Aaron White

Til Death Do Us Part ?!?!? by suh_blim_uh_nal, made at...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:54:18 -0500

Til Death Do Us Part ?!?!? by suh_blim_uh_nal, made at DoInk.com

Valentine’s day is right around the corner. Let your loved ones know exactly how deranged you are for them!

(be sure to hit full-screen icon, it makes it ‘pop’ even better)

hiten: iPad Camera rumor becoming a reality? We think so....

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:26:40 -0500

hiten: iPad Camera rumor becoming a reality? We think so. « Mission:Repair Blog

Not surprising, and somehow still cool :)

The Apple iPad: First Impressions

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:58:00 -0500

infoneer-pulse: jeffrock: David Pogue:

At the same time, the bashers should be careful, too. As we enter Phase 2, remember how silly you all looked when you all predicted the iPhone’s demise in that period before it went on sale.

Like the iPhone, the iPad is really a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential. It may become many things. It may change an industry or two, or it may not. It may introduce a new category — something between phone and laptop — or it may not. And anyone who claims to know what will happen will wind up looking like a fool.

I wasn’t fully convinced during the presentation, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more niches it seems to effortlessly fill, the more creative apps I can imagine, the better it seems for ANY form of non-movie-night media consumption (Which means other movies, tv, books, magazines, web-content, etc).

To beat a dead horse, it’s not about features, it’s about experience, and the combination of a touch-educated public, developers who are motivated and enabled to continue capitalizing on that, as well as accessible pricing creates scenarios we aren’t capable of fully predicting.

I am willing to establish a base-line however: a successful hit by Apple sales definitions.

Product Market Fit & DoInk.com

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:40:00 -0500

We at DoInk.com recently ran a customer development survey to gain some insight from our users; word on the street is that if greater than 40% of surveyed users would be “very disappointed” if your service no longer existed, you’ve achieved product/market fit.

At greater than 75%, I’d say we have something special on our hands! Now that I’ve shared that minor success, back to the task of helping more discover the great tools & community we’ve built.

Good developers share a lot in common with super-villains: both are highly intelligent, incredibly...

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:42:23 -0500

Good developers share a lot in common with super-villains: both are highly intelligent, incredibly confident, and completely unable to estimate the chances of success.

(Also, don’t forget the shared love of sarcasm)

Running the Boston Marathon this April

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:38:00 -0500

A friend of mine gave me a *unique* opportunity to run the Boston Marathon this April, and I’m (overly) excited about it.

While I can’t share the details (yet), it’s going to be a memorable & highly visible experience.

So please pardon the temporary increase in running-related posts, hopefully you’ll find my 3-month journey from runner to ‘Marathoner’ interesting & entertaining.

PS: Did I mention I plan on running it barefoot?

caterpillarcowboy: fishy: meldoesgradschool:prostheticknowledge:...

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:57:00 -0500

caterpillarcowboy: fishy: meldoesgradschool:prostheticknowledge: via HomeTone

AOK Apple Calendar

Here, the German agency, Serviceplan has exploited the concept of “an apple a day for better health” on behalf of the insurance company AOK and has come up with an amazing wall calendar shaped dispenser that holds up to 31 apples in a Plexiglas tube resistant UVA and UVB. The AOK insurance company has very well brought the saying “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” To life in a very attractive way. In the beginning of the month there are 31 apples in this UVA-and UVB-resistant Plexiglas. You remove one apple from the tube and eat it each day and give a boost to your health. The rest of the move up and reveal the date on a calendar fastened behind the apples. Same goes on each month depending on the number of days, the number of apple varies. Hanging smartly on the walls of your room the apple calender will remind you of having an apple each time you look at it to know the date.

Mmmm, I love 30 day old apples. So delicious!

I think I’d be better served by the 7-day version as well. Nice kitchen/office concept though; anything that automates success = win.

giantrobotlasers: The averages are uglier. Median filtering on...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:49:00 -0500

giantrobotlasers:

The averages are uglier. Median filtering on the top %0.000001 of faces will likely produce a better result.

The average face of these people famous in part because of their pretty faces is more attractive than the slightly androgynous average.

Fascinating. On an objective, scientific note: Fox-Bellucci-Portman-Johansson merge is a total hottie.

Today we launched PoketyPoke

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:21:52 -0500

siminoff:

PoketyPoke is like Tripit for conference calls. Once you sign up you just forward any free form email or calendar invite to calls@poketypoke.com. At the time of the conference call PoketyPoke calls you (on the number of your choosing) and bridges you into the conference call. PoketyPoke does all of the deep dialing so that you do not have to remember all of the bridge pins, etc.

Doesn’t just solve a pain point for me, but for those on the other end of the call :) Cool.

giantrobotlasers: #lookatthisfuckingproductivityboom

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:51:00 -0500

giantrobotlasers: #lookatthisfuckingproductivityboom

What's a Facebook Fan-page Worth?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:19:00 -0500

A “Sushi” page has nearly 1.5 million fans. It’s benign enough; its info page points to Wikipedia article, it’s not cluttered with apps or posts.

What’s this web property worth? This page has permission to reach 1.5 million people predisposed to enjoy sushi news & content.

Anyone done the calculation? Should we be rushing to carve out the “object/name/activity/brand” space as fast as possible so we can sell these pre-qualified lists to the highest bidder?

Hoping I’m not missing the .com domain rush all over again…

"When Evan was at Pyra Labs they ran out of money. He laid off the team (actually just stopped paying..."

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:09:00 -0500

“When Evan was at Pyra Labs they ran out of money. He laid off the team (actually just stopped paying them). Everybody hated him. He worked alone for a year in what I can imagine were far from optimal conditions. And what happened next? He sold his product (a little thing called Blogger) to a hot start-up (a little company called Google). The rest is history. And I’m pretty confident there would be no Twitter today if Evan hadn’t persevered back in the day.”

- Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. | JonBischke.com (via hiten)

Lots of interesting stories and links, beyond just Ev’s.

In the words of team Galaxy Quest: “Never give up! Never surrender!”

Zynga & Facebook & DST. Conflict of Interest, Anyone?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:19:00 -0500

giantrobotlasers: aaronwhite:

Last night news broke of Zynga scoring a huge new investment of $180 million more dollars… from the same Russian Venture firm, DST, that invested $200 million dollars in Facebook earlier this year.

Conflict of interest, anyone?

The incentives are actually well aligned to make everyone money. It wouldn’t benefit facebook to make a decision that helps zynga but hurts the platform.

Agreed.. meaning it doesn’t help Facebook to have common investors w/ Zynga, only the other way around.

As far as secrets, clearly that needs to be managed by all parties. Tipjoy shared investors with Twitter and built tools on top of twitter. It was really beneficial at times, and at other times we didn’t say certain things. That was a small minority of cases with critical information between the two companies. Overall, it didn’t impact either company.

The scale of this is far larger. Zynga is printing an insane amount of money, so any threat to that on scale, oh, say 30%?, is a ‘big deal’.

Again, I get what Zynga has to gain. In the worst case, it’s neutral for them. In the ‘best’ case (read: evil), Facebook might play favorites.

But for Facebook, the best case for them & their ecosystem is neutral, any pull away from that, even ever so slightly, is really a negative.

My point was this isn’t in Facebook’s interest (or its ecosystem). So were I Zuck, and DST was informing me of this, I’d give serious pause. I just don’t see what FB stands to gain that they weren’t already capable of, and already accomplishing.

Zynga & Facebook & DST. Conflict of Interest, Anyone?

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:40:00 -0500

Last night news broke of Zynga scoring a huge new investment of $180 million more dollars… from the same Russian Venture firm, DST, that invested $200 million dollars in Facebook earlier this year.

Conflict of interest, anyone?

It’s one thing when two companies grow a shared market & community, but it’s another thing when when they are becoming bonded at the hip to the expense of what could be an important and broad ecosystem.

This new mutual alignment around the same investor can only have bad effects on the Facebook app ecosystem. Why not a straight acquisition? Too blatantly harmful to the other app developers? What about Zynga spinning off to create entertainment apps using a non Facebook distribution channel; how can they hedge their bet against Facebook when their investors are now ‘all-in’ on the other side?

Granted, Zynga is highly successful but also dead-in-the-water without Facebook, so I understand why DST would be interested in aligning the two. But you’ve got to wonder how the people at Facebook feel about this one.

Riding the Reindeer (Holiday09) by CaptainOinkers, made at...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:32:00 -0500

Riding the Reindeer (Holiday09) by CaptainOinkers, made at DoInk.com

Can’t begin to describe how much labor & love goes into a 2+ minute animation… it’s not for the lazy. At any rate, this DoInker produced a great mini Christmas-epic :) Hope you enjoy, & Happy Holidays

infoneernet: emergentfutures: MIT Plans to Rebuild Artificial...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:14:00 -0500

infoneernet: emergentfutures:

MIT Plans to Rebuild Artificial Intelligence from the Ground Up
After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline’s beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI — an ambiguous field to begin with — plan to get things right.

As a student of computer science & science fiction, I’ve fantasized about tweaking some ‘neural network’ until it became ‘sentient’ enough to talk to me (and keep me entertained while coding at 3am in a computer cluster).

The funny thing is presupposing there is some magic threshold that you cross into “AI”. Far more likely the path to intelligence is a exceedingly long, and gently sloping.

The reality is that when we create a machine that talks with us, it does far more to undermine our self-impression than it does to inspire self-awe.

Two artifacts from 1981, caught on camera for the first time!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:27:10 -0500

Two artifacts from 1981, caught on camera for the first time!

mikehudack : soupsoup : Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey set to...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:53:08 -0500

mikehudack : soupsoup : Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey set to debut Square.

Very cool stuff in terms of creating alternative points-of-sale.

The Metrics Driven Life

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:49:00 -0500

Everyday I further piecing together the elements for a “metrics driven life”.

Roughly, you can break down your life into three wellness-spheres: Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Happiness though simple to understand, is the hardest to measure, so I’m deferring tracking it (for now). For wealth, there are loads of tools available (though my favorite is Mint.com)

Capturing health metrics, a tour:

Here is where things get really interesting! I’m a RunKeeper super-fan: what’s not to love about tracking your outdoor activities using your iPhone’s GPS and then sharing your maps & progress socially? It’s a real winner, and the RK team consistently produces quality features.

For gym-workout progress & nutrition tracking, I have been using DailyBurn.com. DailyBurn allows you to plan workouts and meals and then track your progress. All-in-all it works reasonably well, though there are minor inconsistencies that prevent it from shining (ie, you can only plan 5 meals but can track 6, and the iPhone app for entering in weightlifting progress doesn’t show you last session’s numbers so you have a target to beat). However, I am extremely excited that DailyBurn announced integration with Internet-enabled weight scales (and, of course, I ordered one). (As they say, the best metrics are simple, automatic, and actionable)

Another device that will be arriving on my doorstep in the near future: the WakeMate. The WakeMate is a wrist-band that tracks the quality and duration of your sleep, and transmits the data to your iPhone. Additionally, it wakes you during the right part of your sleep cycle, nearest an alarm time you set.

What’s next for Health apps?

Here are some of the hard problems remaining: Automating nutrition information capture (DailyBurn’s bar code scanning app is a great step in that direction). Automating gym-workout capture (as much a technical problem as it is a business/standards problem… incredibly gnarly)

But, here’s the problem MOST worth solving, easily within a developer’s power, but difficult to get right: Assuming you’ve got all this data, how do you surface meaningful suggestions & motivate users to follow-through on self-improvement? What makes this particularly difficult is that the more successful your “intelligent” product becomes, the broader your user base becomes, and the more diluted the power users become. In effect, you attract people who are less driven towards success, and less likely to follow your app’s suggestions.

How do you help them acheive success? What failure rate do you have to get comfortable with? How do you balance selling the idea of success against your ability to enable it?

(Two quick other tools I use: Facebook Habits app, and YourFlowingData, a generic data capture tool that uses Twitter as an interface. Disclosure: I wrote the Habits app w/ a friend on a bit of a lark)

znhs: Brilliant. I want to write a long post about this later,...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:16:36 -0500

znhs:

Brilliant. I want to write a long post about this later, but if I don’t get around to it - just had to make sure more people saw this. Enjoy.

While print as a format is dead, there are some really creative folks still pushing it ;-) Great ad.