May 14, 2011

TEDx Silicon Valley -- Live Blogging (Part 3)

Tim O'Rielly

Trend of numbers meets up with our humanity.

"global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange." -- Danny Hillis (via Jeff Bezos).

When we pull out our mobile phone, we are playing out the vision of the augmented reality machine.

Quantify self movement = monitoring and measuring all of your bodily functions and and physiology.

Devices are beginning to respond to the circumstances around us.

The intelligent devices of the future are connected to data.

Would you be willing to cross the street with the data that is even 5 mins old?

Global brain is us augmented and connected.

If the global brain is stil a child, what should be teaching it? how should we be raising it?

How can applications be beter when they are social?

Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

How can we market emerging global consciousness not only more resilient, but more moral.

***

Yasmin Lukatz

Measuring the unmeasurable.

Evo app.

Gathering data on something that has not been measured before -- baby crying

Can data help us be better parents?

***

Eric Rodenbeck

Question making interfaces and exuberant cartography

***

Robert Strong

Mind reading magic trick.

***

Jeff Hammerbacher

Mental health.

Suffer from bipolar disorder.

25% lifetime rate of suicide attempts for people who suffer from bipolar disorder

Global burden of disease -- 41% infectious and parasitic diseases, 26% cardiovascular diseases, 21% neuropsychiatric conditions

46% will develop any disorder -- 29% anxiety, 25% impulse-control

Why don't you get your mental disorder treated?

***

Thomas Goetz

Why did these signs that reminded you of the speed that you're traveling, work?

Feedback loops = action (now) --> evidence (speed limit) --> relevance (you're going faster than that) --> consequence (slow down or else)

This is how we learn -- making it more explicit.

For the rest of the world, the data has to disappear.

***

Cheers,

Andre

May 14, 2011

TEDx Silicon Valley -- Live Blogging (Part 2)

Mitch Kapor

Opportunities -- access to computers.

American dream is premised of having an equal opportunity.

Do we really have an equal opportunity?

I.e. CEO pay -- 1000 to 1, wealth is concentrated at the top

Education is the engine that drives opportunity

College education is the gateway to opportunity

If education is the engine that fuels opportunity, then we're having engine trouble.

I.e US ranks 48th in math and science proficiency, least well performing students in math in Calfornia are overwhelmingly among african american's and latino's, in California, the majority is from minority groups.

Preparation matters but the playing field that kids get is not leveled.

SMASH -- Summer Math & Science Honors Academy

Set high expectations, hold them accountable, give them the resources they need to succeed, they will blow you away.

Mitch Kapor's dream is to scale up SMASH.

***

Laura Stein

Is TEDx a movement? What is it?

Is it a tribe? A tribe is a social division of people, family, group with something in common.

How do you tell the TEDx story? passion, commitment, diversity, openness, trust, risk-taking, amazing brand, aspiration.

Radical openness is what drives TED.

2000 events in almost 2 years.

Listen to the community

TEDx by the numbers

***

Jonathan Attwood

60% fall in activity amongst young people

$150 billion in health care costs

reward program powered by physical activity -- devices that tracks your movement and converts your movement into points, those points can be translated into shopping, etc.

as a result of his experiment, 30% increase in movement

***

Joe Lonsdale

New rules for taking over the world

big data -- technology augmenting our understanding of technology

***

Ron Gutman

The power of smiles.

Children smile 400x per day.

Smile + frown = smile.

Smiling looks good in the company of others.

***

Jennifer Paulka

Started a charity for data -- code for america -- it's a platform for people who care about this institution to reinvent government

5 months into their first cycle

It's not about the data, it's about the people

***

Anna Kristina

DNA singing and dancing metaphysically together

***

Sinan Aral

1. social contagion

2. causality

How do behaviors spread in a social network and thus in a population?

How do individuals influence their peers?

Casual statistical estimation.

Homophily -- birds of a feather, flock together.

Can we engineer products so they are more likely to be viral shared?

By adding (1) personal invitation (i.e. invites) and (2) passive awareness (i.e. t-shirts).

Peer adoption creates engagement, and engagement creates peer adoption.

***

George Legrady

Makes visible the invisible.

***

Daniel Kraft

Medicine + flying, and how they may fit together.

The body by numbers.

Medicine -- digital health -- stream data to my ipad, all of the medical students at stanford are issued an ipad.

Situation awareness due to these numbers and applications.

Technology ubiquitously monitoring us.

***

Stanford Band

Cheers,
Andre
@acharoo

May 14, 2011

TEDx Silicon Valley -- Live Blogging (Part 1)

TEDxSV begins!

***

Ron Gutman

Why is this TEDxSV named "Living By Numbers"?

There are better ways to live our life if we live by numbers (e.g. energy consumption)

How we can change the world with social innovation?

***

Chris Anderson

Living By Numbers -- what's new about this?

1. Observations (The Hawthorne effect) -- by observing ourselves of what we do, we'll make wiser choices. Simply by the act of observation.

2. Sensors (Cybernetics movement) -- we have the ability to measure the world around us now.

3. Connecting (Sharing) -- combining data and people and doing something more with it.

When you link people, there's a powerful network effect.

It's about creating great feedback loops -- cars are example of feedback loops (i.e. pressing the gas or not).

Healthy + game = massive data explosion

***

Chris Hogg

5.5 million patients have chronic heart disease.

Developed new data -- censor that plants b/w the artery and lungs -- just giving doctors to this new stream of data reduced hospitalization by 33%.

New streams of data allow new feedback loops to develop and improve care

Can we measure actions vs inactions?

Measuring imact is key.

Why now? People have measured their weight, glucose, etc. for years?

These new devices, consumer devices, smartphone apps -- in healthcare the patient is the underutilized resource, and this technology puts the power back in their hands.

Data is now going to be able to fill in the gaps for the physician.

Physicians are going to begin to recommend apps for you to measure and track your well being

Data is going to change the relationship b/w a patient and a doctor.

Patients are now empowered.

Patients are active participants in their health care.

This new shift will put us back on the road to self-knowledge

***

Bernardo Huberman

An explosion of online interactions.

We now have a voice in the hopes that people will read / view it.

What's the driving force behind this?

Shift from the value that information was to the scarcity of attention.

Attention is the scarce and valuable resource.

Social attention because it helps determine the conversation in society.

We can measure attention very precisely.

Where attention goes, money goes.

Why is this interesting? It obeys a universal law -- most content gets attention, but very few are getting most of the attention that you care about. The whole exercise is rather hopeless because statistically speaking, no one will really see your content.

Predict the future w/ social media -- can we predict how important those topics are in the future?

E.g. predicting movies using social media -- can also measure the sentiment from tweets.

The media used to decide what we read regarding certain topics, but now, w/ social media, the conversation now bubbles up and become the trending

How do trends form?

Having a lot of followers will actually not get your content to move to the top anymore -- it's the community as a whole that has the influence now.

***

Ruth Kaiser

Happier life through a smile.

Be porous, not Teflon.

Deciding to notice that have the potential to give you pleasure.

Started in 2008 as a fb group, year later, and have 15 million page requests, a ton of press, has now become a hobby from so many people across different cultures.

Partnered with operation smile -- have funded 17 surgeries.

Tool for therapists

You have a moment of happiness when you stumble upon a smile.

***

Eoin Harrington (music)

Measuring and tracking our every day activities.

***

Kriss Deiglmeier

Innovation for social change living by numbers = making the world a better place

Social innovation is about new ideas, new solutions, and new thinking.

Defining what social innovation is?

Social entrepreneurs -- great man or women

Social enterprise -- self-sustaining organization theory

Social capital -- investing in these entrepreneurs and enterprise

***

Damon Horowitz

Power = data b/c we have a lot of it

What can we do with one person's data?

What should we do with this data?

Collecting, gathering, make his online experience better, protect his privacy, etc.

What do we do? Let's crowd source it?

We know more about mobile phones vs moral framework.

We need a moral operating system -- how do we figure out what's right or wrong?

It's kind of random of how we figure out what we should do.

How can we use numbers for the basis for a moral framework?

What if you could calculate, look at the choices, and measure out what to do.

How should we be making our decisions?

What's the formula?

There's not a formula, there's no simple answer. Ethics is hard. Ethics requires thinking, and that's uncomfortable.

The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who are evil, it's the result of simply not thinking.

***

Cheers,
Andre
@acharoo

May 12, 2011

Behavior Design -- BJ Fogg @ 500 Startups

Startup2Startup hosted BJ Fogg, Founder and Head of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, to share his thoughts about how Behavior Design should change the way we think about users, design and the way we launch (and relaunch) our products.

BJ was recently profiled in the NYTimes regarding his Stanford course about Facebook Apps -- http://nyti.ms/mSEp5F.

Here were the takeaways that I thought were very useful to share.

***

5 secrets of behavior change:

1. Patterns -- Don't guess. Find something that actually works and imitate it.

2. Baby Steps -- This is the way to create habits. What is the one daily habit your product can get your user to do?

3. Hot TIPs -- Put hot triggers (call to action) in the path of motivated people. Three core motivators: (a) pleasure / pain; (b) anticipation; (c) social acceptance / rejection.

4. 3 @ 1 -- Behavior happens when 3 things exist at the same time -- triggers + ability + motivation.

The mistake most products make is to focus on motivations. Just motivate users more to do the task. Focus on triggers and ability (i.e. make it easy) first.

Three ways to change behavior: (a) epiphany; (b) change in social / physical context; (c) *baby steps* -- is the easiest one to design for and the one that should be focused on.

5. Ability (ease of use) > Motivation -- ease of use matters more than your motivation.

Cheers,
Andre
@acharoo

May 5, 2011

My Blog Posts on the Upcoming TEDxSV Speakers

Check out the blog posts I wrote for the following upcoming speakers at TEDxSV:

Mitch Kapor -- http://www.tedxsv.org/?p=900

Chris Anderson -- http://www.tedxsv.org/?p=894

Lara Stein -- http://www.tedxsv.org/?p=920

Monika Steiner -- http://www.tedxsv.org/?p=1012

Cheers,
Andre
@acharoo

May 4, 2011

Everything is about Design

You've probably noticed that design has recently become one of the major discussions in the Valley. Just look at some of the recent posts below.

***

Jack Dorsey on the importance of design -- http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/24/jack-dorsey-golden-gate-bridge/

Enrique Allen of 500 Startups d.fund: The Startup Seed Fund for Designers -- http://mashable.com/2011/04/06/d-fund/

Rebekah Cox's Web2.0 Expo Presentation about Design @ Quora -- http://www.quora.com/Rebekah-Cox/Design-Quora-Web2-0-Expo-Presentation

Early Quora Design Notes by Rebekah Cox -- http://www.artypapers.com/ap.log/thread.php?346

Metrics-Driven Design by Joshua Porter --

Engineering vs Design by Jason Putorti -- http://jasonputorti.com/post/3922568219/engineering-vs-design

Design is Product. Product is Design (Startup2Startup) -- http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2011/04/13/design-is-product-product-is-design?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

(There are probably several others that I'm missing. If so, please do share in the comments).

***

With all the recent talk about design, I'm reminded of the process we underwent at Viewpointr to produce our final product. Here's a look back:

Viewpointr 1.0

Viewpointr 2.0

Viewpointr 3.0

Viewpointr 4.0

Viewpointr 5.0

Viewpointr Final

Cheers,

Andre

@acharoo

April 30, 2011

Love or Hate?

Tearing a page out of Dave McClure's Startup Metrics 4 Pirates presentation, I am big believer that in discovering meaning for your startup, the product that you build has got to either evoke two emotions -- (1) Love; or (2) Hate. Anything in between (i.e. the zone of mediocrity) -- you're screwed.

For Love -- of course, entrepreneurs aim to have their product loved by their users. Who doesn't?

However, for Hate -- why you would want someone to hate your product? You don't! It's not about that. It's about creating something that people at least give a shit about. There's a great presentation on SlideShare by Matt Brezina, Co-founder of Xobni entitled "No one cared about my stupid little startup (and they don't care about yours either)". This is true. Having someone express hatred about your startup is a good sign because they at least care enough to voice something about it. This is the point of having your product evoke love or hate.

I happen to agree with the train of thought that bad press is better than no press. Again, you've built something that is interesting and worthy enough to be written about, regardless of what direction or opinion the writer projects to their readers. Products that aim to change behavior, push boundaries, and disrupt industries in a very big way is bound to evoke some form of love or hatred from its users. It may not sound optimal, but it's actually a good thing. If you're part of a company that has this sort of vision, then be prepared to be scoffed at, ridiculed, and criticized for every move that you make. It's all part of the process of creating something amazing. How many times has Facebook released a new feature that users hated and even protested against (e.g. privacy, news feed, redesigns). Yet, people still use their product, right?

Morale of the story -- create something that moves people in either direction and you will probably end up creating something great.

Cheers,
Andre
@acharoo

March 29, 2011

The New Way to Distribute Enterprise Software

(Shout out to @davemcclure for letting me use the pic! Sorry if it might be a bit dated. I really wanted the t-shirt ;)

We constantly hear about distribution strategies for consumer apps such as the Bowling Pin Strategy coined by Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm and through Chris Dixon's post which emphasizes this strategy and points to companies like PayPal, Facebook, Foursquare, Stack Overflow as great examples of how to distribute your product.

I haven't yet heard of an enterprise product that has distributed their software virally or in an innovative way that others could admire. Usually, it's about building a great sales team, and the company that can build the better sales team is the company that historically has a better chance of winning. One of the first questions an investor will ask you if you are building a consumer-oriented startup is -- how will you get to a million users? For an enterprise startup -- how will you get to a million businesses? The answer is usually we'll build a great sales team. (Note: this is by no means a shot at sales people. Recently, I had a great conversation with Yujin Chung, Partner & BD at Andreessen Horowitz and he has directed me to some great books like Spin Selling that explain the true sophistication behind enterprise sales. However, I'm curious whether the sales function will evolve overtime, similar to how say marketing has become less about straight advertising and more about feedback loops, metrics and analytics).

Very few enterprise products (that I've tried at least or heard about) focus on ways in which B2B derive value from the product. It's typically why and how everyone in one organization should use your product and less about why and how multiple businesses interacting with each other should adopt your product. Shouldn't there be an easy way in which businesses can invite other businesses? Are there viral hooks you can build into your software? Is there such a thing for enterprise software? Again, it's easy to understand why people within one organization will invite their colleagues to use it, but I'm referring to other businesses. Perhaps, this doesn't apply to all enterprise software, but usually with consumer products, it's only valuable to you if your friends or other people are on it. I would love to see a product that is valuable to me as other businesses use it.

I believe the bottom-up approach needs to be applied more rigorously towards enterprise products vs. the traditional top-down approach that legacy software companies like Microsoft and IBM abided by with a huge sales force. Kenny Van Zant, newly hired COO at Asana, has written in his series on The Consumerization of IT, about the idea of consumer-oriented technologies and behaviors being further adopted in the realm of the enterprise. The days of having to convince a CIO of why your product is great and why the firm should pay you millions of dollars for it is quickly disappearing (in my opinion). Is there still a need to build a massive sales force? Can your product convince an employee at XYZ company to use it and then have it bubble up from there? Is there a way for that employee to easily invite other employees from other companies? I wonder if the new sales force can be the employees themselves? Are the incentives aligned between those employees? Some enterprise software is so valuable to one organization, there's actually no incentive for them to share it with others.

So, what are some B2B viral / distribution strategies?

Here are two that I'm currently aware of:

1. Creating hybrid software that integrates with other widely used products -- having a way for your product to be used within tools that already exist is something that consumer-oriented apps do all the time (e.g.. creating hooks into Facebook and Twitter). What's the equivalent for enterprise software? A couple examples come to mind:

(a) Asana, which seems to have implemented (see their demo) a very clever bi-directional email bridge that allow users of Asana to collaborate with others who aren't using Asana, through the most widely used enterprise collaborative product we know of -- email;

(b) Box.net with their recent release of ECM Cloud Connect that offers a bridge between on-premise content such as current management systems like Microsoft SharePoint and Box, providing essentially a hybrid solution for users.

2. Empowering "doers" of organizations to spread your product -- who are the doers you may ask? Well, developers are the doers, right? They're the one's actually building the product. Developers are the new recruiters. Developers are evolving into the new sales people. There are two great examples that I know of who focus on developers to spread their product:

(a) Twilio, the cloud communications company that powers the new wave of messaging apps like GroupMe, FastSociety, Beluga and Yobongo. Twilio has reached over 20,000 partners, not through sales people, but through developers. Even if their title reads sales, Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio explains in this Mixergy interview -- it's a developer that you're really speaking to;

(b) Palantir, the Jack Bauer of business software, that employs 250+ engineers and claims they will never have a sales or marketing team. Evelyn Rusli at TechCrunch questioned this approach in her piece entitled "Palantir: The Next Billion-Dollar Company Raises $90 million" by saying, "It's hard to imagine a billion-dollar company without a sales team, but then again Palantir is getting pretty darn close."

I think we'll see more examples like this in the near future. Perhaps, they're already out there and I haven't yet heard of them. If so, please do share.

In any event, however, I should probably spend less time writing posts like this, and more time learning how to code so I don't become displaced at some point ;)

Cheers,

Andre

March 7, 2011

Books I read last year...

I've been meaning to make a note of the books I read last year. Well, here they are:

1. Emotions Revealed (by Paul Ekman) -- this book helped me understand how to control one's emotions based on learning how to tune into one's emotional triggers.

2. PayPal Wars (by Eric Jackson)-- one of the best books to learn how PayPal really built their business from day one. Great for scrappy startups that need to figure out how to get distribution.

3. Linchpin (by Seth Godin) -- is all about encouraging you to create. My favorite line in the book is "what separates a linchpin from an ordinary person is the answer to this question -- where do you put the fear? The Linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds."

4. Change by Design (by Tim Brown) -- Tim describes how design is really about leadership and not what people perceive it to be.

5. The Audacity to Win (by David Plouffe) -- this book chronicles in great detail the Obama startup / campaign. Incredible view from David Plouffe, the Chief Campaign Manager of Obama's presidential campaign. One common thread that I learned through this book is that when you have a vision and you stick with it, and it's clear, you can run really hard with execution. But, that vision has got to be clear -- it makes decisions much easier.

6. Rework (by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson) -- important lessons about business that we rarely hear. For example, words that we should try our best not to use in business: need, must, can't, easy, just, only and fast.

7. Grumby (by Andy Kessler) -- very entertaining rags to riches fiction story about a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who hacks together a better version of Shazam into a bunch of old Furby toys that he rebrands "Grumbys". Great underlying lessons to learn for tech entrepreneurs.

8. Mastering the VC Game (by Jeffrey Bussgang) -- is an educational read by Bussgang, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, who details how to find the right VC and shares some interesting perspectives from entrepreneurs including Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter.

9. Delivering Happiness (by Tony Hsieh) -- the founder of Zappos defines an interesting framework for happiness: (1) perceived control -- being in control of what you do; (2) perceived progress -- being able to track your ongoing sense of perceived progress; (3) connectedness -- number and depth of your relationships; and (4) vision / meaning -- being part of something bigger than yourself.

10. The Accidental Billionaires (by Ben Mezrich) -- it's the book that the movie -- "The Social Network" was based on. Nuff said.

11. The Facebook Effect (by David Kirkpatrick) -- incredibly insightful account of the true Facebook story. No other book accounts how Facebook gained traffic early on, how they scaled, major decisions that Mark Zuckerberg had to grapple with, how they raised their first dollar of investment, what info they used to pitch, etc. Check out my full amazon review here.

12. Open Leadership (by Charlene Li) -- anyone who is interested in social media and it's correlation to how you should lead in today's environment will find this book helpful.

13. Cognitive Surplus (by Clay Shirky) -- makes a great case of how social technologies give us the capacity to collaborate in new ways across time and space and making a contribution without any personal monetary gain.

14. The Mystery of Capital (by Hernando de Soto) -- this book was introduced to me by Dave McClure and it's a great eye opening revelation regarding underdeveloped countries and the real reasons behind their lack of creating capital.

15. The 4-hour Work Week (by Tim Ferriss) -- Mark Suster summed this book up pretty well here. Check it out. He gives a couple of great takeaways which I agree with -- (1) The deferred life plan; and (2) Getting your work schedule on your terms.

16. Return to the Little Kingdom (by Michael Moritz) -- very detailed account of the early days at Apple Computer and provides some insights into the key players of its success in the early days.

17. The Big Short (by Michael Lewis) -- as a financial insider for more than 20 years, this book chronicles a very interesting story of the players at the heart of the financial crisis that became exposed in 2007/2008.

Let me know if you've read any of these books and what your takeaways were.

Feel free to check out my entire bookshelf here -- http://www.shelfari.com/acharoo

Cheers,

Andre

(download)

March 7, 2011

Asana vs Pivotal Tracker

Niraj Shah (@nirajsshah) asked me a question via Twitter that I figured I would quickly answer here on my blog:

"what do you like about @asana vs pivotal tracker?"

Without having used Asana yet (since it's not public), but was a heavy user of Pivotal Tracker (PT) for a while, here are some differences that I see out of the gate:

1. Easier on-boarding process -- Asana seems to be treating their application as if it were a consumer app, that should take less than 30 seconds for a visitor to sign up and a few minutes to personally derive value from it -- one of which is simply, task organization.

PT took a while for my entire team to adopt when I was building my startup. It's not easy to learn how it works and you don't instantly derive value from the application. One of my co-founders actually never ended up using it at all because he found it very convoluted to get up to speed on how to use the application.

2. Instantly relatable to simple ubiquitous products that we use (like email) -- The team at Asana realizes that many people adopt new applications like PT or Basecamp, but often times still resort or simultaneously use products like email, stickies, and notepad to still keep themselves organized. Part of the reason is due to (1) speed -- it's just faster to use email or notepad; and (2) structure -- tough to see different perspectives of a project (for e.g. your tasks, the team's tasks, and the overall milestones), so you've got to use different applications to keep yourself organized and up-to-date.

The main components of Asana, as it stands now through their demo are: tying each task to an unbounded notes capability, tags, assigning people, due dates, attachments, (most interestingly) followers and a news feed. These are all components individually that most of us on the web are familiar with to some degree, and therefore don't need to understand how it works. Also, organizing it in an easy to understand and practical way (i.e. attached to each task) is what Asana seems to be doing much better than PT. The major difference in components are the followers and news feed associated with a task.

I personally think Asana replicates much more closely of how we actually interact in real life around task management.

3. Usable through email -- One of the killer features of Asana is that users can interact with it via their own email. For example, if you assign a task to someone who isn't using Asana, they receive an email notification which they can reply to that will show up in the application and to every follower of that particular task. This, in essence, helps facilitate a much more natural / organic on-boarding process for users who may not want to adopt the platform right away, but yet, can still be involved. I haven't seen any enterprise software with this sort of feature.

4. Broader use cases -- Asana helps solve general task management issues and is not exclusive to web development. PT feels very much geared towards web development oriented tasks, and not so much outside of that domain.

These are just a few differences of Asana out of the gate, which I believe will only compound itself as they release their software and people begin to use it.

It seems as though their vision was just simply more grandiose and therefore required a different thought process from the beginning.

Cheers,

Andre