Leaving the Nest
source: majorbrighton It has been nearly four years since we formed the lab and almost as long since we started talking about it externally. In my 9 years at PeopleSoft/Oracle, I have had the pleasure of doing some great jobs and meeting some amazing people, but nothing compares to the small team I had the [...]
If Maslow Built Software
The moment your software team grows beyond a team of one, you need to communicate. Someone will have an idea on improving a new feature, creating a new product, etc. Immediately the question arises of how best to share the idea. For most people, the conversation moves immediately to tools. Should we use a wiki, [...]
Is Simple Viable In Enterprise Land?
The tradeoff between simplicity and features has been around for ages, but it was hotly debated on the web by two of the most forward thinking software luminaries: Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky. Their back and forth debate hit a crescendo last year around the time I attended the wonderful Business of Software conference put [...]
Learning from Buzz
In life if something doesn’t work out, at least you can learn from it. That is the power of doing. The beauty of being a human being is that we are exceptionally good at learning from others. As I watched Google launch Buzz, and the ensuing mess, it got me thinking. Why did a project [...]
Be Safe Out There Kids!
Last week my imac (home computer), that my wife uses to run our little lunchbox company begin having some serious issues. Slow access times, constant rebooting and as of yesterday a complete inability to boot. Just a lovely grey screen of solitude much like the image above, until it refused to even show that little [...]
Why Gaming is the Future of Everything
Also titled: “What I learned from FourSquare.” A few years back when we started exploring new technology, one of the ideas that seemed to stick with me was around gaming. The processes that made something enjoyable seemed to be an essential, yet elusive ingredient in business software. In truth, I felt there was something magical [...]
Ignore Your Competition, Focus on the Stable
Photo Credit: FoxTongue I watched a recent interview with Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose the other day. In it, he was questioned as to how he, against the odds, “beat” the various etailers of the day pushing books online. His answer was fantastically elegant and straight forward. He is fanatical about aligning his organization to [...]
TED on Play
I am spending some cycles these days thinking on the integration of play and work. I happen to believe that there is some real magic to be had here for organizations and for firms looking to supply the next generation of software. Sure making work a game seems a bit out there (I get that), [...]
Learning from Entertainment
Photo Credit: Timothy Hamilton I recently watched this excellent video of Nick Fortugno at the Meaningful Play conference in 2008. If you are into designing games with a message behind them it is worth a watch. Among other things, he highlights the basic split in entertainment between “form” and “content”. Form being the mechanics used [...]
Play with Purpose
Play is our natural state. It is healthy and fun. In that state, we are engrossed and engaged. Time, as they say, “flies”. As we grow up and put aside childish things, we lose this connection to our natural state and a strong division between play and work emerges. In fact it is worse than [...]
Defrag08 Presentation
Defrag 08: Is that Good? View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_networking oracle) I presented the above at Defrag 08′ in Denver yesterday. The idea was to take some known concepts around understanding networks and apply them to how we manage a community. This is new ground for us at the lab, but [...]
Adventures in Bad Design
I am a bit of a closet designer. No I don’t have the funky glasses, but I appreciate great design and get a good laugh at poor design. Sometimes I run across designs that I just don’t understand. Here are two of my recent gems: The first is this novel coffee mug from Delmonico’s Steakhouse [...]
Brick Walls Are There For A Reason
There is a common thread in driving change. No matter what you are working towards, or where you are doing it – change is hard. You’ll run into challenges on time, budget, resources, personalities, vision, objectives, and more. Sometimes you’ll want to throw in the towel. We have all had those days. I recently watched [...]
Are you the only one who “gets it” at your company?
Do you have a vision for how technology can transform what your company or department does, but no one will listen? Do you spend your day “evangelizing” the merits of social networking behind the firewall but finding it fall on deaf ears? Do you find yourself explaining how a wiki works to everyone who emails you [...]
Collaboration with real ROI (finally)
The family and I decided last Friday that we all deserved cheeseburgers for dinner (ok, my 4 year old daughter decided, but let’s pretend I had some say in the matter. We decide on Chili’s and commence to enjoy a fantastic heaping helping of saturated fat and salt. On the bright side, the kids had [...]
Tracking The Competition, Socially
Yesterday in Denver, Jake and I had lunch with a few nice folks from NewsGator, one of which was Jeff Nolan. As you may know, Jeff writes Venture Cronicles. In friendfeed, I noticed that Jeff had posted to his blog, so I went to have a read and ended up reading several posts. This one [...]
Musings on UTR 2008
Every year I attend the Under The Radar conference held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley location. The organization is flawless, the companies interesting, and the facilities are wonderful. If you don’t know, UTR is a showcase for start-ups that are not (yet) in the limelight. In fact, this is where many launch to the world. [...]
Is Your Job Next?
I am not sure why the power (or danger) of the global economy never really hit me before, but I was checking out elance.com as it was mentioned in a recent book I read. If you don’t know, elance is a services marketplace. Anyway, I searched on there for design providers. Guess what, 11,144 companies [...]
What makes a blogger?
Blogging is tough. Some do it well (like Jake) and others don’t spend the time to make it happen (like me). I have found very few that keep it up. It is just another thing that takes up time. Here is what I think makes it work for a person: 1. They have a passion [...]
I’m it.
Ok, per Rich’s post. Here goes: 1. I like lots of things, but nothing as much as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I run Norcal BJJ Academy and it consumes me. I had my first introduction by being soundly beaten by someone I outweighted by 50lbs over 9years ago. After that rather humiliating experience, I knew I had [...]
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