sync

about the iPad

Bradley J Lautenbach — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:09:51 +0000

I’ve now spent 24 hours with the iPad. Everyone keeps asking what I think of it, so I’m formalizing my thoughts and posting them here:

The device:

It’s pretty. This is no shock, coming from Apple, though I do find myself impressed with the quality of the display every time I fire it up.

The battery is good. Pogue said 12 hours of straight video play. Haven’t tried that myself but at the rate things are going, I’d believe it.

Downside: it does not charge when plugged into my mac (older machine) and the cord isn’t really long enough to plug into wall and continue playing with it, so you do have to take a break when you want to charge it. Fortunately the battery seems good enough that that shouldn’t be a problem.

The thing is heavier than a kindle and holding it for a while, while not painful, can get awkward. I got a case. I’d recommend it.

The content:

The Apple apps (mail, calendar, etc) are top notch. They feel like they are the full incarnation of what the iPhone version wanted to be. Disappointingly, Apple does not provide a native chat application (still) which feels like a missed opportunity for the device – perhaps that will come in the next OS.

The third party apps I’ve tried so far are also quite impressive. There does seem to be a thinness around the offerings at the moment though, particularly among the free ones. Also, there is no Facebook app, which seems weird to me. I’ve been much less active on Facebook because of that.

File handling is an annoyance. I can’t download a PDF from the web to view later (I can bookmark it and view it in safari – but there is no way to get the file in an offline state – and no way to mark up the PDF unless it’s imported into Pages – which I can only do if I email myself). Access to Mobile Me iDisk (available on the iPhone) is also noticeably absent.

One would presume the apps will catch up as they begin approving in the iTunes Store again this week.

The experience:

The thing moves fast. I imagine that the next iPhone will also process this quickly and finally we will have a powerful smartphone instead of just a smartphone. The apps all load quickly, video runs beautifully, the speaker is good enough quality to watch tv shows with.

Most importantly though, is the lack of multitasking. This will upset power users, but I found myself consistently more relaxed as I was doing only one thing at a time instead of the usual 4 or 5. I wonder if this will help combat ADD overall – I doubt it.

(I should also add, that while typing is obviously not as good as with a keyboard, it is lightyears better than with the iPhone. I can type at near keyboard pace on the iPad screen.)

So what?

Ya, I agree with the sentiment that this device is more about consuming than creating. But I’m okay with that. It’s been a pleasure to consume with it so far and I do now understand the middle zone between the phone and the laptop that this device will serve – I was skeptical about it before.

The verdict: if you like toys and consume a lot of media, it’s worth the add. But yes, there will likely be a slightly cheaper, better one in 12 months. (That said, this does not seem to suffer from the bugginess or rough first outing effects that iPhone 1 did – so don’t make that the excuse.) I like mine, and it’s been an excellent couch companion for the past day.

This post was written from the iPad.

Feel free to ask specific questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

what you do vs. who you do it with

Bradley J Lautenbach — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:03:51 +0000

Someone said to me recently that they thought that in the decision criteria for choosing a job, who you work with (or for) was a much more important factor to consider than what you actually do. Put simply: the who matters more than the what.

I can think of times in my life where I’ve done things I didn’t enjoy per se simply because of the opportunity to be around certain people. And I’ve experienced this in both the professional and personal environments. With friends, I may go see a movie I don’t particularly want to see because I want to spend time with friends I haven’t spent time with in a while. At school, I may choose the less interesting (to me) of two project topics simply because the team is one I’d rather work with. While these experiences tend to make me think there’s some validity to the hypothesis, I can also imagine a situation where someone takes this to the extreme, chooses to do something they truly hate with people they really like and the hatred for the task leaks over into the relationships.

This notion isn’t offered as a comfort for those taking jobs they aren’t particularly thrilled about, but rather as a prod for those trying out potential employers: it may behoove us to figure out whether we’ll truly appreciate being part of the team, given who’s already on it.

startups, mba’s, and buckets

Bradley J Lautenbach — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:21:20 +0000

There’s been an interesting conversation happening in the world of blogs I read over the last week or so about the role and value of MBAs in startups. It started with this post by Charlie O’Donnell. This post was tweeted around the HBS community with some fervor last weekend and I read it and this reply by Rob Go shortly before embarking on an errand expedition (and ultimately a debate about these posts) with Rafael Corrales last Sunday night. Rafael wrote a great response to them, which I mostly agree with, and Kyle Doherty then added his two cents here.

I really have no desire to engage in a debate about MBAs’ approach to recruiting here (at startups or elsewhere) because I think most of the issues have been covered by Rob and Rafael and Charlie (particularly in the comments on Rafael’s post). I do, however, want to say one thing. And I should caveat that this is general commentary inspired by the above conversation and my experiences over the past year and a half, not a response directed at Rob, Charlie, or anyone else.

It frustrates me to no end when people bucket MBAs. An MBA is not a race or a religion. It is a graduate degree. That’s it. There is almost nothing I can generalize about any of the people I’ve ever met in this MBA program (or from any other MBA program for that matter) except to say that they either have or have had an interest in studying business administration.

People who make the assumption that MBAs are X, Y, or Z, simply because they have an MBA are as guilty of lunacy as the MBAs who throw themselves at startups with the expectations of red-carpet-rollouts simply because they have an MBA.

Contrary to popular belief, not all MBAs are flocking to finance and/or consulting. Further, not all MBAs *come* from finance or consulting. There are a ton of people here who come from interesting operational and functional backgrounds and have every intention of returning to operational and functional positions. These are the same types of positions that any startup seeks to fill.

So, what’s my point?

When Kyle said:

While it seems unfair to bucket a whole group based on the actions of a few, it’s human nature to do so. Those who are really dedicated will figure it out, the perception doesn’t matter. So I guess my approach is to think: who cares?

My answer to this?

I do.

I care a lot. I don’t want a few people who lack a social compass representing me in the world. I don’t want anybody to assume anything about me when they see MBA on my resume except for that at one point in my life I had an interest in studying business administration. And I want to fight those generalizations that get made (and the people who cause them to be made) for the sake of the rest of us who don’t behave like this. Then maybe the people who use criticism of MBAs and B-schools as a way to sell newspapers and display ads will have to find another way to write about us.

updating the site

Bradley J Lautenbach — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:58:29 +0000

I’ve added the WPtouch theme for mobile devices which means if you’re looking at this site on an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, you’ll have a mobile-optimized experience (it looks entirely different, but is much more consumable). Enjoy.

community supported agriculture

Bradley J Lautenbach — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:21:49 +0000

This is an off-topic post for me, but I felt compelled to write a quick blurb about the dinner I attended last night. It was a supper-club style event thrown by a friend in support of the Waltham Fields Community Farm. The primary purpose was to raise awareness (and money) for Community Supported Agriculture. This is a particularly important issue here in Massachusetts, which I knew little/nothing about. More information on the CSA initiative at Waltham Fields here, and more information about the Homegrown Supperclub (an awesome idea – bringing incredible local/sustainable food to the table) here.

project red balloon

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:46:47 +0000

I’m writing to share an initiative I’ve been working on at school and ask for your help.

DARPA, the government agency, is sponsoring a challenge on Saturday to test the ability of social networks to mobilize toward a common task. They are placing ten giant red weather balloons (tethered near the ground) around the US for 8 hours on Saturday. The first person/team to correctly submit the locations of the ten balloons wins $40,000.

We will be donating the money to The Global Fund’s AIDS research/awareness initiative.

I’m working on this initiative with several classmates and a few profs from Harvard Business School, and we’re looking at this as a test of the HBS network. Hopefully we win, but I’m confident we’ll learn something in the process!

details: www.projectredballoon.com
twitter: www.twitter.com/helpredballoon

Please help us spread the word by forwarding to your friends, blogging, retweeting, facebooking, etc.

We need your SUPPORT and it’s for a GREAT CAUSE!

on culture

Bradley J Lautenbach — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:56:57 +0000

I have a lot of opinions about culture. They’ll come out here over time. In the meantime, here is something my friend Rafael blogged about.

Some people in the first year of school seemed inclined to dismiss issues of culture as “fluff” or “kumbaya.”

I have three words to say to them:

You are wrong.

This is a must read presentation from Netflix on issues of culture. Worth the time….

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

feed issues

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:08:06 +0000

I realized my feed was down tonight. A bunch of troubleshooting led me to disqus as the problem. So I killed it. In the process, though, I deleted my feedburner feed. It will redirect for 30 days, at which point I’ll redirect it again. None of this should matter to you (hopefully), because my readers are all seeing the blog fine now, but if you lose me from your reader at some point, come back and resubscribe.

peoplespace

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:10:58 +0000

As I was packing up to leave school in late May, I had a weird experience on campus. I had crossed the river from home to school to pick a few things up from my various lockers, closets, etc. It was about 10 days after school had let out for summer. Most people had already left campus for travel before starting summer internships.

Being on campus, a place where I had had a million intense memories accumulate during the year, I had a rather vacant feeling. The type of vacancy you’d encounter coming to a place you’d never been before.

In my mind I started to feel nostalgic – remembering all the great things that had happened that year.

It occurred to me then that the place would never be the same. Granted, I still have a whole year to go at HBS, and many many more memories yet to create. But the notion that what had happened during the year – the experience – was more closely tied to the people and the circumstance than the physical place, made me realize how much I will need to capture every opportunity in the coming year.

Because once the moment passes: the people, the place, the circumstance – everything that happened there becomes a nice (but unrepeatable) memory.

I wonder what psychologists would say about memories – and the strength of them – relative to people or place.

the content wedge

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:29:40 +0000

In corporate strategy, theorists like to talk about the “wedge,” or the gap between cost of goods and a customer’s willingness to pay. This means that the company with the most sustainable strategy has the lowest cost of goods and the customers with the highest willingness to pay. (That’s a simplification, but bear with me).

The same could be said of content, if it weren’t for a complicating factor called quality. Whereas other industries have found ways to reduce the cost of goods without reducing the quality, content quality is still tied very closely to cost. (If you give a film student a prosumer camera and a modest budget, the discerning audience will still be able to target the work as sub-par when screened alongside a professionally produced film involving 35mm film cameras, etc.)

Recently, though, things have started to change. Technological advances have enabled the creation of high-quality content that rivals that of Hollywood. The question then remains, how long before a new system, a new content producing apparatus, springs forward to break the old-standing business model?

You can see some of this type of work happening around the web already. My friend Nathan Heleine of Crush + Lovely has been involved with this project called Fifty People, One Question. The videos are pretty astounding both from an editorial perspective and from a physical quality perspective. The photography is done by Benjamin Reece of The Deltree and it is just astounding (more of his stuff on his site). Worth checking out any of the links if you have time.

Projects like this are the future of moving image content.

illustrated blogging

Bradley J Lautenbach — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:58:47 +0000

Felt compelled to share a link I stumbled across today. Maira Kalman “blogs” for the New York Times. The blog is called “And the Pursuit of Happiness.” She is an artist, illustrator and designer, and this is reflected in her work at the Times. Her thoughts and observations are presented in illustrated fashion. (It’s also interesting to note that the Times has an alternative style sheet for the presentation of this blog.) I found the most recent post, entitled “Can Do” particularly inspirational. Enjoy.

side effects of the globally-oriented education (1)

Bradley J Lautenbach — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:49:31 +0000

(I wrote this on the train on Friday)

Last night I was in a taxi in New York City headed to a bar when I heard on the radio that there had been bombings at western hotels in Jakarta Indonesia. Prior to school this would have been just another sad headline. Now, though, I have a sectionmate who is working in Jakarta this summer and my stomach jumped when I heard the news.

Fortunately I was able to get in touch with him in minutes (modern communications FTW) and learned he was safe. He had been scheduled to be at one of the targeted hotels for breakfast the morning the bombs went off, but fortunately his plans changed last minute and he was not there.

Phew.

An indicator, perhaps, of the way life will be post-school with friends and classmates scattered around the globe.

bank issues report on teen media consumption: sample size 1, bank’s teenage intern

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:53:19 +0000

This article on Bloomberg this week caught my attention for its claim: “Morgan Stanley Intern Says Teens Don’t Twitter, Prefer Events”

For those that might not know, large financial institutions publish large amounts of research as part of their product offerings (they both sell this research and use it internally to inform invesment decisions). This report, published on a topic I care about, purports (according to the article):

Teenagers spend money on game consoles, movies and music concerts while ignoring newspapers, a Morgan Stanley report said, citing Matthew Robson. Robson should know: He is a 15-year-old intern at the securities firm.

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

“Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it,” Morgan Stanley analysts Edward Hill-Wood, Patrick Wellington and Julien Rossi said in a note, citing Robson.

Call me crazy, but I had two reactions to this:

duh. (on the last part. not sure I buy that “teens don’t twitter”)
are banks in the habit of publishing research that is anecdotally single sourced?

point of order: the post office

Bradley J Lautenbach — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:00:04 +0000

I had to visit a US Post Office recently. After spending the year learning about operations management, process improvement, and organizational behavior, I must admit that the visit irked me on so many levels I could feel myself clamming up and needing to get out as fast as possible.

The thing is, I needed to mail my rent to Boston (from New York). This is probably the only part of my life that has not evolved into even the 20th century yet. I still pay rent by check and I still send it via the mail. In order to do this I needed two things: an envelope and a stamp.

Unable to find these things in single serving size at a deli (because why would I?), I set off to the Post Office. (Which, by the way is not conveniently located and keeps inconvenient hours). Imagine my surprise when I got there to discover A) no envelopes for sale (isn’t that kind of a natural COMPLEMENT (thanks Prof Collis) to selling postal services) and B) no easy way to get stamps. The line was 15 people deep, and I went to a machine where my only option was to buy 40 stamps. (Credit to the USPS 1 point for the “forever” stamp.)

Then off to Duane Reade to buy 80 (79 of which I don’t need) envelopes.

And then back in search of a blue mailbox.

Short point: postal mail sucks. The government should dissolve it, force everyone to go paperless, offer it as an uber premium service (or make FedEx pickup and manage the business), and be done with it as it is now.

spring break: colombia

Bradley J Lautenbach — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:30:00 +0000

When we started the school year, our Section Chair, Professor Frances Frei mentioned it was common for students to earn between 6 and 12 visas travelling during their time at HBS. I’m not sure I believed it at the time, but I’m on the way to that now.

Over spring break in March, a great friend of mine from section, Vicente, lead a few dozen of us on a trek to his home country, Colombia. We spent a few days in Bogota, then a few days in Cartagena, a night on a remote island, before circling back and returning to Boston.

I could bore you with the details, but suffice it to say it was far and away the most memorable trips I’ve been on and I wanted to point to the flickr set from the trip from the blog… so here you are:

colorful colombian crafts