tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

Livestreaming Google+ Hangouts

2012-05-10T09:16:00.001-07:00

One of my responsibilities at Google Ventures is to plan the growing number of workshops that we offer to our portfolio companies. In the last several months, we’ve offered workshops on a variety of topics, including SEO, AdWords, latency, technical recruiting and candidate sourcing, A/B testing, and business development. With each new workshop announcement earlier this year, I received several replies from portfolio company employees outside the Bay Area: “What about us?!” It was a fair complaint: as we ramped up the pace of Startup Lab workshops in Mountain View, the unfortunate reality was that they required you to physically be in the Startup Lab to participate.

Starting in March, we began using Google+ Hangouts to extend the audience beyond the Startup Lab, but quickly ran into our next hurdle: Hangouts support a maximum of 10 participants, and demand for our broadcasts almost immediately exceeded that number.

This week the Google+ team announced that Hangouts on Air allow for unlimited viewers, and are now available to everyone. However, Hangouts on Air require the broadcasts to be public, which ends up not supporting our use case at Google Ventures: our broadcasts are available to anyone at our portfolio companies, but generally not to the public. As a result, we had to look at a way to leverage the early success of using Hangouts to enable interaction between remote attendees and presenters, while also retaining control over who could see the live broadcast.

When I started digging in on the best way to extend live broadcasts of our Hangouts, I was surprised to find few sites documenting the best ways to accomplish what we wanted. Since many people expressed interest in what I ended up doing (not to mention the many Startup Lab occupants who put up with me testing things out at the Startup Lab in the last few weeks!), I figured it was worth a summary of what we’re now using in the current Startup Lab.

Hangouts remain our platform for presenters to speak to the remote attendees, present slides, and screenshare their browser when showing specific sites, tools, etc. Remote attendees are invited into the private Hangout a few minutes ahead of the workshop, and can ask questions at any point throughout. In the Startup Lab, we run the Hangout from a Mac Mini, which has a Logitech C910 HD webcam pointed at the presenter. We use a Blue Snowball USB mic to capture audio in the room, and have a set of powered speakers plugged into the Mac Mini’s headphone jack.

For the livestream, we’re using Ustream. I liked Ustream’s featureset – we have the ability to embed the stream on our site, remove our channel from Ustream’s site altogether, brand the video stream with our logo, password protect the stream so only authorized viewers can watch, and remove ads (we pay for some of these features). Running the Ustream production is a dedicated iMac – I went with a 27” 3.4 GHz quad core iMac so that I’d have the fastest machine possible handling the CPU load associated with live streaming.

Remote attendees had pointed out that they had trouble following along with workshops when questions were asked in person in the Startup Lab – so we added a second camera (the upgraded Logitech C920 HD webcam) mounted on a tripod that’s pointed at the audience. When someone in the audience starts talking, we can switch to that camera so remote viewers can see the person who’s speaking and hear their question (which also avoids us having to have the presenter repeat the question).

Controlling the livestream is Ustream Producer Pro, an app that lets you manage multiple “shots” in a livestream and select which is the active shot seen by the livestream viewers. (Note: Producer is a free app, but I paid for the ‘Pro’ version to get the ability to stream in HD.) In addition to the audience webcam, we need the Hangout to be one of our shots; to get that, I’m routing the Mac Mini’s audio and video out via the Mac Mini’s HDMI port into a Blackmagic Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt video capture box. That plugs into the iMac via Thunderbolt, where Producer Pro sees it as one of its video signals.

Running the actual livestream is pretty straightforward: log into Ustream via Producer Pro on the iMac, select the active shot (the Mac Mini) and sit back. When questions are asked in the audience, switch to the audience camera in Producer Pro so livestream viewers can see/hear them, then switch back to the presenter shot when the question’s done.

In the planning stages, I drew out a diagram that actually comes close to representing the final setup:

Couple final notes on the setup:

In the Startup Lab I wanted to hear audio from the Hangout directly from the Mac Mini instead of through the livestream. There’s a couple second delay from live to the livestream, and the interaction on the Hangout would start to feel very awkward if the presenter took several seconds of waiting before they heard the question asked in the Hangout. When I plugged the speakers into the Mac Mini, the Mac routed audio to the speakers (and not the HDMI signal). To get audio to both the speakers and the HDMI signal (so that the Hangout audio would be included in the livestream), I created an “aggregate device” in the Mac Mini’s Audio Devices (Utilities | Audio MIDI Setup | + | Create Aggregate Device), and in the Hangout set the audio output to the aggregate device.
It’s much simpler if presenters use the Mac Mini for the Hangout, but there are times when what they’re presenting is only available on their laptop. For those cases, I got an HDMI switcher and a display port to HDMI cable. When needed, I can plug them into the HDMI switcher, and the signal on the iMac via the Blackmagic Intensity capture device will be their laptop instead of the Mac Mini.
Facilitating questions from the livestream remains a work in progress. We’ll be incorporating Google Moderator to collect questions and let the audience vote on which questions they’re most interested in. We will likely be embedding the Moderator questions directly on the livestream page on our site, but are still evaluating the easiest way to do this that’s also visible to folks in the Hangout so we avoid forking conversations.
This setup does result in two video feeds: the Hangout and the Ustream broadcast of the Hangout. I’m going to keep an eye on things to figure out whether this becomes too confusing; if so, we may shift to having all attendees watch the livestream, and have presenters in the Hangout.

In the course of building this setup, I reached out to a number of folks for guidance. Big thanks to the TWiT crew (Leo Laporte, Denise Howell, Alex Lindsay) and the Ustream guys (Brad Hunstable, Alden Fertig, Andy Francis) for answering every question I threw at them, and of course the Hangouts team for building such a great product.

Adding Bluetooth to my car stereo

2012-03-11T13:28:00.002-07:00

A few months ago, I flirted with buying a new car. I've driven a Subaru B9 Tribeca for nearly 6 years, and I was attracted to a sedan that would get better mileage. The Tribeca's a fine vehicle, and since my commute has mostly involved driving to transportation (train in Illinois, the Google shuttle in California) instead of driving to work, it has very few miles on it (fewer than 50,000 miles). But I took a few cars for a test drive, and came close to pulling the trigger.

In the end, I didn't. A paid-for car is a beautiful thing, even if it doesn't get fantastic gas mileage. In deciding to keep the Tribeca though, one frustration stuck with me: the stereo was frustratingly limited. There was no line-in option and no Bluetooth connectivity - so I had no way to listen to anything other than broadcast radio or CDs, and taking calls in the car meant using a headset. (I never liked Bluetooth headsets, and the wired headsets were always clumsy to put in when a call came in.)

Last year I tried to solve this by adding a line-in port to the stereo, but ultimately failed. I ended up getting an FM transmitter (plugged into the headphone jack of my phone, and broadcast to one of a handful of FM frequencies to the car stereo), but the interference meant that even on relatively brief drives I'd have to change frequencies two or three times. I stopped using it after just a few months.

I was at Best Buy a few weekends ago, and wandered to the car stereo section. I asked one of the salesmen whether there was a solution that'd let me add Bluetooth to the vehicle. Sure enough, there was: he told me about the Parrot kits that do exactly that - but I'd need to obtain the wiring harness for my vehicle independently, get it to them, and then they'd sell me the Parrot kit and do the install. (Trivia: this is the same Parrot that makes the AR drones!) Total cost would be around $500 (more if I wanted them to mount the phone on the dashboard). That was more than I wanted to spend, but sounded like a pretty ideal solution.

The issue I'd run into last year was the inability to get the right wires into the existing harness, so even though I could hear the audio from the phone, it was very faint and a loud hum was constantly present (I suspect the line-in connection needed to be amplified and grounded). A wiring harness that would ensure everything connected properly would get around last year's obstacle.

Online I went, and here's how I added Bluetooth to my 6 year-old car stereo for just over $300:

Parrot MKi9200 ($180). This kit includes a microphone, a small dash-mounted LCD display to show call and audio information, a set of line-in cables (headphone, iPhone, USB), a remote (make/end calls, play/pause, next/previous, volume), and the junction box that routes the audio through the car's existing stereo.
Quickconnect QCSub-1 MK ($50). This is what makes the installation a pretty straightforward affair. You can ditch the spaghetti mess that ships with the Parrot kit - this harness is configured to plug directly into the Subaru's stereo and into the Parrot, making it a plug-and-play setup.
ProClip Vehicle Mount and Device Holder ($75). I'd tried suction-cup holders for my phone in the past, but inevitably would find them on the floor of the car as the suction would give way to gravity. (The last one I tried lasted just one afternoon.) Much like the Quickconnect site, you provide your year, make and model and they have a mounting bracket custom-sized for your vehicle, then you pick your device and you get a holder that is specifically tailored for your device.

Once everything arrived, installation took about 90 minutes. (I ran into one snag, but found this photo walk-through from a Tribeca owner who'd done the exact same install last year.) This is not a particularly difficult thing to do, but you do have to be comfortable removing the trim from your dashboard and disconnecting your stereo to get everything hooked up. With the wiring harness from Quickconnect, the only thing that was at all tricky was figuring out where/how to hide the wires for the microphone and the line-in cables - that'll vary by car but I was able to completely hide everything behind the car trim so that no wires are visible at all.

The end result is exactly what I was looking for. My Galaxy Nexus is firmly mounted to my dash, making it much easier to see and access (particularly for navigation). Sound quality is outstanding - I've listened to podcasts and music (via Rhapsody, Pandora and Google Music) and found the fidelity to be excellent. Sound quality for phone calls is similarly terrific - the caller comes through on all eight speakers in the vehicle so I hear them very clearly, and the mic is close enough to my face that they hear me well. (Callers have reported some road noise, but nothing that's interfered with hearing/understanding me.) I expect I'll have the car for another few years, and eliminating this annoyance from the vehicle has been a huge win.

One final note: a shout-out to Howard from Quickconnect, who provided the best customer support of any online purchase I've ever made. Within 20 minutes of me e-mailing when I ran into the installation snag, he replied (this was after business hours, mind you). No fewer than four more e-mails over the next two hours - including asking me to take pictures of the stereo and harnesses to isolate the issue I was having - and I was able to quickly figure out what I was doing wrong. In reading reviews online about Quickconnect, I see my experience is hardly unique - can't recommend them highly enough!

Note: links to Amazon use the Amazon Associates service - Amazon pays a small commission if anyone reads this and then buys the products linked here. The commissions end up either buying a few Kindle books or a gadget once in a while; mostly I just enjoy seeing data about whether anyone clicks through and buys the items I write about periodically!

Taking passwords seriously

2012-01-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

I used to use the same password everywhere. In 1993, I crashed a Clinton inauguration party at a restaurant in DC, and for years my password was a derivative of that restaurant's name. I'd read somewhere that it was a good idea to include numbers in your passwords, so I picked a number and my "standard" password became "restaurant#name". Sometime a few years later, I read that symbols were good too - so the stand-by became "restaurant[number]name[symbol]". Every time I set that as my password, the password strength meters measured off the charts: it used a number and a symbol, wasn't in the dictionary, and I was probably the only person in the world with that particular password.

But things began to get messy. Some sites didn't allow symbols. Others had a max character limit. As sites got more serious about security, some required mixed cases (some capitals, some lower case). Inevitably, my "standard" password became more like a template, with a half dozen derivatives. And it became increasingly hard to remember which site had which derivative.

Several years ago, I realized that one password to rule them all was probably a bad idea. After all - if someone got ahold of my nytimes.com password, they'd probably be able to log into Amazon, Gmail, PayPal and any number of other sites. I resolved to use a pattern that was site-specific. That was marginally better, but anyone who got ahold of my password at one site could probably figure out my password on other sites.

Then in December of 2010, Gawker was compromised, and the hackers didn't just publicize that they'd breached Gawker's servers, they published a file of all usernames and passwords. I had an account at Gawker, and as a result my password - and the simple pattern used to construct it - was available for the world to see. I'd read about password managers at the time, but thought that since I'd been able to survive for 15 years without one, I'd be OK just hardening my "standard" password. My new pattern incorporated the year, but now I had an even worse mess on my hands: I had dozens of accounts, and depending on when I'd last accessed them, a password that followed one of three possible patterns (with any number of derivatives). My method was falling apart. When 2012 arrived, it was clear I was toast. I couldn't have a year-dependent password pattern - did I open that account in 2011? 2012? Did I update it in 2010?

This weekend, Zappos's 24 million customer accounts were compromised (I was one of them). Though we don't yet know how broad the breach was, or whether the attackers will publish an account list like the Gawker attackers did, I didn't need another reminder. It was time to get serious about my passwords.

I asked people on Google+ and Twitter what they used to manage their passwords, and people overwhelmingly recommended two services - LastPass and 1Password. LastPass had a few more recommendations overall, so I started there.

First off, a quick summary of what LastPass is: you create a username and password with LastPass, and as you log into websites it asks whether you'd like to store those in your LastPass "vault". Once stored, each username and password is available to you wherever you can access LastPass - whether on your computer, on a guest computer, on your mobile device, etc. If you're creating a new account, LastPass can generate a very secure password - it won't be memorable, it isn't guessable, and it'll be unique to that site and your username. (I just asked LastPass to generate a new password, here's what it came up with: "kkVUI8nZ".)

With that in mind, here's what I did to get serious about my passwords. I'll warn you: this took a fair amount of time - easily 6+ hours in total over a couple days, and I'm not actually done (I keep thinking of more accounts to upgrade). That said, I am much happier with my overall security than I was going into the weekend, and as an added benefit I have a master list of every account I use on the Internet.

1. Set up a LastPass account. This username will be your master login for LastPass, and the password should be very secure, but one you can remember - if you lose it, you'll regret it. (It's not necessarily an "abandon all hope"moment, but it's close.)

2. Download LastPass Chrome extension. I use Chrome exclusively as my browser, and often jump from my MacBook Air to my Chromebook. LastPass has a Chrome extension that makes LastPass completely integrated with the browser, which made the next several steps much easier. (LastPass has integrations with IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera, so you should be good to go regardless of which browser you use.)

3. Install the Android app. The core LastPass service is free, but the premium service - for a whopping $1/month - means I can use their Android app to access my password vault directly from the phone. That's handy - especially with a number of mobile apps I use for banking and the like - and well worth the minimal cost.

4. Clear cookies and saved passwords, set Chrome to never remember passwords. This avoids me automatically logging into any site I visit (which is a nice forcing function to upgrade the password as I'm prompted to log in) and avoids Chrome and LastPass fighting over who gets to save the username/password when entered (I want LastPass to do so).

5. Upgrade passwords. I started a Google Spreadsheet to list all the accounts I could think of. I got to 30 pretty quickly, and after a few more minutes added another 15. But I knew there were more. I've used Gmail for all e-mail for the last six years, so I headed over to Gmail to find all the accounts hidden within. Here are some Gmail searches I used to find little-used and long-forgotten accounts, some of which had saved credit cards stored in them and other data that I'd like to protect:

to:me "new account"
to:me "new login"
to:me password reset
to:me receipt
to:me account confirmation
to:me username

There were other searches that were useful; you get the idea (and can probably think of others that'd produce additional logins). As I found a new site that had a login for me, I added it to the Google Spreadsheet. Within an hour, my account list was well over 100 logins.

Once I had the full list, I then opened a new tab and tried to log in to each site, one at a time. (I often couldn't remember which pattern derivative my password was for that particular site; if that was the case, I just clicked 'forgot password' and used that feature to reset my login.) Once in, I then chose the "change password" option, and used LastPass to generate a new, secure password. Upon confirmation of the new password being set, LastPass would ask if I'd like to save the new password in my vault - which of course I did.

6. Rinse, lather, repeat. As diligent as I was, I thought of another dozen accounts (college and law school alumni sites, couple other news sites, etc.) last night that I've added to the Google Spreadsheet and will tackle shortly. Though LastPass is now managing over 100 logins for me, I expect there are another 50-75 I have forgotten about that I will accumulate in the next month or two. (Update: since starting this blog post, I've found another 30. It never ends!)

7. Turn on Google Authenticator support in LastPass. Last year, I wrote about best practices for keeping your Google Account secure , and spent a bit of time talking about 2-step verification. The premise is simple: with 2-step verification enabled, your username and password alone do not grant you access to your account. You need something else - in this case, a code that is visible only on your mobile phone - to get access. The idea behind this is that your phone is likely to be in your possession - and only yours - so that a bad actor who might have found a way to get your username and password would still be unable to get access to your account. LastPass works with Google Authenticator, which means that you'll only be able to unlock your password vault if you physically have possession of your phone - yet another layer of security that all but guarantees that you will keep prying eyes out of your private info.

As I got to accounts that I hadn't used in years, I thought hard about deleting the account - and in several cases did just that. If I kept the account, obviously it's ideal to upgrade the password to something more secure than my previous password. But removing the account altogether was an even more secure alternative - and I'll remember those services that make removing accounts easy for when I need a service like that again. Services that don't make it easy to delete your account shouldn't expect to see me ever again.

One final LastPass feature that I adore: sharing. Not all passwords that are in my name/e-mail address are mine alone. Our utilities, for instance, all have the ability to log in and review past invoices, pay bills, etc. but they require a single username/password to manage. Rather than make my wife remember one of these LastPass-generated passwords or rely on an insecure, memorable password, LastPass allows me to share a password with her through LastPass. This is no less secure, but far more convenient - and if we ever need to update the password, LastPass will manage the updates and ensure that we both have the current version.

Thanks to the many people who responded on Google+ and Twitter - I'm really happy with the outcome and only annoyed that I didn't do this years ago!

New year's resolution: get a job!

2012-01-04T14:20:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new year. If your current job isn't thrilling you and you resolved to find a job you love in 2012, be sure to visit the Google Ventures job board. Our growing portfolio of start-ups are hiring - as of this writing, there are 371 jobs waiting to be filled.

Whether you're looking for a job in California, Colorado, DC, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Texas, or Washington, there are engineering, HR, bizdev, marketing, sales, design and ops roles that need to be filled. (Not in the US? Our portfolio companies are hiring in Germany, China, Brazil, Switzerland, Spain, and Hong Kong too.)

Rather work at Google? Google's hiring too.

Businesses who don't trust customers

2012-01-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

Comcastic image from barbariangroup.com.

Last month I contemplated something unthinkable (for me): I thought about breaking up with TiVo. I started my relationship with TiVo 11 years ago, with a Sony DirecTiVo box that I still consider among the best consumer electronics purchases I've ever made. Since then, I've gone through several TiVo boxes, as we moved from DirecTV to Comcast, from standard def to HD.

So why consider leaving? In short, my wife and I (not to mention our kids) are watching less and less broadcast TV, opting instead for what we can get on demand. Netflix Instant is great for tv series and some diamond-in-the-rough films, and Amazon VOD (both the free-to-Prime subscribers as well as the on-demand rentals) has been great. Though both services technically work with our TiVo boxes, the interface for both on our GoogleTV is much better, and has been how we consume both services. As a result, we found we were watching fewer and fewer recorded shows from the TiVo, and we were watching the on-demand services through GoogleTV, bypassing TiVo altogether. By moving to the Comcast boxes, we'd also get access to Comcast's On Demand programming, which we pay for through our monthly subscription but have no way to access (TiVo and Comcast have been claiming On Demand support is coming for years, but even if/when it does come, it'll likely be on TiVo equipment I don't own).

Off I went to Comcast to pick up a couple Comcast HD DVRs. I'd conveniently suppressed my last experience with Comcast equipment (that post is worth a read, btw), came home and hooked the first box up. It should have been simple, plugging the HDMI cable that had previously been connected to the TiVo into the Comcast box. (That HDMI cable is plugged into the GoogleTV box, which sends an HDMI signal to our receiver, which sends an HDMI signal to our TV.) Try as I might, I couldn't get anything to display on the television. The front of the Comcast box seemed to read "dU1", and I could only see a blue screen on the TV.

I called Comcast, which produced nothing actionable - the best they could offer was that I should try a different box. (I already had.)

After some Googling, I figured out what was up. It's called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (or HDCP), and it's been in place for years. Turns out, Comcast doesn't trust me! Though I pay Comcast several hundred dollars per month - and was actually contemplating paying another $25/month for the two boxes - if I wanted to plug that HDMI cable into anything other than directly into my television, they consider me a pirate and forbid me from using my equipment at all. (That "dU1" error was actually saying "DVI", but given the limitations of the 1980s-era display on the cable box, that was the best they could come up with. To use the box, I'd need to revert to non-HDMI cabling, separating the video signal from the audio signal.)

I immediately unplugged the Comcast box and returned both. Re-connected the TiVos, and went back to using my equipment exactly how I wanted (which, by the way, is entirely legal).

So here's a 2012 resolution I intend to keep: companies who trust me get more of my money. Companies who don't trust me, or who implement unnecessary technical limitations on equipment I pay for and intend to use legally? Not so much.

BTW, Fred Wilson has a related rant up today titled #screwcable:

I've long believed that piracy is largely a business model problem not a human behavior problem. If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it.

Amen.

Interestingly enough, this same attitude - restricting innovation to protect legacy business models - is the very issue at the heart of the SOPA debate going on in Washington, DC as I write this. Though those of us opposing SOPA made progress last month, the fight is by no means over. Please visit Engine Advocacy (today!) and call Congress today to let your representatives know that you do not want to let the US government censor the web and further restrict users' legitimate uses of new technologies.

Becoming a better photographer

2012-01-01T12:06:00.000-08:00

In keeping with my 2012 information diet, I've resolved to both blog more and take more photographs. Late last year I upgraded my camera - from a Nikon D80 to a Nikon D7000. Thought I'd document a bit about the gear I'm using and how I'm committing more to my photography hobby.

My primary lens is a Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II lens; I waffled a bit between this lens and a better zoom (had my eye on the Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8), but ultimately opted for the greater flexibility of the 18-200, along with the VR capabilities in the lens that should make hand-held shooting better. (For good reviews of the 18-200 that helped me make up my mind, see Thom Hogan and Ken Rockwell.) It also didn't hurt that the 18-200, while not inexpensive, was quite a bit less than the 80-200.

I put a 72mm Hoya UV filter on the lens, and will probably pick up a polarizing filter before our summer trip to Alaska.

Ade Oshineye echoed a recommendation I'd heard from several photographers: keep the camera with me at all times. To make that a bit easier, I picked up the Kata 3n1-33 backpack that will carry my camera and gear, as well as my laptop, power cords and books. I've really liked the bag, which can be a backpack or a sling, and features a nice easy-access compartment that makes getting to the camera really fast. Thanks to Chris White for the recommendation on Google+ - it's been a great bag so far.

After I upgraded the camera body, I asked for some recommendations on books that'd help me improve, and have picked up several of the books that were suggested:

Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. This book does a great job explaining the 3 critical parts of a photo: ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Great illustrations and very readable copy make this a very solid explanation of how pictures are composed and how to get the right exposure every time.
David Busch's Nikon D7000. I read through the Nikon manual - it does a great job explaining how to do things with the D7000's incredibly sophisticated controls. But what's missing is the why you'd do certain things - why you'd use one auto-focus option over another, why you'd tweak that noise reduction setting, why you'd choose one option over another. Busch's guide is a veritable bible for the camera, and is giving me much more appreciation for what the camera can do (and how I can take control of it).
David Busch's Nikon D7000 field guide. This stays in the Kata bag, and is a condensed version of the D7000 bible mentioned above.

BTW, many thanks to some great photographers/friends for their advice on Google+: Erica Joy, Chris Chabot, Bud Gibson, Ade Oshineye, David Hobby, and Thomas Hawk. You should follow them!

Finally, I've switched from Picasa to Adobe Lightroom for managing my photos. While I was generally happy with Picasa, I've found Lightroom to be a more fully-featured app - both for managing photos shot in RAW and for the large volume of photos I'm shooting. I'm still getting the hang of it, but have found Adobe's Lightroom TV a great collection of tutorials to get more out of the app.

Of course, none of this is any good without developing a better eye, and lots of practice. To that end, I'm following a lot of photographers on Google+ and observing what I like (and what I can understand!), and am trying to take a lot more pictures. I've had the camera less than a month and have taken well over 1,000 pictures. We took some family down to Monterey right before Christmas, and I took a couple shots I'm really happy with:

Really looking forward to taking many more thousands of pictures in 2012. Stay tuned!

My Information Diet

2011-12-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

This past summer I had lunch with Clay Johnson, and he told me he was hard at work on a book called The Information Diet. I read an early manuscript copy, and am excited to see that the Kindle version of Clay's book is out as of yesterday.

I'm over-simplifying, but his general premise is that we don't have an information overload problem, we have an information obesity problem. In the same way obesity is less a result of too much food and more about the wrong kind of food, our problem today is that we are spending too much time consuming the wrong information, and we're not disciplined enough about how/when/where we consume the right information. After reading his book, I can say he makes a compelling case.

First, a bit of background: I met Clay when he worked on the Dean campaign, and I was a very active volunteer from Illinois. The Dean campaign was full of smart, idealistic people like Clay - and for much of the summer and fall of 2003, it looked like smart and idealistic was going to take our country back. It was fun while it lasted.

I remained friends with Clay and active in politics after the Dean campaign ended. I had the incredible opportunity to be the lead blogger on then-State Senator Obama's campaign blog. I eventually landed at a startup in Chicago, which was then acquired by Google and we moved to California.

Over the last 4 years, I've become frustrated by the seeming broken-ness of the political system. Conservatives watch Fox News and read Drudge, liberals watch MSNBC and read Daily Kos. Both are not only certain they're right, they're flabbergasted that the other guys are dumb enough to fall for the obvious agenda of their news outlet of choice.

Through some combination of my law school training, some of that latent political idealism, and having some family members whose opinions diverge with my own but are often exceptionally well-informed, I actually want a strong opposition (whether that happens to be my team or the other team - doesn't matter). I believe that the other side of the aisle often has points that are not only valid, they may actually be convincing. Though I strongly identify with many of the core ideals of the Democratic Party, I have frequently voted against candidates from that party.

Clay's own evolution - from campaign operative to political activist to transparency advocate to author - echoes some of those same concerns. Once he understood that much of what he was working on was treating symptoms rather than the cause of the problems he was confronting, he set out in search of the root cause. And that's where the Information Diet comes in.

Clay's book is worth your time and attention, and more importantly it should lead to some evaluation of your own behaviors to see how you can get in shape (informationally, that is). Using the analogy of factory farming - drawing a line from the subsidization of cheap calories to a direct impact on the nation's obesity - Clay goes into the trend of mass-produced "content" (not really "news" or even "information", but content). In the same way that cheap calories lead to unfit consumers, cheap content has led to unfit information habits. It's easy to find the content that agrees with you, that reinforces your point of view, and proves, once and for all, that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.

Problem is, it's just as easy for them to do the same thing. Where that leads us is to a government that's threatened three times in the last five months to shut down over partisan bickering. It leads to the demonization of the opposition, it leads to a total lack of investment in healthy discourse.

I turned 40 this year, and I've made a promise to myself that I'll exercise more and eat better. I'm doing OK on that front - but I'm nowhere near establishing the habits needed to have this be part of my daily routine. But I am committed to it, and know that with some discipline I'll be in a better place. That is the not-altogether-earth-shattering message of Clay's book, but it's delivered in a way that's entirely achievable. Once I saw the connection between information consumption habits and the fracturing of our political discourse, I resolved to get my own act together. I expect others will have a similar reaction. With that in mind, here's my information diet:

RSS: I actually started this process after chatting with Clay this summer, but am going back through my Reader subscriptions. I'd once subscribed to as many as 300 RSS feeds; that number is down to 50 or so and I expect I'll get it down to 20 by the end of the year. Most bloggers I subscribe to I also follow on Twitter or Google+, so I'm removing those subscriptions (I find the ensuing conversation on those services easier to follow too, which is a bonus of moving my attention there away from the blog's feed alone.)
E-mail: Over the past few weeks, I've unsubscribed from almost every e-mail list I've received mail from. I've removed myself from 40 lists this week alone, and expect that by the time I'm done I'll have left over 100 e-mail lists. If I continue to see mail I don't want, I may give Unsubscribe.com a look. Bottom line - I almost never read the promotional e-mails anyway, and the distraction of seeing the unread messages count increment by one when they come in - resulting in me having to archive/delete/unsub/spam/whatever the message means that it just takes time away from otherwise productive time. Beyond that, I'm going to try very hard to block time to process e-mail (I'm pretty terrible at letting my inbox dictate how I manage my time) and keep Gmail closed otherwise.
Production: I recently got a new camera, and this blog happens to turn 10 years old next week. I like producing stuff - but have fallen out of the habit of actually creating stuff I enjoy. In the year ahead, I'm going to focus more on blocking time to write - it's how I learn, since I don't really understand something until I can explain it to someone else. Ditto on the photography - we have a couple big trips planned in 2012 and I want to be good enough with the camera to take pictures worthy of what we're going to see.
Politics: I've already cut back dramatically on what I consume on politics; it's pretty much down to Talking Points Memo (its founder, Josh Marshall, has been a friend of mine for 15 years) and Political Wire. To those sources (both of which have a liberal bent, TPM moreso than PoliticalWire) I'm going to add a few conservative commentators I respect (like Reihan Salam from National Review). Beyond that, I'm going to spend more time understanding the local issues in my community - in Illinois I chaired the democratic party in my city, so I knew many of the local officials, understood most of the important issues. Since moving here, I've had almost no contact locally - that's going to change.
Social Networks: I'm a very active consumer and producer of info on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook - with very different audiences on each. I don't expect that will change much, though I think like e-mail I'll be a bit more diligent about blocking time when I engage rather than keeping tabs open in Chrome with each service running.

The irony of a book about an information diet producing a blog post from me that runs to a couple thousand words is definitely not lost on me. But that's part of the point: the book's important. It's not a fad diet book, it's a healthy living diet book. In much the same way that turning 40 made me think about what really mattered to me - producing a resolution to be more committed to exercise and a healthy food diet - Clay's book helped me take a hard look at how I interact with information. I'm already changing my behavior, and expect you will to.

Stop SOPA and PROTECT-IP

2011-11-17T17:45:00.001-08:00

There's a pretty bad bill going through DC right now. Quoting at length from Matt Cutts' blog post I Need Your Help from earlier this week:

Here’s what I need:
1. Take a few minutes to learn about the SOPA/E-PARASITE/PROTECT IP bills. They’re really bad bills.
2. Take five minutes to call your Congressperson on the phone. If you live in Texas, Michigan, Vermont, or Iowa, this goes double for you.
3. Get the word out. Tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter (maybe a hashtag like #stopsopa), or Google+. If your parents live in a different state, ask them to call their Congressperson too.

I would really, really appreciate the help. If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog or follows me online, I’m pretty sure the more you read about SOPA, the less you’ll like it.

If SOPA becomes law, it could stifle the innovation (and jobs) that the technology industry creates. That’s why Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, and Zynga all oppose SOPA. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue–Red State thinks SOPA is a bad idea too.

Movember!

2011-11-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

Against my better judgment, I am participating in Movember this month. If you don't know about Movember, this Chrome ad does a pretty good job summing it up:

If you would like to support me in this quest to make me look ridiculous, I would very much appreciate you making a donation of any amount on my Movember page - http://mobro.co/rklau.

As Bartles and Jaymes used to say, thank you for your support.

Uncharted 3: Arriving tomorrow

2011-10-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

I'm more than a little excited about this: Uncharted 3 comes out tomorrow, and I just got e-mail confirmation from Amazon that my pre-order copy shipped earlier today.

If you haven't played a game in the Uncharted franchise before, you're missing out. I'm not a hard-core gamer (I hadn't owned a console for almost 20 years until I got a PS3 for Christmas a couple years ago), and Uncharted 2 remains the only modern game I've played from beginning to end.

Uncharted 2 is an incredible game - I picked it back up this past week while my Dad was in town, and my Dad (even less of a gamer than I am!) made it through 1/3 of the game over the course of his visit - and loved it. (Side note: playing video games with your Dad late into the night the same week you turn 40 is about as cool as it gets.) It's funny, thrilling, and at times surprising - and easy for a newbie like me to pick up and still feel engaged. As I said to my Dad - Uncharted - not Indiana Jones - is the franchise Steven Spielberg would build today if he were 22 years old. And after playing Uncharted, it's not hard to understand how the video game industry is bigger than the film industry.

I've deliberately avoided watching any of the game play videos or reading the reviews in depth. All I know is that I'm going to have a lot of fun hanging out with Nate Drake again in the weeks ahead.

A phenomenal birthday present

2011-10-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

I turned 40 yesterday. It's been a great week - we celebrated at the house with friends Saturday night, then my parents arrived for the actual day and we had a terrific meal at home followed by gifts and cake.

Though I've been fortunate to have received some wonderful birthday gifts over the years, nothing really compares to what my wife coordinated for this year. Earlier this year, we got a letter from my friend Bill's wife April - Bill was turning 40, and in lieu of gifts, April wanted Bill's friends to send him a book that meant something to them, along with an inscription inside saying who it was from and why they sent it. We loved the idea, and I eagerly sent 3 books to Bill.

Robin thought it was such a great idea that she'd do the same for me - and last night I unwrapped nearly 50 books from friends around the country. I don't know what's more incredible: the thoughtfulness that so many dear friends put into the selection of the books (and the messages they inscribed), that I've only read a handful of the books (each of which I'll read again now), or that I now have easily a year's worth of amazing reading ahead of me. Opening the books last night and reading the messages inside of each was the absolute best birthday gift imaginable.

Even better? Apparently more are on the way! To everyone who contributed a book (you know who you are!) - thank you so, so much. This list reflects the diverse personalities everyone who participated, and I am blessed beyond measure to have such remarkable friends.

For those who are curious to see what was sent, the list is below.

Miracle in the Andes, Nando Parrado
Fool, by Christopher Moore
Boss - Richard Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko
Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, by Chelsea Handler
Elk Talk, by Don Laubach and Mark Henckel
It’s Your Ship - Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
The Devil Drives - A Life of Sir Richard Burton, by Fawn M. Brodie
The Power of One, by Bryce Courtney
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, by Richard P. Feynman
Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland
How to Negotiate Like a Child, by Bill Adler, Jr.
The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: The Book, by Joss Whedon
A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle
The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston
All About Elk, by North American Hunting Club
Winston Churchill: The Last Lion Vol. 1 - Visions of Glory and Vol. 2 - Alone, by William Manchester
The Girl on the Fridge, by Etgar Keret
Pastoralia, by George Saunders
A Guidebook to Learning, by Mortimer J. Adler
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Heroes of the Hall: Baseball’s All-Time Best, by Ron Smith
Bethel, by Patrick Tierney Wild
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Wine & War, by Don & Petie Kladstrup
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
The Lobster Chronicles, by Linda Greenlaw
Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick
I Know This Much is True, by Wally Lamb
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
Ocean City Volume 1 and 2, by Nan DeVincent-Hayes
Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein
Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook, by Harry C. Box
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
This is Water, by David Foster Wallace
The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
Better by Saturday, by Golf Magazine
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
Domestic Violets, by Matthew Norman
The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown
A Hidden Wholeness, by Parker J. Palmer
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, by Christopher Moore
False Sanctuary, by Del Gibson
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Joining Google Ventures

2011-10-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to share the news that I recently joined Google Ventures as a partner, where I'm going to be running Startup University. Startup U is our dedicated effort at helping entrepreneurs at our growing portfolio companies benefit from our experience and that of our colleagues at Google.

For those who know me, you know what an ideal role I consider this. I have loved working at Google, and consider it a true privilege to continue to work among such incredible colleagues. While leaving YouTube was an excruciatingly hard decision - I loved my coworkers at YouTube, and am excited about what's coming up from them - the role that I've been asked to take on at Google Ventures was simply too perfect for me.

I've worked at a number of startups - most recently FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007. Before that, there was Socialtext, and before that a couple of software companies focused on the legal space (I'm a lawyer by background, for those who didn't know). Before Google, the largest company I'd worked for was just 200 people - I'd worked at a couple companies of just a dozen people. FeedBurner had 6 employees when I joined. I've been on phone calls where founders discussed postponing pay so they could pay the other employees. I've held my breath as we waited for news of the Big Win - some hits, lots of misses. And I've been in the midst of some pretty spectacular crises (maybe a blog post or two in there, come to think of it!) where we wondered if we'd weather the storm.

Which is all my way of saying that I've lived the startup life - good, bad and in between. But in the last four years I've lived the Google life, and seen countless reminders of what an extraordinary collection of talent, experience and insight Google is. When Joe and Bill first reached out to me about joining Google Ventures, I started thinking about what it might look like if we could combine the deep experience of the Ventures team (many of whom have far more impressive entrepreneurial cred than I do) along with the collective expertise of tens of thousands of Googlers. I've been excited ever since, and I formally joined several weeks ago.

If you haven't seen the story that ran earlier this week in TechCrunch about my move, it's worth reading. Not for anything it says about me, but for how Google Ventures as a whole is thinking about Startup U. Startup U is not about telling the portfolio companies how to do things. Instead, it's about setting them up to succeed - and if they're going to make a mistake, let's make sure they don't repeat the ones we made.

The early feedback from companies in our portfolio is exceptionally positive. We have a number of experiments we intend to try in the months ahead, and I cannot wait to report back on what's working (and what's not).

For those who've been in the startup trenches before: what do you wish you'd had access to? What mistakes do you wish you could have avoided? And for those of you thinking about taking the plunge: what assistance/guidance/input would be invaluable to you?

I'm all ears!

New dynamic view from Blogger

2011-09-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited by today's announcement from the Blogger team - as of a few minutes ago, they launched "dynamic views" for all blogs hosted by Blogger. From their announcement:

Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that will inspire your readers to explore your blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier for readers to enjoy and discover your posts, loading 40 percent faster than traditional templates and bringing older entries to the surface so they seem fresh again.

They've also included an image gallery of what the different types of layouts look like:

I've fallen off the blogging wagon for too long. I'm looking forward to picking things back up again - today's announcement came at just the right time!

Falling off the cluetrain

2011-09-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

(I posted this to Google+ earlier today. I'm loving the engagement over there, so feel free to comment on the post over there. Don't have a Google+ account yet? Click here to sign up!)

How times have changed. Just had a miserable post-sales experience with Lenovo. Ugh.

From my overwhelmingly positive experience 5 years ago (!), to this:

My nephew starts college next week, and my wife and I told him we were going to buy him a laptop as a graduation/welcome to college gift. I was going to buy a MacBook Air, but he has several games that are only playable on a PC, so I reverted to my preferred PC brand, Lenovo.

In purchasing the laptop, the estimated ship date was clearly indicated as the 6th. Not ideal - in an age when Amazon can ship things out in what seems like minutes after you complete your order, the week's delay to get a preconfigured machine out the door seemed unnecessarily long. But it'd still be there in his first week of school.

I checked on the order this morning to confirm that it was in order; the website shows the order (3 days later) as still "in process", and the estimated ship date has been updated to 9/12. The site helpfully says for more info I should call, so I called the post-sales line. Turns out the post sales line's touch-tone recognition is borked, so no matter what you do, no tones are recognized in response to their prompts, and you get repeatedly disconnected.

I followed up by calling the pre-sales line, where the touch-tone recognition works, and got through to a rep. All he could offer was that in his experience the shipments often go out much sooner - but could offer no way to improve things, no explanation for the week's delay in estimated ship time, and no promise to do anything other than follow up in two business days with any new info he might have at that time.

In '06, I wrote the following:

Lenovo cares about its customers. Lenovo customers are passionate about Lenovo’s products. And in this age of decreasing customer loyalty, you can’t put a price tag on that.

Maybe the laptop will get shipped out sooner, as my rep suggested it might. But that'll feel like an accident, instead of evidence of a company trying hard to do right by its customers. A lot can change in five years.

Remembering my Grandmother

2011-04-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

Patsy Ruthelma (Dawson) Klau, 1927 - 2011

(My grandmother passed away in January after a brief battle with cancer. She was one week shy of her 84th birthday. Our family gathered in Milwaukee last month to celebrate her life, and each of her four grandchildren spoke at her memorial service. My remarks follow.)

I was probably 7 or 8 years old when Grandma and I went alone to Betty & Gordon Heup's house for a party. I don't remember why it was just the two of us, or what the event was for. But I do remember that we were sitting at a dinner table, and I'd seen one of the older boys (since he's here, we'll blame this on Tim, though I have no idea who it actually was!) flick his finger through the candle flame. Intrigued, and realizing that my parents were nowhere near, I did what I'd seen the older boy do, and passed my finger quickly through the flame. It was the only time in my life I can remember Patsy actually calling me Richard Parker. (And not in a good way!) I straightened up, apologized, and promised her I'd never do it again. She loved me, that much I'd always known. But she wasn't going to let me get away with misbehaving. In a strange way, that felt even more special than if she'd ignored what I'd done. (Boys, don't even think about trying this, by the way.)

In high school, I had a history teacher named Winslow Smith, who claimed that he taught because the way to become immortal was to live on in the memories of others. Winslow was playing a numbers game - if you teach enough students then one of them's bound to remember that thing you said in AP history in 1986. But the only number Grandma cared about was 2: her 2 sons. her two successful sons: the wine guy and the toilet guy. She was so proud of Chris and Dad - of their obvious success in their careers, to be sure… but her real pride she saved for the families they'd built.

Speaking of family, I remember Patsy's mom, who I knew as Nan-Nan. I didn't get too many chances to spend time with her, but as a young boy I remember that she was the really nice lady who cried whenever she saw us. I understood it wasn't because she was sad - I think now it must have been tremendous pride to see what obviously handsome and well-behaved great-grandsons she had. And though Grandma showed the same pride in her family that her mom did, she wasn’t a crier - what I remember whenever we saw her was her laughter.

Grandma and Grandpa meeting me for the first time

Some of you saw that my brother and Erin got my Dad a slide scanner for Christmas, and he started sharing a number of his scans with us. (Kids - slides are like digital photos, only on pieces of plastic. You needed to put them in a big machine, then… oh nevermind. They're digital now. That's all you need to know.) Looking at the photos Dad sent us, we got to one of Grandma and Grandpa stepping off the plane in LA to meet me for the first time. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out: "Man, she was a hot grandma!" More importantly, you can see in those pictures the absolute love she had - for her son and daughter-in-law, and for her grandson.

Grandma and Grandpa on their wedding day, 1947

Grandma and Granpda with Richard #6 :)

In the same year that Grandma and Grandpa celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, Robin and I got married. I loved getting the chance to honor their life together at our wedding; as some of you will recall Grandpa made sure to corner Robin at the reception to make sure that she knew she had to name her first-born Richard. What fewer know is that while that conversation was happening, Grandma whispered to me that Grandpa wasn't kidding! A few years later, when Robin and I took the boys to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Florida, it was amazing to watch as she took to the role of doting great-grandmother - and the love for her great-grandsons is as obvious in those photos as it was in the photos from 30 years prior when she visited my parents in California.

(Great-)Grandma and her great-grandsons, 2006

With the kids in front of the Eby clock

As some of you know I've spent a bunch of time in the last year studying our family's ancestry. With the Dawsons, I'd run into a wall with Nan-Nan's parents. In one of my calls to Grandma last year I asked if she knew anything about her great-grandparents. Not much, she said - but she recalled some papers she had lying around that could help. She mailed them to me, and I was excited to discover that she had the names of her great-great-grandparents - names I hadn't been able to find. From that, I traced her roots to an original settler in Pennsylvania Dutch country - the house built by her 7th great-grandfather in 1727 still stands in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just a few miles from my parents' house. Her 3rd great-grandfather, Jacob Eby, was a renowned clock-maker - and over Christmas Robin and I took the kids to a museum in San Francisco that has one of his clocks on permanent display. Grandma was delighted at each of these discoveries - though she warned me that I might not like everything I found (I *think* she was kidding, but if any of you have stories for me, let's grab a beer later!). The best moments from this research were when I got to share my discoveries with her. Her only regret (and mine) was that I didn't do this sooner, when I would have had a chance to share this with Grandpa, who would've loved to know that a great-grandfather of his was a Colonel who led a regiment of Milwaukee soldiers in the Civil war, or that an ancestor of ours was the royal photographer in the Prussian kingdom in the 19th century, or that his fourth great-grandfather was one of the original German settlers in Milwaukee - its first gunsmith, and the owner of the first house in the city.

I miss Grandma. I miss our long phone calls when I'd call her on my drive to work. I miss hearing her take such incredible interest in how the kids were doing, and her absolute delight at what a strong-willed great-granddaughter she had. I miss her scolding me if she thought I wasn't showing Robin enough gratitude for being such a great wife and mother. But mostly I'm grateful for the incredible amount of time we did get together. I've thought a lot about my old history teacher's comments, and I think he had it a bit wrong. It's not the memories themselves that we should be focused on. Sure, the memories are important. It's not so much that Grandma lives on through our memories, it's that we will honor her memory by embracing who she was, and carrying that with us in what we do. We'll remember to laugh louder, smile a little wider, trace the kids' faces at night, respond "I love *you* more" when someone tells us they love us, or recite one of the many poems she left behind to brighten our days. If we do *that*, we'll continue to make her proud of us.

On the plane ride here, Ricky told me quite seriously: "Dad, it's kind of sad that we're going to Milwaukee, but I think it should be a celebration. Not that she's dead, I mean… but that she had such a happy life." I think he's right. She lived a long, happy life - and as she left us, she knew that she had much to be proud of. I'm grateful for that, and am so glad we've had this chance to honor that memory as we celebrate a long life well lived. We know you love us, Grandma, and we love you more.

Grandma with me and my kids, October, 2009

Google Account security best practices

2011-04-21T03:48:00.000-07:00

A family member recently had some questions about how to keep their Google account secure, and I wrote up a bunch of recommendations for how to stay safe... realized after I sent the e-mail that this was probably good stuff to share for people who might not know about all of the options when it comes to protecting their account. Hope some of you find this helpful!

1. Pick a strong password for your Google Account (in many cases, your Gmail address). Strong = not something you use everywhere else, a combination of letters and numbers, and at least one symbol in there is ideal. (Here are some tips on picking a good password if you need some ideas.)

2. Make sure your Google Account recovery options are set - visit the account recovery options page and make sure you have a backup e-mail address, and that your mobile number is listed on your account. Should you ever lose access to your account, these will be instrumental in restoring access.

3. Set up Two Step Authentication on your Google Account. Details are here, you can set it up by starting at this link. What this does is block anyone else from logging into your account - even if they have your username and password. This requires you to have access to a physical device - your iPhone, Android or Blackberry phone - to ensure that you are really you. This may seem like overkill - but it's a key step to ensuring that your account is secure. There are ways committed hackers can discover your password - even if they get it they won't be able to do anything with it unless they also have your phone. Go through the process of installing the app on your phone (this page has the download link and instructions for setting it up); once done, here's how it will work:

the first time after you enable this, Google will ask you to log in. You'll provide your username and password, then Google will ask you for your "verification code". Launch the Google Authenticator app on your phone, and then type in the six-digit code from the phone into the verification code box in your browser.
if this is your computer, check the box "remember verification for this computer for 30 days" before clicking verify... you won't need to provide the verification for a month. (If it's a shared computer, don't check this!)
You'll see this anytime you try logging in from another computer (i.e., your laptop, your work computer, the iPad, etc.) - it's a bit more cumbersome (just a bit), but the advantage is that your account is far more secure than just a username/password. It's worth it.

4. IMPORTANT: once you've set two step verification up, you may need to change the password for your phone and/or other apps that are communicating with Google's servers. (For instance, I had to do this for iMove this morning when uploading a video to YouTube.) Because these apps don't know how to check for the verification code (they just know username/password), Google has a back-up: an "application specific password" -- you set these up here (see the bottom of the page: "application specific passwords"). Type in a name - say, Nexus S - and then click "generate password". You'll get an auto-generated string of characters, which you will then type into your phone or application's password field for your account.

5. Check to see what applications/services you've authorized to have access to your Google Account. Go here and see what websites/applications are listed - these are services who you previously granted access to your Google Account. If there are any there you no longer use, or sites you didn't intend to authorize, click revoke. (I'll come back to this later - as you centralize your e-mail, address book, calendar, etc. on your Google Account, authorizing other services to access this info can be very powerful - but you will want to use discretion in deciding which services get access to this data. It probably goes without saying - only grant access to trustworthy sites who you have absolute faith will not compromise the integrity of your data.)

6. Phone: if you don't already have a passcode on your phone, turn it on so that someone getting possession of your phone can't use it without knowing your passcode. (Otherwise anyone getting the phone can read your mail, receive "forgotten password" e-mails that would help them reset passwords on your account(s), etc.)

If you do those things, you'll have dramatically increased the security of your information online, and prevented any ongoing security problems. Now here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Try and use your Google Account when you log in to other services. When prompted to create a new account, look for a "login with Google" option. This will allow you to use your Google identity on those sites - not only is this simpler for you (one less username/password to remember!), it's also more useful (the service can access your contacts/information, helping you avoid having to manually enter more info) and it's more secure (when you're through with the site, you simply revoke its access to your info).

2. NEVER manually type your Google account information (username/password) into a webpage that is not owned/provided by Google. If you do this, you have no guarantee that the middle-man you've just shared your credentials with will protect that info. (This is why, by the way, Google's 2 step authentication is so useful - even if you did this, your info would be useless without the phone verification code. So long as you retain control of that, you're safe!) Whenever you're asked to login w/Google, the right way to do this is for them to send you to Google (look in your browser's address bar: is the URL google.com?), where you are asked to login if you're not already logged in, then you are asked whether you want to grant access to the referring app. Say OK, and you'll be returned to the app, which is now approved by Google.

3. Keep an eye on Gmail's "last account activity" feature if you're concerned that someone else may be accessing your account. Towards the bottom of the page in Gmail you'll see something that says "last account activity". Click "Details" to see a report of where your account is being accessed from; you can sign out all other sessions from that page, as well as review the actual location/IP address of any other computers accessing your account. (Gmail keeps an eye on this as well, and may contact you if suspicious activity is detected.)

4. Don't e-mail sensitive files as attachments. Upload the files you want to share to Google Docs, and use Docs to control access to the files. Ideally you will share the file with a Google Account user. This is the most secure, and is helpful in the event you ever want to stop sharing with that user - you simply remove them from the list of people who can view the file. If that's not an option - the user doesn't have a Google Account, for instance - you can set the document's visibility to 'anyone with the link'. This has some risks - the person you share with can share the link with someone else - but you retain control of the document, which means you can delete it, or update the security settings to require login to view... either of which is much more secure than files you e-mail as attachments, which you lose control of the minute you hit 'send'. And whatever you do, be smart about who you e-mail those files (links or otherwise) to in the first place.

5. Don't send passwords in e-mail. While Gmail uses https to encrypt all traffic between your browser and the Gmail server, there's no guarantee that the recipients of your e-mails containing passwords are similarly secure.

If you've hit this point and you're wondering whether there's even more you could read (!), swing by the 2010 and 2009 tips and tricks that Google compiled for National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and this page has some additional tips for keeping your info secure.

Any other tips for keeping your account secure?

The New Google Profile is here!

2011-03-02T16:15:00.000-08:00

Last year I announced I'd moved over to the Google Profiles team, and then went all but radio silent as we put our heads down to upgrade the product. Hilariously, last weekend someone not-so-subtly teased me by leaving an anonymous comment on that post: "11 months and counting..." (It's nice to know people are paying attention, I guess!)

Well, the wait's over. Over at the Social Web Blog, you can read the blog post that outlines what's new. Most notable, from my point of view:

bigger profile pic - go update yours now!
"scrapbook" lets you pick 5 thumbnails to show on your About page (clicking through will open the pics in full-screen lightbox mode)
overall update to the look & feel
"About" tab is the default tab (whether you use Buzz or not)
Buzz users can choose to hide the tab (if, for instance, you don't use it or just don't want it shown)
several fields have auto-complete (e.g., schools, employers)
search visibility is controllable: you can choose to prevent your profile page from being indexed

Here's what the Profile looks like now:

And here's what it looked like before:

There's more (hint: upload multiple profile pics, see if you can figure it out), and a lot more to come in the weeks and months ahead. I'm really proud of the team - this represents a complete rewrite of the profile, and will serve as a great foundation for more fun stuff down the road.

On a separate note, I can now share the news that once we got the Profile to code completion a few weeks ago, I moved over to YouTube. I'm now a PM at YouTube, where I'm responsible for the homepage, YouTube's social strategy and a variety of other related pieces. Leaving the Profiles team was a very tough decision - I loved working with them and am eager to see the next set of things they launch.

That said, the opportunity at YouTube was simply too good to pass up. I'll have more to share about the new gig soon. In the meantime, go update your profile (or create one)!

Protip for book publishers

2011-01-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

In the nearly three years since I bought my first Kindle, I've become an enormous fan. I've purchased about 100 books, and have read books on the first gen Kindle (now gifted to my in-laws), second-gen Kindle (a gift to my wife), my iPhone 3GS, my Nexus One, my iPad, and my Nexus S. The reading experience has been consistently terrific - synching between devices (so you can pick up on the phone where you left off on the Kindle) is flawless, the experience of transferring titles to any device is simple, and the more recent ability to lend titles to friends is great too.

But I had a terrible experience with a book last week, notable as much because it's the first time I've felt that the Kindle degraded my reading experience in three years. To be clear, this isn't Amazon's fault - it's a combination of a disappointing book (hardly their issue!) and a dumb decision by the publisher (which may have been intentional).

Let me explain: I heard an interview last week on NPR with Brad Meltzer, author of a new book about intrigue at the National Archives. (I know what you're thinking, and in hindsight, perhaps I should've thought twice: "intrigue" at the National Archives?) It sounded interesting, and I'd read some of Meltzer's work before so I picked it up.

I wasn't really enjoying the book as I read it. The plot strained credibility in several places, twists were pretty foreseeable, and Meltzer never really pulled me in. But it had one thing going for it: as I watched my progress meter on the Kindle get to just 25, 30, 40%, I figured that perhaps the best of the book was still in front of me. Maybe this was just necessary setup for a more engaging ride?

Then, at 47%, I was at the end of the book. The book didn't just end on a cliff-hanger, it ended with the main conflict in the story completely unresolved. Certain that there was a mistake, I tried to re-download the title. I skipped ahead to 50, 55% to see what was there - and discovered that Meltzer's publisher had bundled an entirely different book - by a different author - in with this downloaded title. End result? Total, utter confusion. (I'm not alone - here's one reviewer who had the same reaction; there are many others in the book's reviews.)

This is partly the author's fault: I can't remember another book I've read where the author so utterly punted on the central conflict at the end of the book. (After reading some reviews on Amazon, I discovered that this is the first book of a series Meltzer intends to write centered around these characters.) But it's also the publisher's fault: if they hadn't included the second book in the download, at least the Kindle's progress meter would've accurately reflected the % of book I'd read. As it was, the % meter reflected the % of the downloaded item I'd completed, which is useless - why do I care that I'm 47% of the way through the combination of two books by two different authors?

If Amazon has any opportunity here, it's to prohibit this kind of bundling by publishers - it degrades the user experience, and through no fault of their own, renders one of its key features useless. One of the tremendous assets of the Kindle reading experience is that it's consistent - not only across devices but across titles.

Bonus: I guess maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss the notion of intrigue at the National Archives. From this week's headlines:

Maybe Meltzer was on to something...?!

Tasker makes Android better

2011-01-04T17:10:00.000-08:00

When I got my Nexus S last month, I was excited about a number of things, but particularly the remarkable battery life promised by a number of reviewers. If I had one complaint about the Nexus 1, it was that the battery often gave up the ghost by the end of the day. I got used to charging during the middle of the day just to be safe, and for the most part that worked, though it didn't avoid the fairly often end-of-day battery drain (which always seemed faster than at any other point in the day).

When I started seeing similar behavior with the Nexus S, I was concerned. Thanks to a couple Android utilities, however, I was able to finally figure out what the root issue was. And with the help of Tasker, a terrific Android app, I believe I've completely solved the problem - not to mention gained a very useful utility that's capable of doing a lot more.

It turns out that the issue is where I live: there's next to no T-Mobile service within about 100 yards of my house. Elsewhere in the neighborhood is fine - but the particular hill we live on is a dead spot. In Settings, I clicked on "About phone" and then "Battery Use" to get a full report of what processes were responsible for the battery usage. It's a handy way to know what's responsible (if anything) for abnormal battery consumption - in my case, it was "Cell standby". What this means is that the phone was trying to acquire a (mostly) nonexistent cell signal - the longer it tried, the faster the battery drained.

I experimented with using the phone's airplane mode (turning off all radio antennae) to see if it helped - and sure enough, the phone held its charge without a problem. Now that I'd isolated the culprit, I wanted to automate the process of disabling the radio antenna so that the phone wasn't constantly trying to reaquire a cell signal - that's where Tasker comes in.

Tasker's an automation app for Android. You can define a set of criteria that, when met, trigger an action - loading an app, presenting a menu, changing a system setting, etc. For this particular scenario, I just wanted to have the phone turn on airplane mode (but keep wifi and bluetooth on) whenever I'm home. Tasker made this a trivial task - and the battery at the end of the day is now often north of 40% where it was previously empty by day's end.

There's a lot that Tasker can do for you - check out the example profiles included in the Tasker wiki. Each profile is described in detail, and includes a download link so you can load the profile directly into Tasker. For around $6, it's a great deal. (You can download a 7 day trial here, if you want to kick the tires before buying.)

If you're looking for other things you can do with Tasker, Lifehacker has a great write-up with step-by-step instructions about how you can use Tasker to extend your Android phone's capabilities. I particularly like the profile that asks you which music app to load when you plug the headphones in:

I asked some co-workers for tips on how they use it, and one guy had a great idea: when the phone is placed face down (like in a meeting), have Tasker mute the audio and turn off wifi, bluetooth, GPS, etc. Ultimately, it's this kind of customization and control over your phone that I love about Android. One warning, however: Tasker, while powerful, is itself rather utilitarian in design. It will take a bit of getting used to, and you'll need to invest some time in learning its quirks from an interface perspective. (Critics will rightly point out that this is the trade you make when you give users customization and control over the phone. I'm quite comfortable with that trade-off, but your mileage may vary.)

So how about you: any Android automation tips? Do you have a Tasker profile you want to share? Feel free to leave them in the comments.

Jacob Eby clock at the de Young museum

2010-12-19T17:05:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I started researching my family's history. I knew very little about my ancestors, other than that I was the fifth Richard Klau in the family, and that the first Richard Klau came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s. After pursuing a number of branches of the family tree on Ancestry.com, I'd hit a couple dead-ends, one of which was my paternal grandmother's line. I couldn't find any information on her mother's ancestors, so I asked my grandmother whether she had any info that could help me out. She sent me some sheets of paper that another relative had compiled several years ago, and one of those included a sheet listing her grandparents.

Ancestry.com "leaves" indicate possible info about ancestors

If you've ever used Ancestry.com, you know about the leaves that display on an individual's record when Ancestry.com thinks it has information that might be helpful for you. In my case, the minute that I entered my grandmother's grandmother's name, Ancestry.com went nuts - eventually leading me back another 6 generations. Sophronia Eby, it turns out, is part of a rather remarkable family line. She is a direct descendant of Theodorus Eby, one of the first Mennonite settlers in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. His sons emigrated to Canada, where they founded the Mennonite community.

Theodorus's great-grandson, Jacob Eby, was a clock-maker in Pennsylvania. I discovered this after finding a website dedicated to Eby descendants, where the woman who maintains the site mentioned that she has a Jacob Eby clock in her house. I did some research about his clocks (on a separate blog I keep focused on the family tree), and was stunned to find that another Eby original is on permanent display at the de Young museum in San Francisco.

We went to the de Young today, and it was a thrill to find the clock on display. Here I am with my kids, Jacob Eby's 7th- and 8th-generation descendants:

Jacob Eby clock, at the de Young Museum

The clock face is really fascinating, and I'm hopeful I can learn more about it:

You can make out Jacob Eby's name on the face, right above Manheim (he lived in Manheim, Pennsylvania). The inner-most circle on the face appears to track the day of the month, while the dial at the top of the clock might be tracking seconds. Here are a few close-ups:

The final detail is in the clock base, which is a beautiful mahogany wood base. Inlaid in the wood is this eagle:

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I started researching my family's history. Finding such a beautiful piece of work, made by someone I'm directly descended from, is a thrill.

The annual Christmas letter

2010-12-14T08:07:00.000-08:00

For the last six years, Robin and I have taken a different approach to sending out the annual Christmas card. In the past, we would write out a letter, fold it up and insert it into the card, then mail the combination out to our list. Starting in 2005, we omitted the printed letter, and instead pointed recipients to a URL where they could read the letter; in addition, we gathered a bunch of photos from the year and put them in a gallery that visitors could browse. We got to share so much more info with our friends and family, and it also meant less work for us on the actual sending of the cards.

I've refined the approach over the last few years to try and simplify, and the approach now seems ideal. At first, it was all installed software - Movable Type on the server for the letter, and a PHP-based app called Gallery for the photos. Today, it's much easier: Blogger for the letter, and Picasaweb for the photos. Here's what we do:

Set up a subdomain at the domain we use for family stuff on the web, then create a blog on Blogger and use Blogger's free Custom Domain feature to point to the subdomain. (Note: you don't need this step, you could just use a free blogspot.com URL... I just like keeping things on my family domain.)
In the past, I'd hunt for a third party Blogger template that was suitably holiday-oriented, but with the new Template Designer, it took a matter of minutes to find a beautiful design that required no extra work.
Fire up Picasa on my Mac, copy photos from the year into a "year in review" album. When finished, enable "sync" on the album so that the images copy up to Picasaweb, and visit Picasaweb to view the album on the web. Click "link to this album", then "embed slideshow", and copy that code into an HTML/CSS gadget in Blogger - now I've got the year in review slideshow running in the right margin of my blog. Update: Shameela on the Blogger team reminded me that there's a Picasa gadget in Blogger - no copy/pasting of embed codes to worry about. Duh!

Another advantage of each of the prior years being online is that I can point to the earlier years - new friends can see what we were up to in years past, and family who want to reminisce and look at images from the last several years can do so. All told, each year averages 75-100 pictures - our kids love looking at each year's collection of pictures!

Always be Cobbling

2010-12-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jake, I watched this Alec Baldwin sketch from SNL this morning:

So much to love about this Glengarry Glen Ross-meets-Santa's Elves sketch: Baldwin confusing his line (yelling "Always be closing!" - the actual line from Glengarry Glen Ross), the many inside references ("I rode here on a talking moose!", "Second place is a set of candy canes"), and the fact that Seth Myers can't keep a straight face for much of the sketch.

Always be cobbling!

Christmas gift idea - Livescribe Echo Pen

2010-12-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've written about Livescribe before (Livescribe Pulse Pen - Pure Awesome) and if you're looking for a great gift for the geek in your life, or for a high school or college student, I don't think you could do much better than the Livescribe Echo, the updated version of the pen I use.

What makes this pen so cool is how well it changes your experience taking notes. In my case, I almost immediately stopped taking my laptop to meetings - it occasionally shows up now, but I am far more likely to take hand-written notes. Practically, it means I'm less likely to check e-mail, respond to IMs or otherwise get distracted from the meeting I'm in. The notes you take are then synched back to your PC, and fully searchable. Any audio recordings on the pen are matched to the time you took the notes, so that you can tap the page and re-hear the discussion at the time - extraordinarily helpful for clarifying notes that are unclear.

The pen's ability to record the audio of the meeting has, on several occasions, radically changed my ability to benefit from the interactions during the meeting. One example comes to mind: I had a big presentation before a number of execs, and my team and I had a series of prep meetings to go over the presentation. Ordinarily, I'd have someone else run the presentation so I could try to take notes on my computer while keeping up with the conversation. With the Livescribe pen, I instead drove the deck from my computer, and didn't take any notes. I just recorded the audio of the entire meeting - I was more engaged in the discussion as it played out, and after the meeting, I simply replayed the audio while reviewing the slides and incorporating the suggestions that were made. The end result was a presentation that more faithfully implemented the feedback of the entire team, and I had complete confidence that I hadn't omitted any of the valuable input we'd received during the prep.

If you're looking for more on how the pen works, Scoble's interview with Livescribe's CEO is a terrific review of how it works:

The Echo pen has a better form-factor than the Pulse (the model that I have), uses standard micro-USB and headphone connections, and offers improved software on the pen itself. Can't recommend this pen highly enough - really a great product. Oh - and I am also a big fan of their moleskine notebooks for taking the notes themselves.

(Disclosure: I happen to be friends with one of Livescribe's founders. As I noted in my original post, he gave me a Pulse pen a while back.)

Christmas gift idea - Kodak Pulse picture frame

2010-11-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

For my birthday, Robin and the kids got me a Kodak Pulse digital picture frame. I adore it.

Years ago, we bought my grandmother a Ceiva frame. One of the advantages to the Ceiva is that it doesn't require Internet access - you just plug the frame into a phone line, and it updates nightly. For my grandmother (who didn't have Internet access when we got her the frame), this was an ideal answer. No setup required, and she got (mostly) regular updates from us when we sent pictures. Each year at Christmas, we renew her subscription - Ceiva charges $100/year for the service.

Well guess what? For the exact same amount of money, I can get a far better photo frame that has no additional yearly subscription fees. In addition to card readers that can read photos directly from your memory cards, the frame also has a wifi radio that will receive photos via e-mail (you get a dedicated @kodakpulse.com account) or from your Facebook account.

This last point is both a highlight and a frustration for me: I love the simplicity of linking my frame to my Facebook account. Last night, I uploaded pictures from our Disney vacation, and when I got to work this morning, they were already on the frame. I get the choice of adding pictures from other Facebook friends as well, so as Robin adds photos to her account, I'll see them on the frame too.

The frustration is that it doesn't support other photo services. In the past I've used Flickr, and more recently use Picasa - though other frames support those services (even other Kodak frames), that doesn't seem to be a priority for the Pulse frame at this point. In the end it's frustrating but not a deal-breaker; though Picasa is where I store my photos, the vast majority of photos shared with me are via Facebook.

Overall, I highly recommend this frame. Surprisingly affordable, extremely easy to set up and a great way to share family pictures. (Interestingly, there's also a 10" version, if you want to spend a bit more for a larger display.)

For more on the frame, you can visit Kodak's site.

Google TV - couch surfing

2010-11-22T11:07:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate to get an early prototype of GoogleTV over the summer (the Sony stand-alone box). I was particularly happy to see it worked with my existing setup - I have a TiVo HD running through an Onxkyo receiver which is connected to my Samsung TV. I routed the TiVo HDMI connection through the GoogleTV box, and with a couple minutes setup, it just worked. (The GoogleTV controls the TiVo via an IR-blaster.)

Early reviews focused on the remote, with TechCrunch proclaiming it "an absolute user experience nightmare" for consumers. My experience suggests otherwise - my 8 and 10 year-old sons both use the GoogleTV regularly without any issues.

But I want to talk about the moment that GoogleTV changed how we use computers at our house. As a family, we periodically loan money to entrepreneurs through Kiva, the microlending site. I'd received an e-mail that one of our loans had been fully repaid, and I wanted to have the kids help my wife and I decide where to loan that money.

In the past, this would have involved all of us crowding around my laptop. Inevitably, one (or more) of the five of us couldn't see the screen, resulting in whines about who's getting special viewing. This time, we decided to fire up Chrome on the TV, using the "10,000 button nightmare" (TechCrunch's words!) remote control that comes with the Sony GoogleTV unit.

The version of Chrome that ships with GoogleTV is a fully-functional browser. It plays Flash, it lays pages out exactly as they appear on your desktop. And it does it on your TV - in my case, a 52" HDTV. The result? All five of us sat on the couch, easily able to browse through dozens of potential recipients of our next Kiva loan.

It was a phenomenal experience, one that's played out several times since then. Searching for YouTube videos is a pleasure (compared to TiVo, where I must use the up-up-down-down-left-down-left-down remote to select letters as I type out my query), as is navigating to various websites to show on the big screen. When my parents visited over the summer, I showed them the family tree research I'd done, able to easily navigate through the various branches of the family tree. One night after dinner, the boys and I looked at LOLcats for almost an hour.

I realize there's been quite a bit of discussion about whether or not you actually want a web browser in your family room. Based on our experience over the last several months, I can tell you that it's been a big win for us. Partly it's a byproduct of having a good remote; partly it's a result of having a fully-featured browser. The end result is a nice addition to the family room, one that'd be hard to give up now that it's there.

(I suppose I should add, for anyone who just happens to stumble across this article from a web search: I work at Google, and the GoogleTV unit I've been using is an internal version for testing. I did not pay for it, and expect I'll need to return it before too long - at which point I'll buy one.)