The Alta Vista School opens in three days with sixteen children from Jr Kindergarten to Kindergarten and First grade. New grades will be added each year as the current batch of kids advances.  Biz notes another twist – classes will be conducted in English and playtime in Spanish to add a bilingual experience.

Being involved myself with two young children in a parent participation, hands-on learning program called Indigo in the Oak Grove School district (and working in technology) – I have a great appreciation for Chowdhury’s vision and the support of Biz Stone.  Our Indigo Program also started with a small group of dedicated founding families and has been growing year after year.

Great work guys and best of luck!

Read Biz Stone’s blog on his experience at: http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/startup-time-machine.html and also check out the article the San Francisco Chronicle ran a few days ago covering the school: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/31/BAR61EMIJP.DTL

The project was created by Writer/Director Chris Milk with Arcade Fire and Google. The experience, called The Wilderness Downtown, uses some of the latest emerging Internet web standards including HTML5, Google Maps, and some neat drawing tools. Given that it is a Google project and somewhat experimental, it is best experienced using the Google Chrome web browser.

I’m not so sure about the whole storyline that integrates Google Maps view of your “childhood home” (after you are prompted to enter an address), but the integrated multi browser windows, beautifully synchronized videos/animations and great track are cool enough on their own.

Interestingly enough, when checking the project out earlier today with a colleague, I remarked “Hey, that [scene] kind of reminds me of [the movie] Brazil.” It turns out that Terry Gilliam, Writer/Director of Brazil, directed a live stream project for Arcade Fire earlier this month; so guess that wasn’t coincidence.

It’s definitely worth your time to experience The Wilderness Downtown.

Read more about this project and other very successful ways that Arcade Fire has been tapping into social media at Mashable.

In this TedTalk video, he explains his enjoyment as a “data detective” – discovering patterns in information data. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.  In particular, McCandless is interested in living data visualization and data mashups.

You can see the TedTalk video on ted.com or below.

Information is Beautiful Website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

David McCandless on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mccandelish

Some of my favorite points are the “Strait of Rick Roll” near the YouTube land mass, “Land of Defunct Social Networks”, not-to-be-missed small island of “LOL CATS”, and of course the multiple “Google Information Gathering Outposts”.

See  the full-size map over at Flowtown.com.

While we plan to look out for the schedule in the upcoming fall an winter sessions, We were very excited to learn that Stanford shares over 1,600 videos and podcasts online at their ecorner website: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/. There is an amazing lineup of superstar speakers in a broad range of fields including technology, finance, biotech, mobile, education and government.

I’ve already downloaded and begun listening to at least a dozen podcasts, including Marc Andreessen (Serial Entrepreneur/Ning/Loudcloud,Netscape), Randy Komisar (Author/KBCP), Steve Case (Revolution/AOL), David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals), Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon (Zynga), Mark Zuckerburg, Jim Breyer and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Eric Ries (Lean Startup movement) and a bunch more…

Now to find the time!

Which videos or podcasts look interesting to you?

Respecting the request of moderator Ravi Belani to keep some of what was discussed as “something special for the audience to take home”, I won’t go into great detail on the anecdotal gems shared by the speakers, but will hit some of their major points.

Three excellent speakers were assembled for the panel, each offering a unique perspective on the specific topic “How I Pivoted to Success Through Effective Iteration and Innovation“:

• Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google, spoke frankly from her experience as one of the  first Engineers at Google leading several of Google’s flagship applications.
• Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, cited that their clients come to them when they need help with innovation, but their internal team also challenges themselves with design experiments.
• Randy Komisar, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Author of Getting to Plan B, provided the perspective of venture financiers – how to turn early company growth failures into successes.

Marissa Mayer was the first to share her perspective through very generous insights into Google’s early product decisions. She offered up 4 recommendations:

• Focus on Users, Users, Users: instead of deliberating on what users might do, use A/B testing to find out what users really want.  That’s what Google did when deciding between which of 2 early features for Google News search to work on first.  And they never stopped using this approach when deciding on new features and products.
• Innovation is more important than perfection: Again citing an example, this time in the area of acquiring Deja News, Mayer preaches that launching early and iterating has been a successful approach for Google.
• Separate Technology and Application: Unlikely successes may be born out of a product or service.  Widening vision allowed Google AdSense to flourish within Gmail by providing targeted ads despite some early opposition from the idea.
• And running out time, Mayer added her last point: “Speed!”

Tim Brown was next up. Although IDEO began as a physical product industrial design company, they have grown to be an extremely successful all-encompassing global design consultancy.

Brown offered that one cannot innovate without experimentation.  Experimentation means prototyping – both of which equate to iteration.  And, iteration includes giving yourself the time to experiment.  Brown added that one should still anticipate the outcome of prototyping and that the key is to learn from each iteration.

His second point was that, in IDEO’s experience, some of the best innovations result from the non-obvious and, in fact, that some of the best ideas come from the edges of the organization.

Similar to Mayer’s position that Google learns by “eating their own dog food”, Brown also shared that IDEO learns by developing experiments around its own internal processes.  This probably isn’t obvious to most companies, but worthy of consideration.

In conclusion, Brown says a company (or individual) should have great stories about successes and failures.  This is how lessons are learned and shared from experiments.

Last up was Randy Komisar to offer some amazing advice despite opening with “I have nothing to add.” Komisar shared several Silicon Valley tech war stories. Each one clearly supported his key points, especially for a startup:

• Plan for iteration: don’t blow your whole budget on the single “idea and plan”.
• Komisar also stated that a prototype is an absolute necessity for a startup seeking funding.  He gave a specific mobile software example where, by user testing and (relatively) inexpensive prototyping, they were able to quickly rule out features that users simply wouldn’t use and focus on the (obvious) one that they would.
• Retain the flexibility to pivot from a failure: Avoid a win / lose outcome; you may even find yourself continuously pivoting.  ”When you decide to pivot, you’ll wish you had done it earlier.“
• Learn from failure: Komisar said he is known as the “failure guru”, a moniker he doesn’t really like, but concluded that “If you can’t afford to fail, you can’t afford to innovate.”

Notably, several times throughout the talk when iteration and user testing was discussed, the cult of Apple came up. I believe that each speaker gave credit to Apple and Steve Jobs for being the “last of a breed”.  Apple has to work hard to work on its product in “world wide wow secrecy” and, somehow, Jobs is still uncannily right in product decisions.  Although Komisar did offer up a perfectly timed crack about “holding one’s phone the right way”, which did elicit great laughs from the packed audience.

Another topic that popped up a few times was Google’s practice of allowing their teams to spend 20% of their time on “passion projects”. Both Brown and Komisar were supportive of the general approach.  Miller confidently stated that 50% of Google launches come from the 20% time.  That sounds like a pretty incredible return for generously fostering creativity.

While iteration was the central line of the whole discussion, quickly discovering what doesn’t work and pivoting towards what does work was the clear take-away from the session.  Companies can do this by turning any failure into a success by applying what is learned.

The session was expertly moderated by Ravi Belani of Draper Fisher Jurvetson who kicked off open discussion for the panel and asked them to sum up their recommendations in 6 words.  I couldn’t be more succinct, so here it is:

• Marissa Mayer: Focus on the user. Prototype. Test.
• Tim Brown: Prototype. Learn. Prototype. Learn.
• Randy Komisar: Investing in iteration immensely improves innovation.

Simply expert advice for any company.

I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, but plan to spend more time checking it out. The creators say that they developed the tool for their own use and decided to share it with the user experience (UX) community.

This is a 1.0 version of the app just released last week with some basic features, but they work pretty well:

• Draw on the canvas
• Add sticky notes (that you type on with keyboard)
• Colorize the sticky notes for hierarchy, grouping, etc.
• Save or share your work via email

Universal Mind says to send them feedback and they’ll keep working on the app.  I look forward to seeing how it evolves.

Get the iBrainstorm iPad app for free in the App Store; they also indicate that an iPhone version is coming.

Hunter’s blog raised a provocative idea – namely to get your “best” designers to do less, to have them paint the broad strokes, not get bogged down in the details and move on. The driving factor being that you can’t clone a great designer and finding them in the first place is still a challenge.

Bilotta’s post responds to and expands upon Hunter’s ideas. These are a few of the topics she explores:

• The flow of ideas is collaborative, not directional
• Every possible design iteration doesn’t need to be explored
• Context switching is the enemy of quality
• The devil’s in the details
• Anything that users can see is the responsibility of the designer
• Strong team relationships accelerate design innovation

I don’t want to regurgitate her points; I really encourage you to pop over and read her thoughtful post.

I do want to say that my own project responsibility often lies somewhere right in the middle or at least sways back and forth: the need to work with a design team on every last detail to submit to engineering and the need to often times compromise detailed planning in order to keep production moving at a required pace.

With a background in multimedia from back in the day of “Gold Master CD-ROMs” – I appreciated that every design layout, information flow, and technical implementation was thoroughly thought through, tested and re-tested.  That was the only way to not sweat approval of several hundred thousand CD-ROMs being pressed for a client’s trade show.

These days, as a Product Manager, I’m trying best to shift my own thinking and that of my teams to accept that everything we do is iterative – we can let some things slide because websites and even apps are being experienced more and more as “living, evolving things”.  Just take a look at Twitter, billions of tweets a day and it’s still down 1/2 the time!  I have to admit, though, the designer in me often cringes when we can’t get something just perfect before sharing it with the world.

While I agree with nearly everything Bilotta points out, the most notable for me are around the issues of context switching and strong team relationships.

Designers are most often on the hook to come up with “amazing” things.  For this, they need to be given breathing room, runway to explore, and time to focus.  I find that when think time on any project is disjointed, it severely undercuts ability to hit the mark.

On the flip side, when you have a designer (or designers) that work with engineers very closely, they can often work through details collaboratively much faster than the typical linear flow (PRD -> Design -> Engineering).  This is where the concept of iteration really fits.

And, of course, having great designers in the first place is pretty important…

Thanks to Jennifer Bilotta and Hunter Walk for sharing their conversation!

FYI: I spotted the dialogue by way of a Twitter post from Silicon Valley blogger, Louis Gray.

The article raised a few very important points, particularly how libraries are being forced to reduce hours, programs, resources and services due to budget cut.  Given that my family very much appreciates our local libraries (we frequent two of them),  the article did prompt me to seek out the California Library Association.  I discovered that the association has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a YouTube Channel and a Flickr account.  I joined the Facebook page and followed the Twitter account.   I now plan to pay closer attention to what is going on with our local libraries, as I’d certainly like to see them around for many more years.

California Library Association on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Folsom-CA/California-Library-Association/87228833792?v=wall

California Library Association on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CalLibAssoc

California Library Association on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/CLA1895

California Library Association on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/calibraryassn/

Wells’ article linked to another from earlier this year by Marion Maneker: Do Libraries Have a Place in a Digital Future? Although the article is brief, it raised the question of the need for physical books as e-books are on the rise. The article is even more relevant as Amazon announced just days ago that Kindle book sales are now outpacing hardcover book sales.

I’ve been trying out a few eReader applications and have read a few eBooks.  I can see myself reading more books digitally but I have to say that I’m proud of my personal library and don’t see myself ever going completely digital.  There’s just something special about sitting down and being consumed by a “good book”… especially a favorite that you re-read multiple times.

Do you use your local library? Have you tried out any eReaders? What are your thoughts?