Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Me on Local Radio
On July 11th I was on a local radio show that profiles San Diego based companies. Head to this page and click on the July 11th segment. I am the first person on.
Monday, June 30, 2008
New Habits, New Reading, New Tools
About four weeks ago I came down with some pretty serious headaches that were experienced in conjunction with a general illness I was experiencing that my children gave me. I didn't think much about it and figured I would get over it until I hoped on a Virgin American plane to San Francisco for a day of meetings.
Right after takeoff I had some seriously sharp pain in my neck and head and began to get pretty worked up about how sick I was. At that time I thought that I had a mild infection that was complicated by a dental issue I was experiencing. After a number of calls to doctors and dentists etc. I got on a plan and a series of appointments that put me back on track. One thing that didn't get on track though was the issue with my sinuses that I assumed was just another symptom of being sick.
After a full 3 weeks, I couldn't get the feeling of having a nail driven through my head to go away. After a CAT scan (gasp) I found out that I have a pretty major infection in the deepest part of the sinuses. Armed with that knowledge, I have been on a regimen of antibiotics, mucus reducers and nasal saline baths. Good times. The only positive benefit of this has been a lot of time at the home office which has allowed me to catch up, take a deep breath and focus on the non business development part of work as well as generally reducing the overall stress level of the organism which is me. Aside from the headaches which are coming down, things are actually very good.
So the point of this post that was in the title has yet to be addressed...
New Habits - Over the last several months I have been working on organizing my work. I have read and followed the various GTD and other things out there and am certainly a big fan of sites like Lifehacker. For all my interest in this there really are only three big items that I have found myself doing that I would call new habits that I have focused on over the last six months of this year that I would say are ingrained habits. They are use of Spaces on the Mac, use of outlines to manage my work, and staying current on email.
As far as the last two, those are pretty self explanatory. I process email on a fairly regular basis and aspire to get to zero while knowing that I never will. There is an ebb and flow of around 200 emails that are always in my email box and I keep a range open of about two months. When I am more organized than not I can leverage my outlining to capture the emails and drive the number down. When I travel a lot, I might peak up to around 600 or so. Outlining is critical for me and although I can be engaged or not at times, when I really am trying to juggle a lot of things, the outline is my best friend. We should teach outlining and mind mapping to everyone at a young age.
The Spaces one is certainly more novel for me. A lot of my engineer friends who are Linux nerds use multiple windows. When the new version of the Mac OS came out I gave Spaces a run and slowly over time found it to be a way to organize what I do as I work on my machine. My current configuration is using 9 windows in a 3 by 3 grid with Email in the top left, browser in top center, communication apps in the top right. I use middle center for music and bottom center for calendaring. I use the other winodws for docs or file management or whatever.
New Reading - I haven't been reading any books which bums me out a bit but I have adopted a couple of new blogs over time. My daily reading right now is as follows: Techmeme, Hacker News, Lifehacker, Google News and then checking my news reader. I adopted Hacker News at the recommendation of one of our engineers and have really been enjoying the stories. There is certainly some overlap with my other blogs/sites etc. but there is a pretty strong nerd flavor as well.
New Tools - Not a lot. The biggest one has been a switch for news reading. For around four years now I have been a Bloglines reader. Nothing of any significnce has changed with Bloglines as far as I can tell. While it is adequate for reading stuff, I had cluttered my reading list with the accumulated blogs of those four years and cleaning was less than push button on the interface side. I went back and checked out Google Reader, which didn't blow me away when initially launched. A quick look showed some impressive progress and I made the switch.
The only other thing that I would consider a new tool right now is Google Gears for offline access to Reader and Docs. I have been bummed about how long it has taken to roll this out but it is now here and I am waiting for that next plane flight to give it a run on both accounts. I will let you know how it goes.
Right after takeoff I had some seriously sharp pain in my neck and head and began to get pretty worked up about how sick I was. At that time I thought that I had a mild infection that was complicated by a dental issue I was experiencing. After a number of calls to doctors and dentists etc. I got on a plan and a series of appointments that put me back on track. One thing that didn't get on track though was the issue with my sinuses that I assumed was just another symptom of being sick.
After a full 3 weeks, I couldn't get the feeling of having a nail driven through my head to go away. After a CAT scan (gasp) I found out that I have a pretty major infection in the deepest part of the sinuses. Armed with that knowledge, I have been on a regimen of antibiotics, mucus reducers and nasal saline baths. Good times. The only positive benefit of this has been a lot of time at the home office which has allowed me to catch up, take a deep breath and focus on the non business development part of work as well as generally reducing the overall stress level of the organism which is me. Aside from the headaches which are coming down, things are actually very good.
So the point of this post that was in the title has yet to be addressed...
New Habits - Over the last several months I have been working on organizing my work. I have read and followed the various GTD and other things out there and am certainly a big fan of sites like Lifehacker. For all my interest in this there really are only three big items that I have found myself doing that I would call new habits that I have focused on over the last six months of this year that I would say are ingrained habits. They are use of Spaces on the Mac, use of outlines to manage my work, and staying current on email.
As far as the last two, those are pretty self explanatory. I process email on a fairly regular basis and aspire to get to zero while knowing that I never will. There is an ebb and flow of around 200 emails that are always in my email box and I keep a range open of about two months. When I am more organized than not I can leverage my outlining to capture the emails and drive the number down. When I travel a lot, I might peak up to around 600 or so. Outlining is critical for me and although I can be engaged or not at times, when I really am trying to juggle a lot of things, the outline is my best friend. We should teach outlining and mind mapping to everyone at a young age.
The Spaces one is certainly more novel for me. A lot of my engineer friends who are Linux nerds use multiple windows. When the new version of the Mac OS came out I gave Spaces a run and slowly over time found it to be a way to organize what I do as I work on my machine. My current configuration is using 9 windows in a 3 by 3 grid with Email in the top left, browser in top center, communication apps in the top right. I use middle center for music and bottom center for calendaring. I use the other winodws for docs or file management or whatever.
New Reading - I haven't been reading any books which bums me out a bit but I have adopted a couple of new blogs over time. My daily reading right now is as follows: Techmeme, Hacker News, Lifehacker, Google News and then checking my news reader. I adopted Hacker News at the recommendation of one of our engineers and have really been enjoying the stories. There is certainly some overlap with my other blogs/sites etc. but there is a pretty strong nerd flavor as well.
New Tools - Not a lot. The biggest one has been a switch for news reading. For around four years now I have been a Bloglines reader. Nothing of any significnce has changed with Bloglines as far as I can tell. While it is adequate for reading stuff, I had cluttered my reading list with the accumulated blogs of those four years and cleaning was less than push button on the interface side. I went back and checked out Google Reader, which didn't blow me away when initially launched. A quick look showed some impressive progress and I made the switch.
The only other thing that I would consider a new tool right now is Google Gears for offline access to Reader and Docs. I have been bummed about how long it has taken to roll this out but it is now here and I am waiting for that next plane flight to give it a run on both accounts. I will let you know how it goes.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Death of the Tech Cell Phone Fetishist MVNO
Silicon Valley Insider has a good piece here about the Virgin takeover of Helio. It is interesting to note that in many ways this marks the death of the second wave of MVNOs (Amp'd, ESPN, Disney, Helio). It will be interesting to see how the market segments over time as the 1st wave players (Virgin, Boost) compete with fast moving low price carriers like Leap and Metro PCS. It seems that some combination of 2 or 3 of those players would make for an interesting opportunity. I think that both Virgin and Boost do a great job of marketing, but the growth that Leap and Metro are having driving low price leadership and all in pricing is certainly attractive to a big segement of the market.
I have posted previously on my thoughts around Helio and I think that the article linked above makes the most compelling point about Helio in my opinion. As I said before, I always expected Helio to be the technology fetishist MVNO with cool devices and advanced technology features. While the phones materialized, and to some extent the services did as well, the focus on marketing to the youth demographic on the one hand, while operating high concept stores on the other hand struck me as misaligned. The bottom line has become that the iPhone has become essentially the technology fetishist MVNO with a very attractive price point and soon a very fast network. I hope Virgin maintains some of the focus on the higher end on the market in a practical way but given overall price competition both from above and below I would expect that best execution is the name of the game for a couple of years ahead.
I have posted previously on my thoughts around Helio and I think that the article linked above makes the most compelling point about Helio in my opinion. As I said before, I always expected Helio to be the technology fetishist MVNO with cool devices and advanced technology features. While the phones materialized, and to some extent the services did as well, the focus on marketing to the youth demographic on the one hand, while operating high concept stores on the other hand struck me as misaligned. The bottom line has become that the iPhone has become essentially the technology fetishist MVNO with a very attractive price point and soon a very fast network. I hope Virgin maintains some of the focus on the higher end on the market in a practical way but given overall price competition both from above and below I would expect that best execution is the name of the game for a couple of years ahead.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Socialthing 2.0
One of these days I will blog again. I swear. I did want to share that my buddies at Socialthing rolled out version 2.0 Last week. Check it here.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Ocean
I live in a little town in what is called the North county part of San Diego. Back on April 14th we had a really nasty Santa Ana wind condition that raised our temperatures well into the 90s. I decided that given the heat it would be a great day to take all the kids to the beach and I couldn't help but take my first plunge into the sea. It was cold but awesome.
Having lived in a great surfing area for almost ten years now, I have made it an annual ritual to promise myself to learn how to surf and each year I neglect to follow through on this. Instead I am a big fan of boogie boards. I have some decent boards, a spring wetsuit and flippers than make me look something like a hybrid between a seal and a walrus depending on how my diet is going.
All my life I have lived near the ocean and I have to admit that weird things in the water creep me out. I especially hate seaweed but as I get older it is less of a concern. This last week freaked me out. Let me explain...
The picture above was taken on Christmas day at Seaside beach in Cardiff.
View Larger Map
The map here is a close approximation of where the fatal shark attack happened last week. the picture I took, is about half a mile north of there and it is at the beach we usually go to during the summer. Yikes.
I don't expect this to stop us from a lot of beach trips this summer but I am thinking that I am going to be wearing the wetsuit and end up being mistaken for a tasty little shark snack.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
More Socialthing Invites
I just realized I have 10 more socialthing invites. If you want one send me an email to derrick AT doien DOT com.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Google Maps Goodness
I am heading to San Francisco tomorrow for a speaking event at Haas and for some meetings. One of my meetings is with someone I have never met before who happens to live in Santa Cruz. I asked him to meet me in the city and he asked me to suggest a place. There is a place over on Brannan near Bacar that I can't remember the name of for the life of me. It is a place I like to go to when I am meeting with Six Apart or some of the other companies in the area.
I used Google maps to search for Six Apart. After that I did a local business search for restaurant and cafe and bar. None of the results were the place I was looking for. That didn't make any sense to me. I know this place is all three of those things. And it is good. I had a bright idea. How about I use the street view and meander down the street. Having been there many times I knew exactly where it was but that would be of no help to the guy I was meeting. I cruised down Brannan until I saw the familiar place, The Brickhouse cafe and bar. Now that is some useful stuff.
I used Google maps to search for Six Apart. After that I did a local business search for restaurant and cafe and bar. None of the results were the place I was looking for. That didn't make any sense to me. I know this place is all three of those things. And it is good. I had a bright idea. How about I use the street view and meander down the street. Having been there many times I knew exactly where it was but that would be of no help to the guy I was meeting. I cruised down Brannan until I saw the familiar place, The Brickhouse cafe and bar. Now that is some useful stuff.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Art
Earlier in the year I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The conference was good but one of the highlights of the conference for me had nothing to do with wireless technology. The flight I took to Spain ended up in Madrid and given that I was going to get in at 7 AM and was in no rush to get to Barcelona, I decided to spend the morning checking out Madrid.
I had never been to Madrid and have always had a strong desire to get there but it had never happened as other places had called us instead. Back in 1997 when my wife passed the bar we had made it to Barcelona and had plans to go to Madrid but it was hot in Spain and we instead opted to head to Italy and then Germany.
In Madrid there are a number of places that I have always wanted to visit and at the top of the list was the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia is home to the National Modern and Contemporary art collections and, of most interest to me, Picasso's Guernica. I have always been fascinated by this painting and it had some particular interest to me based on my Western Civilization class in high school.
In my senior year I took the Western Civilization AP test and the question I answered for my essay was roughly as follows:
Two paintings were shown, Picasso's Guernica and Goya's The 3rd of May 1808. We were then asked to write about the paintings, the artistic movements they represented and the socio-political setting in which the paintings were made. While there might have been easier questions, this one was a no brainer for me as I had studied the military history of Spain both around the time of Napoleon and during the Spanish Civil War and have always been a huge art fan. Needless to say I did well. I bought a small Guernica print and hung it in my room for many years.
Seeing the painting in person was an absolute treat and unfortunately for me my time was short as the entire museum was hosting the Picasso museum of Paris's collection during renovations. I briskly walked through the various rooms and took in the wonderful paintings many of which I had seen in Paris previously. Goya's painting is in the Prado and I had no time to visit but hope to make Madrid the next destination of a European pleasure trip sometime in the coming years.
I had never been to Madrid and have always had a strong desire to get there but it had never happened as other places had called us instead. Back in 1997 when my wife passed the bar we had made it to Barcelona and had plans to go to Madrid but it was hot in Spain and we instead opted to head to Italy and then Germany.
In Madrid there are a number of places that I have always wanted to visit and at the top of the list was the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia is home to the National Modern and Contemporary art collections and, of most interest to me, Picasso's Guernica. I have always been fascinated by this painting and it had some particular interest to me based on my Western Civilization class in high school.
In my senior year I took the Western Civilization AP test and the question I answered for my essay was roughly as follows:
Two paintings were shown, Picasso's Guernica and Goya's The 3rd of May 1808. We were then asked to write about the paintings, the artistic movements they represented and the socio-political setting in which the paintings were made. While there might have been easier questions, this one was a no brainer for me as I had studied the military history of Spain both around the time of Napoleon and during the Spanish Civil War and have always been a huge art fan. Needless to say I did well. I bought a small Guernica print and hung it in my room for many years.
Seeing the painting in person was an absolute treat and unfortunately for me my time was short as the entire museum was hosting the Picasso museum of Paris's collection during renovations. I briskly walked through the various rooms and took in the wonderful paintings many of which I had seen in Paris previously. Goya's painting is in the Prado and I had no time to visit but hope to make Madrid the next destination of a European pleasure trip sometime in the coming years.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Email Assasination
Where am I? Haven't been here in a while. I find my blog is an inverse reflection of what is going on in my life. Relatively calm and peaceful? Blogging. Crazy and overworked. No blogging. Today however I was moved to put the hands on the keyboard and share something.
My email was hijacked last night. What do I mean? Well, my personal email that I have been using for around 8 or 9 years had a giant inbox this morning. I keep up with all my stuff all the time although I don't usually respond over the weekend unless it is critical. As of last night, not much. As of this morning, 10 pages. What the hell?
I started combing through the list of emails and all of them were bounces across a variety of domains across the Internet. The senders were various people but all the from email addresses were mine. Ouch.
I have spent a chunk of time today deleting the various bounced emails and other than a nuisance I haven't been too concerned. More important though is that I am certain that I am a very likely to have my personal domain listed on the RBL. That is essentially death of your email account.
While I have often laughed at the stupid amount of spam that I get from all these poor people who I generally assume are hijacked spam zombie computers firing from all over the world, I never expected to see my name as the sender of one of these messages, much less a million or so which is what I am sure happened. In my case, neither my laptop or domain were compromised, but the net effect to me is the very real possibility that my personal email is at risk of becoming a dead useless email address.
It is interesting to read the stories about the death of email and the various attempts to "fix" email. It is less than interesting to be on the other side of the problem and realize that any of us can be easily hijacked by spammers and rendered the unwitting roadkill in their ongoing attempt to get people to buy Viagra.
My email was hijacked last night. What do I mean? Well, my personal email that I have been using for around 8 or 9 years had a giant inbox this morning. I keep up with all my stuff all the time although I don't usually respond over the weekend unless it is critical. As of last night, not much. As of this morning, 10 pages. What the hell?
I started combing through the list of emails and all of them were bounces across a variety of domains across the Internet. The senders were various people but all the from email addresses were mine. Ouch.
I have spent a chunk of time today deleting the various bounced emails and other than a nuisance I haven't been too concerned. More important though is that I am certain that I am a very likely to have my personal domain listed on the RBL. That is essentially death of your email account.
While I have often laughed at the stupid amount of spam that I get from all these poor people who I generally assume are hijacked spam zombie computers firing from all over the world, I never expected to see my name as the sender of one of these messages, much less a million or so which is what I am sure happened. In my case, neither my laptop or domain were compromised, but the net effect to me is the very real possibility that my personal email is at risk of becoming a dead useless email address.
It is interesting to read the stories about the death of email and the various attempts to "fix" email. It is less than interesting to be on the other side of the problem and realize that any of us can be easily hijacked by spammers and rendered the unwitting roadkill in their ongoing attempt to get people to buy Viagra.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Socialthing Invites
I am good friends with the founders of Socialthing as a reader of this blog knows from my posts about Techstars last summer. I have 10 invites available on a first come basis. They were featured on Techcrunch today and are getting a lot of good buzz. Don't post a comment here but email me at Derrick AT doien Dot com if you want one.
Hiatus
Busy Startup + A Very Busy Travel Schedule + A Large Young Family = No Blogging.
Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.
Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Barcelona Redux aka MWC 2008
I returned from Spain last Thursday. I was very impressed by the scale and quality of the conference. It was amazing to see how many people they could get to pay 600 Euro compared to a similar number of CTIA attendees at $50 a pop. There is probably a lesson in there for the CTIA.
I didn't have a whole lot of serious takeaways other than one over arching thing that I couldn't shake. The overarching thing was that the music is playing and everyone is looking for a chair and this is making for some strange bed fellows. Witness Microsoft buying Danger, Sony releasing a Windows Mobile device, etc. I think there is a lot more of that sort of thing to come.
For our part we announced a partnership with Bebo, one of the largest social sites in Europe, that you can see here as well as a with Moko which is a leading mobile only community in the UK which is here.
I didn't have a whole lot of serious takeaways other than one over arching thing that I couldn't shake. The overarching thing was that the music is playing and everyone is looking for a chair and this is making for some strange bed fellows. Witness Microsoft buying Danger, Sony releasing a Windows Mobile device, etc. I think there is a lot more of that sort of thing to come.
For our part we announced a partnership with Bebo, one of the largest social sites in Europe, that you can see here as well as a with Moko which is a leading mobile only community in the UK which is here.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Travels and Talks
I am in Los Angeles for most of this week for a variety of meetings and am hoping to catch up with some friends. After the LA stop, I will be heading to Spain this weekend for 3GSM. If you want to grab a nice cold cava in Spain let me know.
At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. Details here. Shortly after that we were invited to speak at the Microsoft sponsored Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. Link here. Details pending.
At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. Details here. Shortly after that we were invited to speak at the Microsoft sponsored Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. Link here. Details pending.
The Industry Standard Lives!
Holy Bubble Batman! The Industry Standard has relaunched. It is now more of a game theory / marketplace of people speculating on Internet happenings. Do check it out. My sense is that this one is gonna last longer than the previous one. Don't get me wrong, I am/was a huge fan of the original.
The Rabble Tribe
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Travels and Sex::Tech
This week is the first travel week of the year for me. While I have already been to San Francisco and Los Angeles, I don't think of those as travel days since they are short trips. This week includes a trip today to Seattle, down to San Francisco later this evening, an appearance at a conference called Sex:tech and then a journey out to NYC.
The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.
Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.
One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.
While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.
The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.
Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.
One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.
While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Football
I think I had a little more restraint this year in talking about football than I normally do. So if you don't like football stop reading now. This is more of a mental marker for me than anything else.
This year, like last year, I participated in 3 fantasy football leagues. I know, nerd.
I am in a redraft league, a keeper league and a dynasty league. Without getting to much into it, a redraft league is where everyone starts with nobody and we draft our teams from scratch. In our keeper league you can keep up to 4 players from a previous year according to a scheme where a players draft position is cut in half from the previous year. For example a 10th round pick this year will be a 5th round pick next year.
In our dynasty league, we keep up to 18 players from the previous year and then have our annual draft right after the real NFL draft. The Dynasty league is sick and I predict it will become the primary format for fantasy football nerds in the future.
In terms of performance, I won my redraft league, came in 4th in my keeper league and came in 7th in my dynasty league. In dynasty, which is in our second year, I took a long term view and took a bunch of rookies the first year which insured my last place finish the year before. Next year, I am a contender.
In terms of real football this was a fascinating year. To see a team go undefeated was really impressive. To have 3 of the 4 teams I care most about in the playoffs has been great. To have two of them playing against each other next week, is depressing but unavoidable.
Beyond all of this though, my personal highlight was last week when I was able to assist as a runner for a friend of mine who is a photographer on the sidelines of the Titans Chargers game. The picture here is from the game. I can only say that it was amazing to be that close to the action.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Pedigree Technologies - Update
Back in December of last year my brother in law's company Pedigree Technologies, was selected as a Top 100 company in the M2M space. Link here. It's been fun watching him build his company in an almost parallel time frame as we have been on at Intercasting. I wanted to send him some props for hard work recognized.
Happy New Year
I usually post a retrospective post from the previous year but opted not to out of mostly laziness. 2007 was a great year for me. Family life was hard, especially with the amount of traveling a do, but the kids got a lot easier and a lot more fun. Professionally I couldn't be more excited and I expect 2008 to be a very big year for both home and work. Best of luck in the coming year.
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