This past weekend, I was a part of Chicago Startup Weekend. We (Some friends, my brother, and I) gave a solid college try at launching a minimum viable product (MVP) to help foodies connect to personal chefs and aspiring food entrepreneurs called BigStove. We did hone our message and are working on taking some important [...]
I usually lock my laptop in the BettrAt WHQ file drawer. I forgot my keys this morning, so I didn’t have a laptop. How are you supposed to work without a laptop? Then it dawned on me. I’m going to try an experiment with the iPad today where I use it to get as much [...]
I haven’t read Ariely’s latest book yet, The Upside of Rationality, but the Boing Boing folks seem to have summed up the best part. Ariely was on All Things Considered earlier this month. Here’s where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent [...]
If the world were easily explained by some meta production possibilities curve that included every single possible output, I wonder which “output” most people are spending their time, energy, and money. It might seem odd to boil the entire world of production into this simple curve (but economics by its nature is a simplification). I [...]
What I don’t want: Chatroulette is interesting. I’ve sort of refrained from talking about it until now because I hadn’t known what to say/think about it, and based on the primary use cases (I think of the “Comic Book” guy archetype looking for a good time) or teens that frequent the “Most Viewed” section on [...]
Leave it to Steve to drop some sick metaphor on you like that. Bonus points for referencing bicycles. Computers are like bicycles for our minds
Living our daily lives touched by Boxee, Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and YouTube, it’s easy to think that we are on the cutting edge of media consumption. That the business exchanges that we partake in, whether it be paying subscription fees for entertainment [Netflix], or piecemeal for atomic units of media [iTunes] will be what everyone [...]
I just listened to this 4 year old piece from NPR and found its implications interesting for designing experiences and things. When people say “The novelty wore thin,” it’s entirely possible that they’re not talking about a particular novelty, but novelty altogether. Reading You are Not a Gadget has introduced me to the user/human idea [...]
Here’s a humanistic thought to start your day. “The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network [...]
Last year, I went to FailCon and StartupSchool (they were situated around the same weekend). I could easily say that I learned way more listening to the cases of failures than the “here’s what worked for me, but probably won’t work again, and most certainly won’t work for you if you do it exactly the [...]
Okay, back. Been gone for more than 2 months. One month in India and a month working getting ready for a pilot with a group here in Chicago for BettrAt (Which is going well — my favorite part of the webinar we held yesterday: “This (BettrAt) could be the next Facebook, but actually USEFUL”. Imagine [...]
