It’s Quite Easy

… for me to find myself working non-stop. I acutally quite like coming into a project when it’s been thought out in advance and I can just get it done. Execution is relaxing – I just sit down and figure out how to make ideas become reality, and so long as I’m not the one who has to come up with the ideas, it’s quite easy.

Case in point – this past week has found me doing contracting work for a design house in San Francisco. The project is very cool and has lots of neat technical challenges which have needed solutions. As usual, I’m challenging myself to complete the project (or at least features of the project) as quickly as possible… and we’ve built a BEAUTIFUL, MONSTER application in about a week and a half.

But most of the work was already done because WHAT to build had been figured out.

Actionable Measurement

What can we measure that’s actionable? That’s a very important question. I think it varies from individual to individual. For instance if I give you a chart of your insulin levels for the past 12 months with great resolution, you’re probably not going to know what to make of it unless you’re a doctor.

I think that measured data needs to eventually map to a game a person can play – so for instance if I’m measuring my cholesterol and I don’t get enough information from my measurements to see how the things I do effect the levels of cholesterol then I’m unlikely to change my behavior. However, if I play snood – a little game in which the goal is to connect different colored balls together, it’s intuitive and RESPONSIVE enough that I quickly change my behaviour.

So your meeting with your doctor once per year in which he hands you a chart which says, “Your cholesterol is out of control” == not useful.

A game in which your goals are to change your PSA level or your cholesterol level or control your insilin. That’s what we need.

A Glimmer

I built an application over the weekend because I wanted it – basically it allows me to “measure everything” – track events in my life and correlate the events to how I feel day by day.

I’ve been doing something similar on an Excel Spreadsheet for a while, but there are a few problems with doing it this way. First, eventually I get to the point where I can’t see the column headers for the columns I’ve created. Second, I have to fill in each and every column every day – most of the independent variables are of the “I ate went jogging” variety, so this means that the answer to most of them is, “No I didn’t”. So I wanted a system where I could quickly just enter in the data with a couple of key strokes. Finally, although Excel has some excellent plotting capabilities, I don’t know how to use them that well (and I have a feeling other people are in the same boat).

So the application ended up being a pretty simple one programming wise, but somehow I think it’s one of the most valuable ones I’ve ever created, because it’s actually useful. I’m hoping that I can improve it in the coming months. For now it just helps me record my life. Ultimately I’d like it to help me analyze the records too.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s my motivation.

Social Signaling

Problem:

In the world, on any given day you walk by 1000s of people focused on EXACTLY the same stuff you’re focused on – and you don’t even know it – that’s broad – I’ll give you an example:

There are employers who want to hire you – and you want a job

Your research group embarks on a research project – and the research has already been done but you don’t know about it

You’re looking for a house and you walk past someone with a house to rent

You are looking to buy a motorcycle – you walk past people who have motorcycles to sell all the time

These are signaling problems – and they should be solvable. Imagine a world in which these problems were solved – companies would approach you when you ran into problems rather than constantly assulting you the way they do now. Job hunters and employeers would find one another. People within research groups would “hear” when other scientists with similar interests began talking about their topic and they could share their ideas and information. The barter economy would thrive – imagine an iphone app where you could say, “I want a motorcycle” and then as you walk to work, your phone “hooks you up” with someone who’s dying to get rid of his motorcycle.

Many of these problems already have web sites which are trying to “solve” the signaling problem. I think that they’re missing something critical though – these signals need to be mapped to space and time – otherwise how can you act when the opportunity presents itself.

So some practical ideas:

Job Push – jobs come to you – employers come to you when they’re seeking workers and you’re looking for work

Web Push – information comes to you – only fresh information – this way you can contact the person who’s talking about what you’re interested in WHILE THEY’RE STILL FOCUSING ON IT

Marketing Push – A sliver of web push – marketers can track “noise” on the web – IMPORTANTLY this lets them contact the noise maker to initiate a conversation – Much easier to get your PR don’t you think?

On mac they have Grizzly – A notification system which pops up notifications on a users’ desktop – Imagine creating systems which used grizzly to publish the signals I’m talking about here – better yet imagine something like that on the iPhone. It would be great don’t you think!?

Dear Service Business:

You may never transition to building your own products. Why?

Because although you may be good at building ideas when they are well defined – read concrete, you are not good at figuring out what to build.

What are the skills that a service business develops that don’t translate well to the product business world?

• Focus on implementation instead of concept/design
• Hunt and pounce client acquisition
• Short term development

Focus on implementation – you build stuff other people have already come up with. Coming up with something viable (and I’m talking about the process of burning through 1000s of ideas and prototypes to get to something that MIGHT actually work) and the other half — believing in your concept before it becomes successful is REALLY REALLY HARD… And it’s a process which product companies have to develop.

Hunt and pounce client acquisition – is what most service companies do – “We need to work up a bid for…” – which is totally different than, “Why aren’t people buying…” – The first tries to fit the business to the client the business is going after. The second tries to fit the client to what the business provides. These are two very different tasks.

Short term development – In my experience, service businesses rarely end up living with the results generated from the products they build. If the application they built doesn’t “generate the leads” or “get viral adoption” or “scale with load” or “solve AIDS” which are the true desired business outcomes of many of the projects we work on, we service businesses never really know & usually we don’t care. We have our money. We don’t have to live with the consequences of the code we write and so we never get to learn the lessons an off target project would teach us.

I think this post isn’t really complete… I’m still thinking about it. There may be a follow up post in the future.

Remember the Milk + Google Gears

These two technologies are SOOO COOOL.

I LOVE remember the milk – It makes it easy for me to get and stay organized.

Google gears makes it so I can use remember the milk while I’m not connected to the web. Hooray!

Oh, it lets wordpress do the same thing.