Today I dropped my daughter off at school for the first time in more than two weeks, great family time.
As I was walking past 6th Ave I looked south and noticed the Freedom Tower. Wow, great progress since I last took this route way back in 2011. In the morning light, the lights in the still exposed upper floors twinkle majestically.
Crossing the Avenue, as the tower started to disappear behind other buildings I was left to wonder, “What is there left to build?”
I was not around to see the bridges of NY be built, or the Tunnels, the Empire State building, the Interstate system, or even the Twin Towers. These were all great feats of engineering. And I fear that not many of their kind will be undertaken in this country in the foreseeable future.*
The engineering feats of my and future generations lie not in structural and visible feats, but more in the digital and scientific realms.
I am an engineer of the 21st Century. Building the future of media consumption. What it is? Totally unknown, totally up to people like us to build. Media giants have no clue what the future will hold, no idea what consumers want, no idea what the next step is. Another example of the Internet being a great equalizer. This is a huge opportunity, one that I can’t stop thinking about and look forward to waking up to every single day.
* [to argue this point you could say that we are building a tremendous new Aquaduct and Su way line under New York, which is nothing short of amazing. I’ll admit that.]
For as long as I can remember (or maybe just since 1995) I have worked hard to constantly challenge myself. Whether it was running, rowing, physics, chaos theory (fun to learn in high school!), a PhD, I maintained that working hard, stepping outside my comfort zone, would pay off and lead to good, maybe even better things. (luck = hard work hypothesis, google it).
“Always live on the edge of comfortability,” I have always told myself. (Mind you I’m I was a physicist, not a writer :)
A little over a year ago I joined a great team, which is now Shelby.TV, as an engineer. I joined a team of 3 founders as employee #1, maybe a little smaller of a startup than I was looking for but…
What it came down to was that I believed in what the team was building and it turned out that we all got along great (I even told my wife that these guys were like long lost college buddies) and my time with The Company, we have built some really cool shit!
But I digress… Building Shelby.TV from the ground up has been a VERY challenging but a VERY rewarding experience thus far. We have big visions and a great team to start out on this endeavor. We have also benefited GREATLY from the mentorship based TechStars Program, which as a team, we all can’t speak highly enough about! In the three month proram, we accomplished what probably should have taken us 9-12 months (thank you TechStars!).
But of course, we are looking for people to join us. One of the attributes of Team Shelby that I love the most is that every member, even @internzero, is pushing themselves each and every day. As a small team we use Ruby/Rails, Javascript/Node, Redis, Mongo, Lua, and many API’s (hell we’re building our own!).
Building an API, designing for state-of-the-art browsers, organizing a video hackday, doing biz-dev’ey type things that biz-dev people do… everyone is working their asses off, pushing towards a vision. Join us.
It is unbelievably rewarding to work hard everyday knowing you are being challenged, pushed to the max!
If you live in New York City, odds are you have walked past one of the most unsung entrepreneurs in town.
No, not a startup founder.
No, not a wall street trader.
The fruit cart vendor!
Fruit cart vendors are now everywhere in this city and if you look closely they are all operated by one or two businesses (I would love to actually dive deeper into who these people are… for another post).
Fruit carts have been around since before Don Corleone’s time. But now, the timing is ripe for their explosion. Costs are high. Rent. Utilities. Labor. Rent… these carts have low overhead.
But the quality of fruit can’t be tht great, right? I should go to whole foods or *gasp* Gristedes, right? Wrong. Odds are in most cases they are selling the EXACT same fruit, of the same quality as traditional stores at prices that are anywhere from 10%-40% cheaper. Not bad.
Notice these people. They’ve got a real opportunity on their hands… college tuitions will be paid by all that fruit!
[RANDOM thought: Let’s collect photos of fruit carts… upload yours!]
This morning on my way to the office I did what I usually do most subway rides. I turned on my e-reader and read.
Today it happened to be my iPad (I bought an O’Reilly book and thought the big screen would be best) but sometimes its kindle on my Android phone, and sometimes its my kindle on my kindle. I have different use cases for each but love reading on all three. On the iPad I read more short form content than on Kindle and I wouldn’t read on my iPad outside in the sun (I feel like my iPad is a little bit of a vampire).
But I digress.
Point #1:
I was reading and riding this morning and I looked to my left. Kindle. I looked to my right. Kindle. I looked down at the riders sitting in front of me. Blackberry, iPhone, Android.
No joke, everyone around me was reading or playing a game. A mere year ago I felt like I was the only one riding the subways of NY reading an e-reader.
We have come a long way. Some people (eg my brother) say the like the feel of books and will never make the switch BUT the wave is moving to digital.
Point #2:
This is part of a greater trend of people feeling more secure using technology in their every day lives. I want to explicitly throw in television. Tech like Boxee is becoming an accepted thing in our living rooms and is known about more and more people. That’s why we are building Shelby.tv, we believe that there are better ways to do the things we do everyday. It shouldn’t be a process to watch things your friends are talking about and enjoying (we do that all the time with traditional tv), it should be simple to discover and enjoy.
Shelby is the best way to discover and enjoy video on the web. The Future is arriving soon.
(p.s. see what i did there? check out Shelby!)
(p.p.s when will then be now?)
What makes a really great product these days?
Short answer… I don’t know. (and that’s ok, i believe no one *really* does)
Long answer:
Great products are those that give you a deep feeling that you are are truly connected to others. Tumblr, Bookface, Twitter, SoundCloud, rdio, Foursquare, and ahhh, the book.
You interact with a book on a personal level but you interact with others around that book. Books make people excited, sad, happy, scared. You develop a connection with the book but that connection enables you interact with other people wrt the book.
Does youtube give you that feeling of connecting with people? Maybe on a superficial level… But it definitely does not give you insight into a person like a blog post or a tweet does. It gives you a window into someones world but it doesn’t invite you in, invite you to site in the couch and stay awhile. Comments under videos are ment to give a greater connection to other people, but those are crap!
Video is an asset, just as the book was in the previous analogy. You consume video, you get emotionally attached, you develop a relationship. The problem is it does not enable you to interact with other individuals around the context of that video or that collection of videos in a meaningful way.
[random thought thrown in: Today more than ever I think a great product gives you a feeling that a friend is really a friend, not just another check mark on the wall.]
An idea Gary Vaynerchuk is pushing out recently is that we are growing stronger relationships to products (he says brands), so does that mean we are becoming friends with products? Isn’t that the next step?
I want a friend that can enable me to develop relationships around video. I want that product.
#shelby
[p.s. curious on your thoughts?]
The one thing I know for sure is that I’m a fan of the hackers who are dispensing vigilante justice. Here’s another unintended consequence: The hackers could end up organizing over this issue and ultimately forming a shadow government of their own, if they haven’t already. I welcome my hacker overlords.
Scott Adams Blog: Sweden 12/08/2010
This is all scary stuff going on now with some serious consequences for freedom. Not freedom of press, religion etc. Just Freedom. Governments vs Hackers. Proceed.
bijan:
I was thinking the other day about user interfaces on non-PC devices.
For the most part they are all stuck in some frozen point in time. Or worse, they became more complicated with time.
Consider this list which serves as a tiny sample:
-consumer landline telephone
-microwave
-automobile
-payment systems/banking
-digital SLRs
-home audio/video equipment (TVs, set top box, remote control)
-home security
(I could go on and on).
There is an obvious tendancy to give us more features in each update with these products. Yet it doesn’t seem like the companies that make those products have user interface obsession.
I realize that I’m an Apple fanboy when it comes to design and user experience. And sometimes they absolutely miss the target (I happen to think iMovie 09 was a big step backwards). But for the most part they nail the user experience. Yes, I think they have great taste but it’s more than that. Its taste combined with obsession. Taste makes it sound too easy and like something you are born with or without.
Taste (alone) doesn’t give enough credit to companies that hyperfocus about their products.
I think a lot of companies don’t obsess on their user interfaces. That’s the only explanation I have for why my remote control looks like the way it does. And why there are a billion buttons on my car’s dashboard. Or why I still dont’ know how to sync the address book on our home telephone system.
They just don’t care enough.
That’s why I love startups. The best ones obsess about the user experience. They care about their products and the user interface like nobody else does and they don’t settle.
Very interesting and true. I like the bit about Home Security!
Just reading information about H1N1, a.k.a. the Swine Flu… here are some thoughts:
The Flu Pandemic of 1918 had a mortality rate of about 10% - 20% of those infected and about 1% of the global population.
The Swine Flu Pandemic (yes it is classified as a pandemic! read here.) doesn’t seem so easy to get a mortality rate for. One estimate was 6%-10% (back in May)… but I will give it a shot…
The CDC (@CDCFlu) reports as of 09/04 that there were 9,047 hospitalized cases in the US (they stopped reporting all reported cases a while ago but at last count ( 07/24) was >43,000) and the number of deaths was 593. So the mortality rate of people entering a hospital with H1N1 is ~6.5%.
Looking at the last number of reported cases of H1N1 (not just hospitalizations), I estimate the total number of unique cases of H1N1 in the country to be up to ~52,000 cases. This implies that a more realistic mortality rate of H1N1 is really ~1.1% (all numbers are for the US only).
These numbers are including the relative “lull” in the spread of the virus during the summer months. It will be interesting to see what develops in the coming weeks and with the distribution of the vaccination next month.
Some thoughts on the Quantum and the Long Tail at henry.sztul.com/blog
Meanwhile, NBC and Fox only get paid when you watch the TV shows on TV or cable, which gets them Nielsen ratings and subscriber fees. Internet revenues from the likes of Hulu are puny. So they can’t afford to lose viewers to Web video shows on TV when they need them to be watching TV shows on TV. That’s the gist of Zucker’s quote.
Longer term, this anti-customer strategy will fail. (See: Music industry v. Internet.) But perhaps it saves the networks a few years, and could open more opportunities for the cable industry to build up their on-demand content and technologies so that subscribers at least keep feeding the monster $80 a month.
NBC Boss Explains Why Boxee Users Can’t Have Hulu (GE, NWS)
My 2 cents: Go all the way or don’t do it at all. The networks should put all their weight behind web technologies like Boxee. Hell, make their own (isn’t that what hulu is?), I don’t care! I think this is the quickest way to skirt this issue of ad revenue (hello, watches on Hulu will give 10x more info then Nielson ratings, eg IP, Location, Time of viewing, browser, OS, etc). No brainer if you ask me!
So yesterday I got a little bogged down in the morning and my plans to leave City College before the Inauguration had to be modified. I scrambled around and decided to watch the whole thing on the Internet via “the tubes.”
So, I loaded up the Hulu stream and enjoyed Fox News’ wonderful coverage.
Around 11:15 or there about I started to lose the feed. It started to get choppy with the video first flciekring then followed by loss of audio. In a panic I switched to the CNN live feed and was happy that it was in good shape. If the video started to go out, at least the audio always stayed on.
Then 11:45 rolled around and all hell broke loose! I lost the CNN stream and scrambled for my next alternative… C-SPAN to the rescue! While I did receive the feed fine, the video was something like 250px x 250px of pixelated fuzziness. Nice, but I wanted “web 2.0” video goodness.
Then finally I saw that the NY Times had a feed on its homepage that was pretty good quality and not THAT choppy. It only hung up exactly when President Obama was giving his address. I thank the NY Times for their reliable service and hope they can navigate out of the choppy waters they find themselves in in this print-to-web transition we find ourselves in.
My read of TV on the Web: We have a little way to go (read: a long way to go) before live streaming broadcasts are capable of handling the bandwidth to meet the demand of a broadcast such as an inauguration. I think for watching repeats, syndicated shows, or movies, now is the time to start watching online. Bandwidth for “live stuff” is not quite ready.
TV is dead. Long live TV!
Seriously, TV is dead. Ok, maybe this is an overstatement, but I think Internet TV will be on the rise, and fast. I believe Internet TV will be the next YouTube craze, Internet video on the TV, yay!
Right now there are a growing number of services like hulu.com and the big networks streaming video services are making this happen slowly but surely. Application’s like Apple’s Front Row, Boxee, and XBMC are emerging as solutions to allow us to be entertained on our computers.
More important is that these so-called TV “solutions” allow us to now connect a computer to your TV, any computer, like that one sitting dormant in your basement (or storage container in your buildings’ basement, as in my case).
I think services like blip.tv and justin.tv are a new arena that something like this might be ready to distribute as well.
I especially think the time is right for an online variety show… like a recent event I attended in Tribeca last weekend called Pillow Talk, like an SNL broadcasted online. This is a niche in online video that could take off… especially based in NY.
I am thinking about changing this site, but I am curious what my readers think…
Do you think I should leave things the way they are?
Do you think I should switch to a more static, traditional site about me?
Or…
Do you think I should push technology and try and form some hybrid of the two?
Leave a comment and tell me what you think!
I once read a book titled “Cod” which was about the history of the fish and the demise of the Cod population due to overfishing. This Time article caught my eye because it was the second time in as many weeks that I have heard that Tuna might be heading down the same road. Sad. I like tuna. If its on a menu, I’ll have to eat it now… you never know when your next tuna might be your last!
From wikipedia:
“Most common definitions of terrorism include only those acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal (as opposed to a lone attack), and deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants. Some definitions also include acts of unlawful violence and war.”
By this definition, or spirit of the word, a serial killer can be a terrorist, a bank robber can be a terrorist, and a schoolyard bully can be a terrorist.
Not to make this political, but this notion of terrorism IS political. The word, the use of the word, the fear invoked by the word are all Orwellian, Machiavellian, you name the ‘-ian’ and run with it.
This has become one of the more powerful words out there. Would you ever use the word terroris on an airplane or in an airport? (And better yet, what is wrong with saying that word on a plane or in an airport?)
So next time you use the word TERRORIST just think for a second what message it is you are trying to convey.
That is my daily public service announcement. Thanks for listining. Back to Ruby on Rails.
