Idea: notify

Here’s one for the Cybernauts: a platform that is able to create a unified notification list out of a variety of sources, including news feeds (RSS), e-mail, instant messaging, Web site comments, discussion forums, etc.

As a frequent Internet user that roams far and wide across the plains of Cyberspace, the thing that frustrates me most is that I keep having to return to sites that I visit infrequently – maybe a news site with an interesting article that a friend posted on Facebook – simply to check whether somebody has replied to a comment I made.

The low-hanging fruit are the existing platforms for which a notification system already exists (RSS, Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, etc.), and on top of that some standard and popular applications such as vBulletin or phpBB, where the app could scrape the User Control Panel.

Ultimately what I want is a big-ass list of all the Web sites and applications that I’ve used, and for the ones which have been updated to bubble to the surface, e.g.

• Twitter (32)
• Ars Technica OpenForum (12)
• Gmail (9)
• Facebook (7)
• Hotmail (7)
• OCAU Forums (4)
• Australian Frequent Flyer Forums (1)
• DTV forums (0)
• etc.

Right now I use 2 programs for this: Digsby, which shows me the status of Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn; and Feedly which is pretty much just a front-end interface for Google Reader, which handles RSS. Neither of these platforms can handle Forums, and Feedly can only handle Web site comment systems that export to RSS (which are few and far between).

It would save me oodles of time having to keep going back and checking various Websites for updates. Am I the only one that has this problem?

The future of idea realisation

I reckon Kickstarter points the way to the future of how we consume ideas, and quite possibly product manufacturing. In today’s world of products, services and ideas (books, movies, music), pretty much everything is created and marketed based on speculation. That is, if a person has an idea, they do some “market research” and if a certain threshold is crossed, and the probability of being able to recoup your costs and turn a profit exceeds that of failure you forge ahead. This is pretty much the standard business model the world over, particularly if you need to borrow money from banks or venture capitalists. For risk-averse personality types like me it’s too much of a gamble, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I start a business – at least not under the existing regime.

Cue Kickstarter.

Some call it crowdsourced funding, but it goes deeper than that. Kickstarter helps those who have a feasible idea, where the only remaining obstacle is funds. It’s true that the site uses a financial model, but more importantly – and this is the key – the people who contribute funds are also the consumers of the idea. There’s zero speculation; the product is pre-sold and “fans” of the idea (and therefore your target audience, advocates and supporters) are identified before it even goes to press. Conversely, if your idea is unable to garner enough support, not a single cent is wasted, and you walk away with the knowledge that the market for your idea simple does not exist.

Take this project for instance: a short movie called Troll Bridge based on a short story by British author Terry Pratchett (which not only has the author’s blessing, but also dialogue contributed by the man himself!). Despite his massive popularity and huge following, you could still reasonably argue that Pratchett’s popularity is niche. Kickstarter has enabled one talented Melbournian movie maker and Pratchett fan to create something for a very narrowly defined audience.

This removes the gross inefficiencies involved with trying to reach audiences through traditional means of advertising and marketing. In the future, instead of having to endure unsolicited crap coming at you from all angles, you could simply pick and choose to support offerings that are relevant or seem interesting to you. And don’t worry about the problem of delayed gratification – there’ll surely be a backlog of material created beforehand.

Is Kickstarter something you’d use?

Ingredients for success

I’m such a sore loser. Last week I entered a competition on Gizmodo to win the new Samsung phone, which required participants to submit a 50 word description and an accompanying image or video describing why you deserved to win. Seeing as I’m still unemployed and had oodles of spare time, I actually put effort into my submissions, going on location to take pictures, Photoshopping, and tapping recent Internet memes. In spite of that I was pipped to the post by several folks who obviously spent that much more time and effort on it than I did by creating videos*, leading me to post a crypto-emo remark on Facebook that “No matter how good you are, there’s always somebody better :-(”

As a result, I spent last night mulling over what it takes to be successful and came up with a few thoughts. Here are the things I believe are the ingredients to success:

A deep passion
The key word here is “deep”. There’s a veritable gulf between taking an active interest in something, and being passionate about it. Whatever you want to be successful at, from playing an instrument to building an iPhone app, requires a significant investment of time and effort to get to the level of expertise where success happens.

I love the sound of the cello, can play the violin worth a damn thanks to Chinese parenting, and was even given a free instrument by my father in law. But even after setting myself the goal of learning to play the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite #1, I couldn’t dredge up enough discipline to keep at it beyond the first few bars. That’s how I discovered interest and passion are not the same thing.

If you want to be successful, figure out what your true passions are and look for success there, instead of playing in the shallows of where you think success might lie.

A very good memory
Another quality I’ve noticed in people who succeed is their ability to call from a huge mental database of information relating to their passion, be it sporting statistics or musical repertoire. This could very well be closely related to passion since the deeper you go into something the more space it occupies your brain.

I’ve always marvelled at Jenny’s musical recall – back in the period when it seemed like all our friends were getting married (including us!) she created several excellent playlists for wedding ceremonies purely from the vast store of tunes in her head, which we still occasionally use as background music while entertaining. (Her talent only applies to musical melodies though, she’s rubbish with lyrics…)

A large network of friends
Next time you finish reading a book, any book, take a note of the acknowledgements page if it has one. Very few authors will count their work as a solo Herculean effort – at the bare minimum, there will have been a contribution from an editor (if not, how the heck did the book get published?) You need people to bounce ideas off, proof-read your manuscript, help with research, motivate you to finish, etc.

An audience
This is the most obvious, but the most easily forgotten about. You could think of the most awesome idea (“an ancient global war between mermaids and centaurs has been hidden from mankind for centuries, accidentally uncovered through deforestation and overfishing, which dooms humanity to becoming a statistic in the battle for this planet!”) but unless there are other people also interested in the same idea, success will exist only in your own head.

Time
If you’ve ticked off every one of the points above and success still eludes you, then probably the only reason left is that you must give it time. How often have you heard somebody famous comment that their “overnight success” was 10 years in the making or similar?

As for me, I’m still trying to figure out what my passions are, which was the inspiration for the poem Jack. I’m good at so many things, but what do I want to be great at? I’ll let you know if I figure it out. Meanwhile, what are you passionate about?

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* Well, except this one guy who everybody is complaining about because he used a cheap trick that obviously fooled the judges.

Proceed with gaussian*

Since reading Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, I’ve been seeing gaussian fallacies everywhere. Let me back up a bit and explain: the story goes, Europeans observed that swans were white throughout all of Europe, which they extrapolated that into a theory that all swans around the world must be white. But when explorers came to Australia and discovered a Black Swan, their theory was immediately invalidated. The implication is that Black Swans can happen anywhere, at any time to invalidate theories and models.

This applies to technology. Experts want us to think that just because the 128-bit encryption standard used to protect our personal data takes a supercomputer a squillion lifetimes to crack, it means that the systems protecting our sensitive information are secure. Yet the recent of Sony Playstation accounts, adding to the growing list of major security breaches in recent months, tells an entirely different story.

Admittedly there are many factors other than encryption that can be to blame security breaches, but in terms of how security is marketed to the general population, we’re usually told that encryption is the primary means of protection, right? (That little lock icon in your browser? That’s encryption. Facebook suggesting that you switch to using https? Yep, encryption.)

What’s to say an event from either extreme of the bell curve won’t happen in the first 20 seconds? Just because it takes a computer an eternity to crack the code, doesn’t mean that the result will only be known at the very end of the calculation process. For example: I pick a random number between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 and ask you to guess it. In the absence of any other limitations (i.e. time restrictions) you could either take potshots at it by selecting numbers at random, or you could just start by guessing 1, then 2, then 3… and so on. If that random number happens to be 12, the second approach would have gotten you there in mere seconds.

But I digress. The point is, we’re being fed a Gaussian fallacy with encryption. The real threats are whatever means hackers and other nefarious types are using to bypass security – those are the “black swans”. I daresay the same thing applies to password selection. Is “password” really that much less secure than “Gh$h26Sd!0” if the vector of attack is a colleague installing a keylogger on your computer?

Post back in the comments here if you see any examples of Gaussian fallacies in your life.

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* The title is obviously a pun on “proceed with caution”. I know “Gauss” rhymes with “house” rather than “horse” but I’ve always pronounced it “gore-shan” for whatever reason.

iCanDoMoreThanJustPhone

One of the key reasons for the iPhones’s success is its ability to run apps. What’s notable about this is that the name “iPhone” is a huge misnomer – the device so many people call a phone is not really a phone at all (even smartphone is a stretch). We think it’s one because: we bought it to replace our old mobile phone (which really was a phone); because of the “phone” part in its name; and because – yes – it is capable of making and receiving calls. But the device itself is a chameleon. It can transform into whatever the software and its inputs and outputs allow it to do.

For example, in the past if Jenny wanted an audio recording device to record counselling sessions with clients, she’d have to go and buy a tape recorder. Now instead, she simply installs a recording app on her iPhone, and the built-in microphone and storage capabilities of the device delivers the functionality she needs.

So predicting the next big advance in gadgetry becomes about how many input and output modes we can generalise into a single device, like how touchscreens and GPS were groundbreaking additions to mobile devices. Geeks everywhere are anticipating the next round of smartphones, but the rumour mill merely points to “upgrades” that improve existing technologies – faster processors, better screens and higher resolution cameras. But nothing really revolutionary…. well OK, there’s Near Field Communications (NFC), which may have the potential to transform commercial transactions, although innovation in the financial realm is generally resisted by large, incumbent institutions like banks (consider how many years it took for Paypal to become widely accepted – a scenario currently being played out again with Square, a payment system devised by the man who created Twitter).

Really, we may already know what the future of handheld devices look like. Just as the Apple Newton might have paved the way for the iPhone (although one would be drawing a long bow to suggest that they could’ve predicted one from the other), technologies that already exist today give us glimpses into upcoming devices. Pointing the way are the tricorders from the fictional Star Trek universe – for which there’s now an X Prize on offer to the first group that is able to successfully develop one – and of course that old McGuffin, Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver.

The question comes down to need. If you could carry it in your hand, what would your ideal mobile device include?