disposal that it is become increasingly easy to literally be a 1 man (or woman) show. Probably worth a post at some time, but not in this series.

Ok, so that is a start. Excited to start blogging again and can't wait to get going on the five areas outlined above. Stay tuned.

Randy Lofgren, R.I.P.

2011-07-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a trip of the lifetime, rowing down the Grand Canyon for 6 days. While the trip was amazing, I climbed out of the Grand Canyon to get the news that my Uncle Randy has passed away while I was gone. It was sort of uncanny to me as we hadn't talked in a while but had a good long chat the day before I left on my vacation.

My Uncle was always around throughout my childhood. There were a bunch of years where he lived with us and with my real father divorced and usually out of state, and my step father almost always overseas, my Uncle was certainly a big impact on me as a father figure. He was a giant of a man around 6'4", who was liked by all and extremely friendly and outgoing. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts about my Uncle.

As a child I remember driving with my mom to pick him up from his Navy ship in Long Beach.

I remember the time when he had a full face cast from a bad motorcycle accident and he would scare the living shit out of me pretending to be the Gila monster. I must have been 4 or 5 back then.

He took me on my first camping trip up in Big Bear near the gold mines.

He took me on my first fishing trips.

He took me on my first motorcycle ride.

He was probably the first person to take me out shooting guns, and if he wasn't the first, we certainly did it a lot together.

He would discipline me when I was just about to enter my teens and my mom would try to spank me and I would laugh at her.

He took me to Vegas for the first time on a "fishing trip" to Lake Mead and my brother and I stayed up pretty much all night playing video games while he gambled.

I will never be able to listen to The Eagles, The Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys without thinking about times driving around in his muscle cars through the desert.

Simply put, he was a good man who meant a lot to me and even though I spent very little time with him over the last 20 years, his influence and impact on me has been with me through all of my years. My uncle was a big part in helping to make me who I am today.

I will miss him dearly, and will always hold those memories we shared deep in my heart.

Rest in peace dear Uncle.

The last one at the party

2011-03-23T10:55:00.001-07:00

Techcrunch just posted this article here. The headline says amazingly that the Myspace decline is accelerating.

This absolutely isn't surprising and in fact makes total sense. One of the dynamics of community sites is the "empty room" problem at startup. Nobody wants to be the first one to the party and would be happening places have to figure out how to address that issue. Once you gain the "cool" factor then it is a race to the top. That is until you aren't cool anymore. Then it is a race to the bottom as nobody wants to be the last one at the party when the party is over. There was a good article about this I read several years ago that actually showed this with math and I think they used Friendster as the example. If I find it I will post.

The chumby8 is getting ready to ship!

2011-03-22T20:30:00.001-07:00

Did a blog post on the corporate website here.

Tech docs can be found here.

You can pre-order the new chumby8 here.

Cookbooks 2011

2011-03-16T21:23:00.001-07:00

At the end of the year each year I like to sample all the new music and spend time keeping myself current on "what the kids are listening to". In addition to this I also like to pick up a couple of new cookbooks that are either critically acclaimed or are in an area that I am trying to learn. I wanted to share the 4 cookbooks I picked up around the end of last year and the beginning of this one.

The first book I am in love with is "Around my French Table". You can find the Amazon link here. This book was at the top of most of the food blogger lists this last year and having spent a month or two reading throughout the book, I can only say that this is the best French cookbook in my collection by far. While there are a lot of the crazy complicated French recipes, I would say that the vast majority are straightforward and very accessible.

The second book I grabbed this year from the food bloggers was "Stir-Frying to the sky's edge". Amazon link here. I decided this year that I was going to master wok cooking as I have become a master at seasoning pans and I am excited by doing fun things with vegetables. I received a very nice electric wok for Christmas so the whole seasoning a pan went out the window but I have had some fun getting ready to dig into the book in a big way. The book covers a great range of things you can do with Asian inspired foods in the stir fry tradition.

The other two books were not blogging inspired but were actually the cookbooks of two of my favorite restaurants over the last year.

The first book was from London based Wagamama. The cookbook I picked up was "The Wagamama Cookbook" and the link is here. This book was a best of cookbook selection from 2007. My office in London was right next to the Covent Garden Wagamama and I was always pumped to eat their spicy chili mein. As soon as I bough the book I cooked this recipe back to back over two days. This book is awesome and was a great companion to my other stir fry book, although this is less about stri fry and more about noodles and other things.

The last book I picked up was "Kokkari: Contemporary Greek Flavors". The book is not available yet but you can pre-order it here. I bought the book directly at the restaurant as I believe it is by far the best restaurant in San Francisco right now and I try to eat there whenever I get the chance. I generally eat at the bar and usually eat a variety of mezes, which are Greek tapas style dishes. Their Gigantes, Asparagus, and Brussels sprouts dishes are to die for. I like it so much that this morning I cooked the sprouts dish for breakfast this morning as I am trying to perfect the dish. If you get to SF, eat here and if you don't get the chance, get this book when it comes out.

Chumby screen saver

2010-10-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

Having a little fun with chumby as a software platform...here.

Blogging at work

2010-10-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Just made my first work blog post here. Will keep things mostly personal or unrelated to work on this place.

Androidboss website plagiarized my post

2010-10-07T08:48:00.001-07:00

My post yesterday about the G2, was directly lifted by some guy named shadow at a website called Androidboss.com. Unbelievable. No attribution, no changing. They directly copied it and posted it as their own. I think this article here is a good gameplan for people who face a similar situation.

My G2 review

2010-10-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

Today is the day most people can buy the new Tmobile G2 phone. I was fortunate to receive a device late last week and have had almost a week to play with it. As this is my fifth Android device (G1, Droid, Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy) I have a lot of experience with this mobile OS. For the purpose of this post I think there are 5 areas worth commenting on: hardware, setup, usage, HSPA and applications.

Hardware - The G2 is a hefty little device. I actually feel like having some heft is a good thing in a device. Of the devices I have had, the G2 weighs in as the heaviest at 6.5 ozs. I thought the Droid was actually heavier but it in reality is lighter at 5.99 ozs. Maybe the boxy industrial design gave me that impression. This is contrasted with the G1 which was 5.6 ozs. and the ultra light Samsung Galaxy device which is an amazing 4.59 ozs. For a non-Android comparison, the iPhone 4 is 4.8 ozs. It is interesting to me how close in weight the iPhone and the Galaxy are, but how much more solid the iPhone appears. As far as durability, I think the G2, Droid and iPhone all seem fairly similar in that regard.

The G2 to me, looks a lot like a beefed up Nexus One. The faceplate appearance is a slightly more squarish version of the Nexus One, but that is where the difference ends. The G2 has an amazing spring loaded slide action that is as strong as what I saw on the Helio devices back in the day. Not quite a switchblade locking action, but a strong spring loaded slide up. The keyboard is gorgeous and most closely resembles the Sidekick 2 with slightly raised rubberized buttons.

Setup - Like all Android devices, you need to be bought into the whole Google thing to experience the full range of the device. In my case that means I am a user of Gmail at work, I have all my contacts in Google Contacts and I use Google voice. With a simple login with your Google credentials you have a quick OTA update of the relevant services and before I knew it, my 1800+ contacts were loaded and ready to go. Two additional comments on setup. Thus far, I have had to load back every application when I set up a device. It would be great to have your application profile saved so that when you migrate from one device to the next you don't have to go back and redownload all the applications. iTunes has Google beat on this front in that an iTunes sync to a new device does all that the Google OTA stuff does but it also brings over your applications. I am sure that is either fixed and I don't know it, or it will be fixed.

Usage - The device works great. One of my big concerns was that the processor has a slower clock speed than the Nexus One with 800 mhz vs. 1 gigahertz. I am not sure if there are memory optimizations or other things that make the speed comparable, but I have yet to notice any speed differences between the two devices.

One last thing on Usage, one of the primary things that I love about 2.2 Froyo, is the Car mode and how unbelievably amazing voice search and voice controls are when I am driving. I connect my phone with my Blue Ant hands free and basically toss the phone in the seat next to me.

HSPA - I can't say that I have any concrete comments about the HSPA network speed vs. my previous experience with Tmobile's network in general. I am sure that with time I will have a clearer perspective. Two things I have done to test out speed that are worth noting were traveling down the freeway at maximum speed limit and streaming NFL Sunday ticket this last Sunday morning between San Onofre and North San Diego county. I wasn't watching the video necessarily (wink) but rather was tracking the audio via my hands free as a means to listen to the game. I had zero interruptions over approximately a 30 mile drive while streaming video. I think that is a positive test. The second and less tasking has been streaming Sirius XM over the device over the last several days, which also has worked well.

Applications - It is probably worth another post sometime as I use about 20 different applications frequently, but there are a couple worth mentioning now. Vlingo does a great job filling the gaps for me when I feel like Google Voice products don't quite do the job. Car Home is a noteworthy 2.2 application, providing an easy to use card dashboard for search, calling and navigation.

Summary - Since I am not in mobile anymore, I was really hoping that the G2 was a phone I can use for the next year or two. After a week of putting it through the paces, there is no question to me that this phone definitely fits the bill. My only concern is that all the innovation by OEMs is going to make me want to switch sooner than I should. HTC has done a great job with this device and I am sure the other leading OEMs are going to do their best to one up them.

Some Nice Press

2010-10-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

Local tech press did a nice write up here.

I am an Android

2010-09-29T21:56:00.001-07:00

As the various smartphones have emerged in the last several years one of the interesting by products of the carrier model in the US is that the carrier that you do business with is a big determinant in the type of smartphone you own. ATT and you are an iPhone user. Verizon and you use the Droid. For me, I have been a Tmobile customer for something like 10 years.

One of the advantages of Tmobile (and also ATT) is that you can use whatever unlocked phone you want. In the US, that is the exception as most people purchase subsidized phones. My initial phones with Tmobile were Sony Ericsson candy bar phones. I think that was the T610 and T635 if I recall correctly.

As I went to Intercasting, I wanted to see where phones were going(unlocked) and became a fan of the Sony Ericsson P series of phones purchasing the P910 and later the P990. Man were those phones big! I have to say though that I loved those phones and even became fairly happy with Symbian UIQ at the time. Unfortunately for me, Sony Ericsson made the decision to go with Windows Mobile on the Xperia and I was lost to them. This of course happened around the same time that the G1 was about to come out. Per my earlier point, since I was a Tmobile customer, I was happy to be an early adopter of Android and was extremely pleased to get my first G1.

Arguably the G1 paled in comparison to the iPhone. While I think that was true, I still loved the device especially the fact that it had a keyboard. During most of my time at Intercasting I was also a Sidekick user, spanning 3 different models of Sidekick before abandoning the devices as the product cycle times extended and much of the differentiation was absorbed by smartphones.

I faithfully used Android/G1 up to the Good acquisition, which resulted in my change in focus from feature phones to smartphones as it related to an increased focus on enterprise mobility and thus higher end devices. For the last year, I have been using the last 3 versions of the iPhone, The Droid and the Nexus 1. Interestingly, while I think all three of those phones were outstanding, I was the biggest fan of the Nexus One. The Droid certainly had the best network with Verizon, and the hardware from Motorola was very hardy (I think you could bludgeon someone to death with it and it's sharp corners), but I found the keyboard very disappointing, which has been the case for me with most Moto QWERTY devices historically.

Certainly the iPhone is an amazing device from a usability perspective and from a services perspective, but the lack of keyboard and some of the better features on Android devices leave me with more interest in that platform. I have to note that this is really only as it relates to smartphones as I use a Mac, have Apple TV, and love my iPad.

The reason I write this is that on my last business trip with Good before coming over to Chumby was that I lost my personal Nexus One at Seatac airport my last week of work. I can't tell you how angry I was when that happened. I knew that Tmobile had rumors of the G2 coming out but I needed a phone immediately so I headed over to the nearest Tmobile store and bought a new device. At the time, the hot device for Tmobile was the Samsung Galaxy phone called the Vibrant.

I think Samsung is an amazing company, and has amazing hardware, but I have to say that I was very disappointed in this device. There were 3 big issues for me. First, the GPS didn't work right. My two major differentiators for Android over iPhone are Google Voice (I was previously a Grand Central user) and Google voice related car functionality like Navigation, Voice search etc. No GPS means no navigation, no foursquare check ins, no Twitter location lookups. While it is true that the phone actually allowed me to call people, so did my old T610 and it was free.

The second reason was the lack of Android 2.2, which isn't a total problem, but it did highlight to me the issue of platform fragmentation with the various OEM UI overlays. Add special stuff and it takes a while to roll out new versions of Android to make sure that the are no integration issues.

The 3rd issue, which is relatively minor was hardware related. This one is sort of a mixed bag for me because there are both highs and lows on this. The high is that the screen on this devices in unbelievable. The low is that the device is super lightweight to the point of almost seeming flimsy.

Bottom line though is that I think that the Galaxy line is a great product but the GPS piece was a P1 bug for me that is not the sort of thing I would expect from Samsung given their general commitment to some of the highest quality devices across product lines.

With this in mind I decided to return the device and went searching through my closet for something I could use to cover the time between the return and the eventual release of the G2. The best answer for me was to dig out an aold N97 that a friend at Nokia had given me.

Before I trash this device, I want to say that the N series of phones are among some of the best devices I have ever used. Both my N95 and N85 are among my favorite phones in terms of reliability, battery life and industrial design. The N97 on the other hand is clearly an example of how Nokia completely lost track of the competitive landscape of the smartphone business.

Instead of editorializing some of the hardware specific issues, I would rather focus on my experience as a user. On the good side? The battery life is in another world compared to all other smartphones I have used. Where Nokia made the investment on top shelf items there is no comparison (the camera). Long battery life = good. Good camera = good.

Software. Aaargh. I hope that Nokia gets it right eventually with Ovi, but if you compare the experience of setting up an Android device, with setting up a Symbian smartphone, they aren't even in the same league. I think I spent two days setting up the N97. Worse yet, I ran out of memory on the core device early on in the process. This was tragic because the device is loaded with memory, just not on the primary device where all the software goes to in default.

Once I got a decent configuration set up with some reasonable synchronization between services I use, I was left with two other things worth commenting on. One, the navigation was top notch, but not up to snuff compared to Google Maps and Navigation. Close but the lack of workable voice support was a big miss for me. Second, the lack of applications really stands out as a gap when compared with iPhone, Android and RIM. Nokia will have to address this somehow.

While it is easy to see how Nokia is in a precarious position in the smartphone space, I will only add that there market share in devices below smartphones is impressive and I am a huge fan of Maemo/Meego as a potential way out of darkness for Nokia. I am an owner of both the N7790 and N800 and love the devices although they too have a shortage of software. I would love to get my hands on an N8 but since I am not in mobile anymore, I don't see me buying one anytime soon. :-(

All of this is a long way of saying that I am hooked on my Android devices and can't wait to share my thoughts on the brand new G2 device that I am playing with this AM.

TripIt Pro Discount Code

2010-09-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

Tripit is without question one of my favorite services. I signed up for Tripit Pro earlier this year and it has paid for itself many times over. I get text messages when I land telling me of gate changes. I get flight delay updates before others. The point tracking system is simply amazing.

With all that said, I am basically shilling for Tripit right now. They have lowered their annual price to $49 and have sent a discount code to distribute to friends for $5 off. If you travel at all on a frequent basis, I have to say that you will be amazed by this service. If you are interested, the discount link is here.

My new gig

2010-09-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

So...

Yeah. Well I didn't really take much time off between gigs.

A couple of weeks ago, I took over the ceo position at chumby from Steve Tomlin. We had been thinking about external communications and for the most part wanted to talk to partners like Sony and Best Buy and some others prior to saying anything in public. Somewhere along the way, I forgot about this press release which hit the wire as I was coming back from NYC and Boston last night, so I guess it is time to say, this is what I am doing!

I have been close to the chumby team over the last several years, but certainly the most with Steve Tomlin who founded chumby and was also my investor and board member at Intercasting. Beyond Steve, the founding team of Bunnie, Duane, Ken and the rest of the team at chumby have done an amazing job creating not just a product, but a product that people actually buy!

In addition to having success with their own product, the idea that the chumby network of flash applications can be proliferated on other devices has been validated with their work with Sony on the Dash and with Best Buy on the Infocast. Expect to see more of that on devices like tablets and televisions in the coming months.

For me this gig brings some new challenges and some familiar ones. A significant part of the job going forward will involve working with content companies, which I have done throughout my career and also marks a return to the advertising world, where I cut my teeth at MP3.com and at Vivendi. The new challenges are consumer electronics and working with retail distribution. My past two gigs at Good and Intercasting involved working with some of the same players that I expect to work with in the future, although in a different context.

I am excited to take the helm at chumby and look forward to helping to scale the business beyond the success achieved thus far. It is a great honor to take the reins of a company that you have watched someone build from scratch and I will do everything in my power to deliver on that promise to the team, to our partners, and to the many people who have become great fans of what chumby has done thus far.

Happy Trails

2010-08-13T06:10:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day at Good Technology. While it is the end of a run at Good, it is actually the end of my run with Intercasting and mobile as well. It’s been a bit over 6 years and besides saying, gee how time flies, I have to say that it has been a great adventure and a period of time that I know I will look back on with pride and a sense of accomplishment.

Much like my run at MP3.com and Vivendi, which was almost the same amount of time, I am pretty sure this is a marking point for a move into a new sector. I have really enjoyed mobile and think that mobile is more exciting today than when Shawn and I started Intercasting in 2004. It’s just that, like digital music before it, I find that I am looking for some time in a different place. That is not to say that I won’t go back to mobile in the future, or digital music for that matter, it’s just that for me, I think a change is a good thing at this point.

At a point like this I think it is important to ask one self, what have I learned these last six years? Aside from some industry specific things, which I don’t feel like exploring in this post, I think I have learned a lot of similar lessons to my time in digital music. It’s probably worth pointing out a few. First, markets in technology are extremely volatile, fast moving, and not prone to any great amount of predictability. In 2004, there was no iPhone, there was no Facebook, and messaging revenue was king. Because of this, winning and losing is something that is driven by luck to some degree, but most important for an entrepreneur is the ability to pivot in a market when the path to success isn’t necessarily all that clear. Flexibility, the ability to slaughter your sacred cows and a focus on execution are key. With that and a little bit of luck, you might get a win.

Second, and actually more important that the first, is that it is all about the people. The people you hire, the people you do business with, and the people you compete with in the marketplace. To me the most rewarding part of the last 6 years has been working with some of the most talented people I know, getting to know new friends and acquaintances in my day to day interactions, and finding a number of inspirational people along the way. Without that, I can’t imagine how I could pursue my dreams every day.

Third, it is extremely important to always remember the most important people in your life, which in my case is my wife and my four kids. While I have traveled over 120,000 miles this year already, I always made it home on the weekend, and I always did everything in my power to keep things at home as important as my work. My kids will grow up with good memories of hanging out in my office with my team and that thought will always make me smile. More important than that though is the unending support my wife has given me with this venture and in our marriage of 16 years. She is without question the best and most important part of my life.

So other thanks. I have to thank the team that I worked with at Intercasting for this entire time. They are, without exception awesome. Their hard work and innovation were the key to our success. Shawn and I could never have spun the tales we spun if they didn’t give us the tools to back it up. I also want to thank my team at Good. While most of my previous team went on to various roles at Good, I inherited an entirely new team and added some others and I have to say that my time spent with them was great and I really value the time I got to spent with each one of them as well. I wish it had been for a longer time but that is what the future is for!
I also owe a great deal of gratitude to our various business partners who took their chances with us and in many cases formed relationships that spanned a number of years. One last point of thanks is owed to my investors who I have stayed in touch with to this day. We were extremely lucky to end up with the team of investors that we did and it is only with time and experience that you figure that out. I would work with any of them again any time.

There are five people I met along the way that I want to call out who I was fortunate enough to encounter during this adventure who either influenced me, inspired me, or just became good friends. The first one is Paul Palmieri, who was the head of data services at Verizon when we started talking about a community called Rabble. Paul went on to leave Verizon and started one of the more successful advertising services in mobile, Millenial Media. Paul is a great guy who deserves all the success that is coming his way. A lot of people inside big companies aspire to be entrepreneurs and Paul is one of the few who have the savvy and intelligence to actually go out and do it. I hope to know Paul for years to come.

I met Greg Clayman at one of my first CTIA’s in New Orleans I believe and have much respect for Greg. Greg did the opposite track of Paul going from an entrepreneur to running the digital strategy at MTV/Viacom. Greg has been a great success and is one of the funniest guys I know. He has the added distinction of creating Twitter many years before Twitter was created with a service called UPOC. I am pretty sure my path will continue to cross with Greg’s in years to come.

Sometimes you run into your long lost brother who you were separated from at birth. In my case I met that person when I met Mike Clark from Photobucket. Mike is a great entrepreneur, an outstanding friend, and someone I am sure I will work directly with sometime in the future. I know that if I ever need any help in any situation personal or professional, I can call Mike. Mike founded a fascinating called Safety Web earlier this year and I have no doubt they are going to be a runaway success.

I met Tasso Roumeliotis shortly after our company and his company were pitted against each other in a bake off that ended up getting snaked away from both of us at the 11th hour. That episode, while very irritating to both of us ultimately resulted in the start of a great friendship that lasts to this day. Tasso is super smart, an operator and a guy with a hell of a lot of vision. I am not sure that we will be running in the same circle in the future, but I will certainly keep in touch. Tasso helped drive home the lesson that competition should be something that is done in an honorable way among competitors and hopefully as friends.

Shawn and I have worked together for something like 12 years in 6 different companies so I am hard pressed to say that I have had a better timer with anyone other than him in business, but without question the time I spent with Jean Tripier was certainly a close second. I am pretty sure that the main reason that Intercasting was sold to Good/Visto was in a large part a result of what we thought of Jean. Jean is funny, intelligent and a consummate deal maker. My only regret is that I didn’t get to work side by side with him for a longer period of time. Jean went on to become the CEO of Worldmate and I am sure he will be a great success with that company. I only wish I could share some of the funnier moments, but I think that could get me in trouble so I will have to hold off on that.

So mobile has been good on that front. I could easily rattle off about 50 other people(Mark Ewen, Dan Shapiro, John Hiler, Rick Heitzman, John Smelzer, Adam Lavine, Alex Panelli, Joe Waltman come to mind immediately) and I mean no slight to any of them by not mentioning them, it is just that the above folks had a particular impact on me.

Earlier in my career I had two amazing mentors in Paul Casella and Robin Richards. Their impact on me last to this day and reminds me to spend time with those in my organization who have the potential to grow into something great. While there were many outstanding senior people in our company, there were a number of people who we got to watch grow and who I think have great careers ahead of them who I would like to say something about. Kristen Jourdonais has had something like 6 different jobs with me. She has grown into a superstar and unfortunately I think we have wrecked here from ever working at a normal company. While she is still very early in her career, she is certainly destined for much success.

Ben Reesman came to work with us part time out of UCSD and unfortunately we ultimately got him to come to work with us full time. Unfortunate only because it took him away from UCSD. Fortunate because Ben has grown a ton and I can’t wait to see where he ends up in his career. His big brains and passion will serve him well in the future.
Tom Demas was one of the cofounders at Intercasting and I would be lying if I said that we had it easy between us. Tom and I went round and round for something like two years but I have to say that Tom may have grown more than anybody at Intercasting and he has moved on to have great success at Good. I am sure that there are many good things ahead for Tom and I wish him the best.

One last person I want to mention, who unfortunately I didn’t get to spend as much time with as the others was Brian Spencer. Brian worked closely with our CTO Josh and it was awesome to see him grow into one of the top guys in our company. His positive attitude and can do leadership are something to see. Big things are going to come from Brian in the future.

Like before none of this is meant to come at the cost of the many awesome others on our team (Josh, Scott, John, Matt, Chris, Kang, Cassie, Tim all come to mind immediately) but to point out how good it was to see some of our friends and co-workers grow before our eyes.

Two last things and then this windbag will cease. Deborah Critten has worked with me for over 10 years and even today I continue to be amazed at her instincts, hard work and am entirely envious of her sense of style/understanding of consumers/knowledge of the zeitgeist. I want to thank her for her support and friendship.

And of course the best for last. Working with Shawn is and will always be a great adventure that is unlike any experience I have had. The two of us work together very well and complement each other and we have fun in the process. Shawn is more than a business partner, he is a good friend and family to me and my family. This run has been a blast. I am sure there are more to come. Can’t wait for the next one.

What's In My Ipod?

2010-03-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

At the end of the year every year, I like to use some of the down time between December and January to comb through the various MP3 blogs end of the year lists to discover new music. While I love Led Zeppelin, REM and Radiohead, I have found that taking the time to find new music is something that keeps me in touch with what is new and exciting that I would otherwise not necessarily discover. As a kid, the radio was my number one discovery tool. Today, my radio listening is about zero, and when I do find myself in the car, I tend to listen to the NFL network which feeds my football obsession. The radio has been replaced by sites like Hype Machine and Motel de Moka.

So what am I listening to right now? A bunch of good stuff.

Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros - The song Home is without question my favorite song right now. The band's music is very reminiscent of early California folk/psychedelia. I don't know a bunch about the band but in this track and several others I have listened to, I really like the sound, which doesn't sound like The Mamas and Papas or Jefferson Airplane, but certainly evokes that sort of feel.

Phoenix - Their release Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was everywhere on people's lists this year. The big track 1901 is a fun and uplifting song. If it wasn't everywhere already, the recent Cadillac commercial has certainly made it all the more familiar.

Passion Pit - Tim in my office turned me onto this band and while it didn't click the first listen or two, it certainly has now. Sleepyhead and Little Secrets are played over and over again in my car. I haven't listened to all of Manners, but I would definitely recommend it as a catchy, upbeat sound that doesn't necessarily remind me of MGMT in style but certainly in spirit.

The xx - This band had a lot of buzz on the same level of Phoenix. I heard them first on NPR on an end of the year music special, and while the first track I heard didn't do much for me, some repeated listening of the various tracks got me hooked. I especially like Crystallized and Night Time. Their sound is haunting and dense, but the male female vocal teaming and the ethereal sound really is something that I keep coming back to.

Julian Casablancas - Whatever happened to the Strokes? I don't know as I was only really into their debut release, but a listen to the latest effort by their frontman reveals a high charged, almost disco revival sound that has hints of the initial Strokes release although more lively and I guess danceable?

The Rest - I discovered this band on some obscure indie music blog whose name escapes me. This band out of Canada is way up my alley. The track Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air reminds me of Radiohead and U2 with a more haunting backdrop. Seriously, of all the new stuff I have heard, this one song has blown me away the most. I hope to hear more like this from them.

Atlas Sound - I can't put my finger on the sound of this band, but the track Sheila, is something I never tire of listening to. The chorus "And when we die we will bury ourselves" is very Wilco in a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sort of way, but much more catchy and earnest way. The link here is to a live video of the song Sheila.

Metric - Not sure how to describe Metric, other than it has hints of fast paced electronica and the lead singer's voice is just great.

Major Lazer - My kid's favorite right now. Somewhere between hip hop (T-Pain) and dance hall with a bit of Daft Punk to boot. The song "Keep it Going Louder" just defies you to sit in your seat and not move.

White Rabbits - I tend towards the punk or heavy rock sound and I wouldn't describe anything in this list as of that vein with the exception of this band. While not really punk, The White Rabbits have a great fast paced beat and a stripped down sound with some hints of what I would say is early melodic punk stylings.

Google Maps Navigation

2010-03-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

It didn't take me long to actually touch mobile and last week while traveling, I forgot another super useful tool for travel that I have to mention. That tool is Google Maps Navigation. Last year Google rolled out a turn by turn navigation component as an add on to their existing Google Maps product. I have historically been a user of both Google Maps and Mapquest although over time I have slowly migrated to Google Maps. When driving, using Google Maps can be a bit problematic as I have to keep looking at the phone as you go from point to point. Because of this, I would usually just print out the directions and refer to them if I got confused.

Once I upgraded Google Maps to use the Navigation plugin, I was blown away. Immediately, I thought that this was a game changer. Certainly the market did as shown by the share price of Garmin show here. Or more pointedly, the move by Nokia to offer a similar free service on the backs of their recent acquisition of Navteq for over $8 billion.

While I am interested in the underlying infrastructure and market implications, the real winning piece is the consumer experience which is second to none. In addition to being free, which is a price that is hard to pass up, the application also combines the ability to use layers to see things like gas stations, restaurants, etc. and also when you arrive at your location, Google Street View pops up and it shows you a picture of the place you are trying to find. I can say that I for one, will never rent a GPS machine from a rental agency ever again.

If you haven't tried this yet, I would highly recommend putting it on your phone.

Tools For Travelers

2010-02-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

There are a number of tools for travelers but there are three that I use all the time that I find very good and are ones that I think are totally worth telling others about. The three that I want to tell you about are Tripit, Tablet Hotels and Expensify. Each one of these is either a website, or a combination of website and application that make my life easier each week.

Tripit. I don't entirely recall why, but when Tripit initially launched on Linkedin, I signed up to add a Tripit widget in the mad rush to find apps that are useful on Linkedin. I still honestly haven't found others to use but that isn't that they arenít out there, it is just that I am not a Linkedin power user, and in general use Linkedin as a business card collector. After designating where I was going for a trip or two, I quit using the widget and forgot about it.

One night I was at a dinner with a number of folks from Sony Music, and one of the guys was raving about Tripit. I was shocked. How the hell could it be useful? He explained the big missing piece I hadn't understood. Tripit is like a virtual assistant for keeping all of your travel information in one place. How so? Well, the real use case for Tripit is to email all of your confirmation materials, like flight, hotel reservation, car reservation and dinner reservations to plans@tripit.com . Once you do this, Tripit parses the various emails and assembles an itinerary that can be viewed on he web, or more importantly on iPhone or Android devices. Once I figured this out, I became a rabid user. So much so that I actually broke down and subscribed to an Tripit Pro account, which lets my wife keep track of me and provides some other added benefits like SMS flight update information for gate changes and flight status as well as a consolidated view of all your loyalty programs. There are some other similar products in the market, most notably Worldmate which also provides this intelligent parsing of emails which I think is an interesting opportunity in a number of application areas.

Tablet Hotels - I have blogged about Tablet a long time ago, but thought it worthwhile to plug it again. While I am primarily focused on booking through SPG as I have loyalty status with them, I often find their choices or locations in Europe either too expensive, inconvenient or frankly a little too old school for my tastes. I originally happened upon Tablet back in 2003 when I was staying at The Standard Hotel in Los Angeles a fair amount and they used Tablet to manage their bookings. From that time, I became a frequent user, especially looking for cheap, hip hotels in places like New York. While Tablet, whose tagline is "Hotels for Global Nomads" tends towards the cheap chic, they also have super high end places as well for the Hollywood or Media crowd.

Three other things worth noting on Tablet. 1. They have a Tablet Plus membership that has guaranteed upgrades. I haven't sprung for this but figure I should break down and do that soon. 2. They have a social networking aspect that might be of interest I suppose, but in general, I am not looking to meet up with the random hotel guest in say Milan. 3. They have some screaming last minute booking deals for "members" that are available each Tuesday.

Expensify - Expensify has a great tagline: "Expense reports that don't suck". What else can you say? It is true. Expensify automates a lot of what you do when filling out expense reports. It has the ability to link a credit card account with your web based account and as transaction enter, they are lined up for you to add to a new expense report. For certain low dollar items, they provide you with an electronic receipt that is IRS approved. For other receipts, like say an airplane booking, you can forward the email confirmation and attach that to the charge. You can do similar things with PDF and web page receipts. For the vast majority of the little piece of paper receipts, you can take a picture with your iPhone or Android device and upload the photo to your account where you can match them to the charges as they appear on your credit card. For cash receipts, you can manually enter the details into the respective smartphone application, take a picture of the receipt and upload them as well.

While there are a number of little items they can and should add over time, I am pretty confident that this is by far one of the fastest ways to process what is otherwise a real pain in the ass. I highly recommend you check this out.

There are obviously a number of others that are great and if any of you want to share them with me, feel free to leave a comment.

Reboot

2010-02-23T03:38:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest things about re-starting something is the fear of stopping again. There have been a number of moments when I sat down with a list of possible blog posts and fired up Blogger and then said, “Not enough time.” That may still be the case, but it seems like something I have been missing a lot when I think about things. I have moved on from blogging to the very occasional posting on Flickr, and more frequent updates on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, but a review of those things are like a laundry list of places I have been and brief snapshots of where I was and where I am going, with very little for me to remember or take on as me. A vanity search on Google still has this blog as the number one result yet it also has a stream of SAN, SFO, etc. of social media sites abandoned or used as placeholders of my travels and not much else. Frankly, that isn’t necessarily something I want to remember.

Work, travel, and business. Going from a startup to a bigger company makes one much more sensitive to what you can say or discuss. One of the things I have some insight on is the mobile industry but I really can’t talk about that. Can’t really talk about devices. Can’t really talk about partners. A lot of what I do every day is a lot of not being able to share. So that has been an excuse I suppose, yet in it’s place I am left with LHR, JFK, and you have the wrong @derrick on Twitter.

So I want that to stop, or rather I want to occasionally post something, anything, other than some geocoded outbursts or other brief comment to a close group of friends. The reality is for me, that long hours on planes, while spent in a large part thinking about work, also involve a lot of thoughts about other stuff. Stuff that is of great interest to me and which I think I have some pretty good perspective on, if not only as a user, but as someone who have been around long enough to hopefully have some insight. At the very worst, it is a means to share and a way to keep in touch with friends who for whatever reason I haven’t kept in touch with between work, travel, family and life.

So there it is. Not so hard. Music? Food? Cooking? Technology tools. Random stuff. I think that should be worth some fun and get me back into the habit. At the very least it is a start, or a reboot if you will.

Google Wave

2009-05-28T15:14:00.001-07:00

I am really excited about this. The O'Reilly write up here is the best I have seen.

What is Twitter Part 2. Media and what comes next.

2009-05-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

In the last post about Twitter, I was focused primarily on discussing how communication channels have evolved and changed. While we use a variety of channels to communicate with different people in different ways, the primary function is communication, i.e. the transmission of a message. In point to point communication, all the value of that transmission is contained in the information between the two parties, or in the case of the forwarding on of a funny message, to the various parties sent that message. It is the telephone game with no loss of signal in the message.

In this post I want to discuss more about how these different communication channels are changing the understanding of media. When people use the word media there are two ways to think about it. The first is that media is communication, and that would certainly be consistent with how I think about the previous post. Twitter is yet another way for people to communicate. The other way we think about media is what I would call big M media. Big M media would be movies, music, news, advertising, etc. Media is entertainment. Media is a way we disseminate culture, for better or worse. We watch American Idol, or go see the new Star Trek, or in my case we talk about the funny baby eTrade commercials. There is a message to share to a broad audience. I think the interesting thing about the evolution of the various communication channels is that we are slowly developing a personal broadcast mechanism that has power not unlike what we see coming from the studios, the record labels, and the big advertising agencies. Let me explain.

Most communication content is designed to be consumed by one other person or in some cases a group of people. I send an email to my wife to see if she can meet me for dinner, or I email my team to give an update on an important deal. The message in either of those cases is purely meant to convey a message and nothing more. In fact, the content of that message is probably not of any use to anyone else. There are a number of important things to think about in this case to make the message relevant and the most important thing in these cases are context. Without context these message mean little else to anyone. While email can be something that communicates to a broad audience, i.e. look at Jason Calacanis's mailing list, or the Pho list, it's primary use case has been point to point communication.

From a timing standpoint, in terms of development as tools, I would argue the next relevant item would be the development of blogs. The advent of Live Journal, Xanga and Blogger all ushered in the creation of media for 3rd parties. In my opinion blogging was bifurcated into usage by the technorati like Dave Winer and others (arguably Userland is one of the earliest platforms) and usage by kids. In the case of the technorati, blogging was a way of sharing thoughts on technology, politics and other ideas where one hoped to influence a wide audience. In the case of kids it was to share stuff with friends. It could be that I am having a crappy day or a link to a funny site, or the sharing of some personal or meaningful experience.

The interesting thing about blogging is that in general it is public, and in general I would ague that the authors write with the understanding that the context may be personal but the platform is public, For me, I have found that a number of my friends periodically check my blog out (when I am actually writing) to keep up to date with what is going on in my life. In this case blogging is still primarily communication but it also can become something more akin to media that is meant to be consumed by more than one person or a small audience. Witness sites like Techmeme that keep people in the technology business up to date with the latest news. If I want to stay on top of technology, it is Techmeme which is primarily made up of tech and personal blogs that is a critical item on my daily reading list. There are no print or other sources of professional content that can keep up with the flow. As this sort of information becomes increasingly important, the concept of traditional media having value as an important unbiased 3rd party source of information begins to become undermined.

There are a variety of sites that are similar to blogs that are important that I am going to skip until I get to the conclusion of this post. They are every bit as important as text based blogs but are more vertically focused. These sites are photoblogs, music sharing sites like Last.fm, event focused sites like Eventful and location centric sites like Brightkite and Loopt. There are certainly others and I think it is important to address them, but I think a discussion of social networking sites is the next in order.

In 2004 when we started our company, Friendster had either peaked or was peaking. A small site called Myspace was growing quickly and a number of the blogging sites were adopting some of the features of these newly created social networking sites. The social networking sites were just taking off and in the subsequent 5 years sites like Facebook became the standard bearer of these friend sites. In fact, the most important thing about both Myspace and Facebook was the amazing reach. While a lot of these sites started out as a place to promote bands or to connect with your college buddies and girlfriends, they crossed over. Today, just about everybody uses these sites. The important question is how do they use these sites. The two main things people us them for is to communicate directly with others and to share. The communicate with others piece is what I referred to in the first post, it is the share piece that I think is most important in this one.

Sharing is a transformative thing for a lot of social networking users. While blogging has attracted a large population of users, sharing is something that almost everyone who uses a social networking site does. Sharing can be as simple as a post saying, Happy Monday, or as involved as sharing pictures of your family, a link to a youtube video or links to interesting articles on the web. In many ways, the infrastructure of the social networking sites allow you to create an image of your self that is the collection of things you declare in your profile, objects you link to, and things you say and share with your "friends" in public. While anyone can see my blog, only my "friends" can see my most personal things. The thing I have found most profound in the social networking sites is the willingness of others to share on such a large scale, especially people who I had previously considered very private.

This sharing experience is a core prerequisite behavior for something like Twitter to be successful. Twitter was originally described as microblogging. Sharing small pieces of content or experience. I am on vacation. Here is a link to a photo. Here is a link to a website or interesting article. Information becomes very bursty. It may be less important to know much about me and rather it is more important to know about my stream, my activities, the things I read. Whereas my blog or social networking page is a comprehensive collection of things I write, or things about me, or things I want to share in a broad way, Twitter is the firehose of things I share on the fly. When filtered it becomes the real time collection of information on particular subjects, or people, or other things such as my geolocation.

From this there are two major things that I find myself thinking about. The first is what does this behavior do to traditional media? The second is what happens long term to what we view as social networking? For the sake of clarity I want to hit the first one and will then follow up with a much briefer post on the later as I have to admit that I like everyone else has no idea what comes next. So what happens to media? We witness the newspaper business rapidly declining and most likely moving to a purely online presence. We see Youtube consuming an increasing portion of mindshare of consumers watching both amateur and professional content. The core question here is whether or not I would rather surf my friends posts and links or watch television or something else. Is it more interesting for me to passively consume content, or to share things I find interesting and view things my friends find interesting. While an idea or article or video can be rapidly spread to my 100s of friends online how does media take advantage of that? Do I friend tv shows, movies and bands? In a lot of cases the answer is yes. Marketing in this world has to change to use this way of reaching new audiences.

In reality I don't think that media as we know it changes very quickly overnight. I would ague that the rapid rise of Hulu is a great demonstration of how traditional media can learn from the new online realities of Youtube and other social media. I do think though that over time there will be increasing pressure for the attention of people who find that looking at the things their friends are doing is much more interesting that American Idol. While I don't know what happens in this new world, I will speculate in the final post, but the thing I think that one should take away is that expression on these new platforms has crossed over to a mass audience. Sharing, posting, linking are not just habits of the techno elite. My friends from high school do this. Our parents are doing this. Our kids are growing up with this as a given behavior. What will come out of this remains to be seen but I am certain that we are witnessing a fundamental transformation in how we interact with each other and what we think of as entertainment and media. While there will be inevitable disruption in these changes, they will also bring new opportunities.