I wish I had: A simple & inexpensive display screen that could wirelessly connect to any of your devices for display purposes. Think Air Display built into a physical product. Ideally, the product could be sized perfectly to fit into your backpack/carry bag or flexible (a thin skin-like-silicon type material would be great) so that it could rollup and be stored easily. Product would come in various sizes and be light enough to attach to a whiteboard or wall for instant brainstorming sessions or be laid flat on a table for multiple people to gather around and discuss whats on the screen. Add in the ability to write on it with dry erase markers and you have an award winner–a product every new startup, design thinker and tech-nerd in the country would die to get their hands on.
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This would be a welcomed piece of mail amidst all the junk & bills packed into the small mailbox at my apartment. Simple is a new generation bank that is going to change the way we view & interact with our banking data–and I certainly hope banking is just the beginning for this company because the entire financial industry is ready for a large tech makeover like the one these guys propose.
I am very eager to use Simple & thankful that Square has been so successful in shaking up the financial marketplace. I look forward to the day when I am able to fully indulge in the experience of both. Companies like these are making it easier and easier to start and manage a small company.
Read MoreThe Denali Experiment from renan ozturk on Vimeo is a bit long but well worth a watch. I love the concept portrayed in the film of mixing two niche groups from a single general segment of expertise (big mountain professional skiers/traditional alpinists); the result of the two way ‘mentoring’ clearly produced a stronger, better kind of professional on all sides of the North Face team. Great concept to apply to the development of businesses and startup teams.
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It is astounding to see just how far Google–and the entire web for that matter–has come in a matter of 15+ years. I’m looking forward to watching our interaction with computers change just as Google Fellow Amit Singhal alludes to at the end of ‘The Evolution of Search’ video. This definitely got me thinking about how I could interact with my desktop much in the same way as new iPhone users do with Siri. My prediction is that our desktops will continue to integrate more and more touch gestures (note the appearance of Apple’s Magic Trackpad and Mission Control) to help blend together the experience of using a desktop with that of an iPhone/iPad etc. along with Siri like conversational search and UI.
Read MoreI want to thread together three different articles that I ran into that really spell out where I am as college grad, my place in the economy and what I truly desire to do about it.
I read an article yesterday that Garrett McGuire had posted on my wall about how wage earning for recent/current college grads will continue to be depressed for –what the data is suggesting–a lifetime. The article is rather ‘depressing’ and the author know it too, but it’s an interesting study nonetheless and relevant to my positioning in todays economic climate (please don’t read this wrong, I’m not a fan of blaming the economy for my problems and I’m not about to start). What interests me most are the questions posed at the end by Economist Michael Mandel who originally posted these figures about the state of young college grads in 2011, he writes:
” I want to ask an economic question, a political question, and a policy question. First, no one has given me a good explanation yet of why young American college grads should have been hit so hard. Is there increased competition with young college grads around the world? Are new college grads lower quality than their predecessors? Has information technology reduced the need for young grads? I really would like to know.
Politically, Obama captured the imagination of this group in 2008. Are young college graduates going to sit out the next presidential election in disgust? Is there any candidate that can excite them?
Finally, if we were going to design some economic policies to help young college grads, what would they be?”
He lists some intriguing questions. The first two, albeit important to ask, I’m not too concerned with–but I do believe the economic policies question is something that we should and can address by creating a more robust startup culture among young people here in the United States. In my opinion this would be much more effective as a long term trend purported by the startup community and ran by groups such as Y Combinator and not a government program or economic policy.
Read MoreRead Morenot with our brilliant assumptions and strategies and whiteboard gamesmanship but with the hard work of discovering what customers really wanted and adjusting our product and strategy to meet those desires. We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want.
–Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
I tweeted about SecondMarket when I came across it last week. Recently, it seems there has been somewhat of an uncovering of small, emergent ‘shadow markets’–as many are calling them–selling shares of private equity in the hottest companies in tech & upstart. What caught my attention was the chance to get your hands on namely some of Facebook and Twitter’s pre-IPO stock offering; something I would still love to do. But there’s a catch… of course. I quickly began to research the two apparent players in this world of private equity exchange; and here is what I found:
Read MoreI stumbled upon this today while aimlessly browsing twitter, luckily I was enticed by the Christmas gift list for geeks via ycombinator and ran across this resourceful gem from @withoutfriction. A perfect find. I was just having a conversation with a friend on how I need to dig into this subject more and take the reins on my own self education on the topic of web and web/mobile app development. The best part of the story is that the writer of this resource guide is ready and willing to share his brain with anyone who inquires and was asking for some direction concerning what to write about next. I was pleased to see in the comments, of the few people that wrote in, that they too are in the process of digging into learning how to code in order to begin crafting the ideas in their heads into a tangible web app or splash page. All in all, a valuable find if you fancy this kind of digital literacy.
Read MoreDARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo – I saw this and was greatly inspired by the cinematography. This guy has an awesome story; love the poetic voiceover set to this incredible footage.
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