cory ondrejka's blog'

now back to work

2012-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

No posts in 18 months. Apparently I’ve been busy. Should get back to work now.

Grading 2010 Predictions

2010-12-26T00:00:00-08:00

It’s grading time, again! Time to look back on my 2010 predictions from a year ago.

1) A major telecommunications company will recognize the competitive threat posed by Google Voice and begin offering “voice is free” as a method to gain customers and transition into more profitable data services.

Singtel made a big move in this direction, including free incoming calls to prepaid cell phones. They’re the only one, as far as I can tell, so going to score this as 1/2 correct.

1/2 out of 1

2) At least one of the ineffective, post-9/11 airport security theater provisions is rolled back.

Ug. Couldn’t have been more wrong about this. Despite backlash from Europe and the backscatter debacle, groping was full speed ahead at US airports. Happy to not be traveling these days.

1/2 out of 2

3) The current crop of social games will go the way of the original wave of Zombies and Vampires as players tire of the repetitive gameplay and friends start a backlash — again, exactly as we saw with Zombies and Vampires. The winning social game companies will be those which pivot dramatically.

Since I’m now at Facebook, not going to grade this one.

4) Apple releases a tablet and moves computing onto a 4th screen, adding a new form factor to their existing complement of full screen (desktop/laptop), handheld (iPhone), and living room (Mac Mini/MacTV). It will be incredibly fun to use for the range of activities currently least served by current screens — movies, reading, browsing/social media on the run, and video/text chat. It will bring at least one new UX tech to the party to help make it the “ZOMG, WANT!!” product of 2010 — for example, front facing 3D camera for gestural control without touching the screen.

Yup, Apple released a tablet that was incredibly fun to use, but they did it simply by executing really well, not through any magic. Miss.
Predictions looking pretty brutal this year.
1/2 out of 3

5) The 2010 midterm elections will see a degree of negative campaigning and hate mongering the likes of which the United States has never seen. It will be so bad that political and media leaders from both parties will finally remember that the point of politics is not to win but to effectively govern.

Again, think I got this one half right, but the wrong half. On the plus side, Congress seemed to pull up from the abyss a bit at the end of the year, with sanity restored around New START and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Still calling it a miss.

1/2 out of 4

6) Amazon responds to the gaggle of competing copycat ebook readers by turning Kindle into a full fledged book platform: author choice on DRM, p2p sharing, and loaning; community elements for book recommendations, annotations, and ranking; and, user-generated book metadata for series and sequels, to allow author and series subscription for automatic delivery of new books.

Amazon did a lot to make Kindle more social in 2010. Don’t think they’re done yet, but Kindle’s cross platform availability, social functions, gifting, and loans are huge additions to the service. FInally got anther one right!

1 and 1/2 out of 5

7) Backlash against the world’s biggest banks and their windfall profits will contribute to the emergence of new regional, community, and online banking options.

Tons of startup innovation happening in the banking space, many positioning themselves directly against big, old banks. Unfortunately, none have actually emerged as viable options yet, so I’m correct but early. Gonna score this 1/2 right.

2 out of 6

8) The threat of Three Strike’s coming to the United States via ACTA will generate a grassroots debate about the merits of Obama administration’s IP maximalist strategy.

The debate is happening. Sadly, I don’t see it making a ton of progress, but at least the debate is underway.

3 out of 7

9) Heath care reform makes it through the committee reconciliation process and passes despite complaints from all sides.

Nailed this one. Particularly the complaints from all sides.

4 out of 8.

10) I will be back at work full-time on something seriously cool.

Apparently when I said full-time, I meant it!

5 out of 9

So, .556 for ’10. Saved by the bottom half of the order. Stand by for fearless predictions for 2011!

Maple-glazed, Apple Bacon Doughnuts

2010-11-27T00:00:00-08:00

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. Friends, cooking, board games, it’s all good. This year the party spilled over into a separate event on Friday, which was great fun. I decided to try and reproduce maple-glazed, apple bacon doughnuts from Dynamo Doughnuts, which I’ve never had but had seen on an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate. Did we succeed?

Oh yes.

Several folks asked for the recipe, so here it is.

Maple-Glazed, Apple Bacon Doughnuts

(Adapted from Alton Brown’s Yeast Doughnuts)

For the doughnuts

1 1/4 cup milk
2 tablespoons apple juice
2.5 oz shortening
2 packages instant yeast
1/3 cup warm water
2 eggs
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
23 oz all purpose flour, plus extra for dusting
2 medium apples (gala or fuji)
1 lb bacon
1/2 – 1 gallons peanut oil

For the glaze

3 cups powdered sugar
4 tablespoons of maple syrup
2 tablespoons of vanilla extract

(Will make approximately 50 doughnuts)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place bacon a rack inside a foil-lined half sheet pan. Cook bacon for 15-20 minutes, until crisp. Reserve rendered bacon fat. When bacon has cooled a bit, dice bacon and split in half.

Warm milk in sauce pan until hot enough to melt shortening. Pour milk over shortening and stir until combined.

Place yeast in warm water for 5 minutes.

Peel and finely dice apples. Place 1 tablespoon of reserved bacon fat into a frying pan and saute apples over medium heat. Keep diced apples moving constantly until they give up some liquid and pick up a hint of color, about 5 minutes. Remove apples and any remaining bacon fat from pan and add to milk/shortening mixture along with 1 tablespoon of reserved bacon fat.

Lightly beat eggs.

Combine water/yeast, apple juice, eggs, nutmeg, milk/shortening/apple mixture, nutmeg, sugar, salt, half the bacon, and half the flower in the bowl of a stand mixer with paddle attachment. Mix on slow speed until flour is incorporated, then increase speed to medium. When well mixed, stop mixer and add remaining flour. Again, slowly increase speed until well mixed. It will be very sticky.

Switch to dough hook and mix on medium until dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and forms a shiny ball. Move the sticky, elastic dough to a bowl and allow it to rise for one hour, until it has doubled in size.

Dump dough out onto well floured surface. Flour your hand and gently flatten dough until 3/4" thick. Flour a 2" and 1" biscuit cutter. Carefully cut out 2" disks and move to wax paper, the use the smaller cutter to cut out the holes. When done, cover with more wax paper and allow to rise for another 30 minutes.

In a heavy stock pot, add enough peanut oil to fill to 2-3" deep and heat to 365 degrees.

Prepare the glaze by whisking together the powdered sugar, maple syrup, vanilla, and 6 tablespoons of reserved bacon fat.

Working in batches of 4-6 doughnuts, fry doughnuts until golden brown and delicious on both sides, about 1 minute per side, using chop sticks to gently flip the doughnuts. When done, transfer to cooling rack and let cool for about a minute before dipping in glaze. Return to cooling rack and sprinkle with bacon from the other half you reserved.

(This works best with two people, one frying, one glazing.)

The most difficult bit will be giving the glaze about 5 minutes to set up. Doughnuts will still be warm and delicious!

Changes

2010-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Sometimes changes come quickly. My blog has been quiet because I’ve been hard at work on the startup I co-founded with my brilliant friend Bruce Rogers . I would have expected this post to be talking about what we built, but for obvious reasons we’re posting something a bit different:

After years of working parallel careers and constantly trying to hire each other, we decided the only way to work together would be to co-found something.
And, so, Walletin was born.
After six months of hard work, we knew we had something awesome. Our friends are the most intelligent and cynical developers in the Valley and even they thought it was cool.
(Some of them may also be great liars.)
We were ready for beta. Hell, we were ready for a “Rate my Startup” post on Hacker News.
During development, we got calls from friends at big Silicon Valley companies. We took those meetings because they came with free lunch, great conversations, and Walletin Global HQ doesn’t have air conditioning. We came away smarter for the discussions, but decided it was more fun to keep doing our own thing.
When we met with Facebook, we expected the same result.
Instead we met our people. Engineers focused on getting shit done. Moreover they recognized the disruption we were betting on and saw how far we could run with it at Facebook.
And they moved like they were still a startup.
For our part, the more we learned about Facebook, the more we saw our ideas fitting in. The more we saw an opportunity exciting enough to abandon Walletin Corporate HQ and go into work every day.
Ultimately, it was an easy decision and we will both be joining Facebook.
It is with a bit of sadness that we bid a fond farewell to Walletin, but are thrilled by what we’re going to do next.
It’s going to be fun.
- Bruce and Cory

Wharton UIConf Keynote Slides

2010-07-22T00:00:00-07:00

This was a fun talk to put together. Thank you to Wharton for the chance to speak and great engagement from the audience!

Cory Ondrejka Wharton UIConf Keynote

What's Cory Doing Now?

2010-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

For some reason, there have been some questions about what I’m up to these days. Since leaving EMI, I’ve been plugging back into technology and tech companies I thought were interesting and that I could help. Time for an update on them:

Instinctiv

Instinctiv is a multiplatform music player that uses some very clever machine learning to let you discover the music you already own. The OS X player is released, mobile and Windows are close. If you spend a lot of time listening to music off of your Mac, grab Instinctiv! You can also sign up on the site to be part of the private beta on your mobile phone.

Togetherville

Togetherville is an online community for kids and their grownups. Togetherville entered public beta in May and has had some great coverage. The team have done an amazing job and if you have kids, you should check it out!

Profounder

Profounder is bringing crowdfunding to business. They’ve just started their alpha entrepreneur program which you can learn more about.

Celmatix

Celmatix is a New York-based biotechnology and personalized medicine startup, focused on creating a non-invasive diagnostic for assessing oocyte quality and female fertility. Amazing mix of scientific research and computational challenges, but very early stage. Stay tuned.

In addition, without going into details, I can say David, James, and Ethan at Bessemer are great to work with.

Plus, coding everyday is a blast. So having fun and keeping plenty busy.

Publishers Who Don't Know History...

2010-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve posted a few times about ebooks, but I’ve been reading a lot more about ebooks recently. Recently Wired discussed the desire to have a universal ebook format and the PBS Newshour hosted a discussion with best-selling author Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, Jonathan Galassi, president of the publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Cathy Langer, lead buyer for Tattered Cover Book Stores.

Apparently nobody in the book business is aware of what happened to the music business over the last decade and they are determined to make all the same mistakes.

Mistake #1: Piracy is the enemy

Tim O’Reilly wrote about this years ago. There is no compelling evidence that the impact of piracy on media is nearly as negative as the double whammies of technological change and institutional incompetence.

Mistake #2: People will always want hardcover books

True, but true in the same sense that people — and by people, I mean “hardcore fans” — will always want vinyl. Despite vinyl records being crushed by CDs, vinyl has made a bit of a comeback of late. Collectors and audiophiles have created a thriving niche market.

But it’s still niche. In the case of vinyl, about 1% of overall music sales.

Mistake #3: People will always need bookstores

Three words: Independent. Record. Stores.

We all miss the personalized recommendation of the small record store employee, but apparently the market did not. At FooCamp this weekend, Sara Winge had a great comment that capture the problem of the market not sufficiently rewarding the curator:

So, the curactor needs to work at a gas station?

It’s very different if the curation you love can also pay your bills.

So, how to avoid following the music path?

Focus on Discovery

Friends share, borrow, and recommend books. Currently, publishers are generally being stupid about this. There are two paths to reduced stupid.

The first is publishers who understand how technology is changing reading habits and take advantage of it. Baen and O’Reilly are leading this charge by avoiding DRM and giving away books, though neither is really focused on helping me lend and share books.

The second is for Amazon or Apple — the only two ebook retailers with the scale to really push publishers — to optimize their reading software to enable sharing, loaning and discovery. The software work to do this would be trivial — the hard part is getting the licenses correct. However, with both Amazon and Apple already enabling books to be simultaneously read on multiple devices, it would appear they have made some progress on the legal side.

Make eBooks as Valuable as Books

Speaking of legal and usefulness, eBooks with DRM suck. You can’t lend them, you may have to repurchase them, and you can’t use them the way you want. If publishers want to be able to sell eBooks at closer to hardcover price points, they can’t break the book with DRM. This is so obvious — and amply demonstrated by Apple and Amazon’s experiences with music DRM — it is astounding to see book publishers not get it.

Stop Leaving Money on the Table

Ask anyone with an e-reader and they will tell you that they want to subscribe to authors and series. Please, take my money and let me automate these purchases! There is no downside to this.

If you want to make even more, do what Baen does and let me buy copies early. Baen lets us off easy, actually charging less than hardcover for their ARCs.

Create Markets for Curators

Amazon already does this a bit with Amazon Associates, but it doesn’t really work for a physical curator.

I regularly make Kindle purchases while in bookstores. I’ll see something on the shelf, decide that I want it and immediately have it on my iPhone and iPad. That doesn’t help the bookstore. Barnes and Noble decided to address this with the Nook, which I doubt will help given the development and marketing costs involved.

Worse, it really doesn’t help the small bookstore.

What would help is if Amazon or Apple made their apps location aware and created a revenue sharing program for small bookstores. Increased ebook awareness in exchange for rewarding the curators. This would work even better if more ebook readers offered subscription and recurring revenue purchase options, so the local book store could sell higher value packages than a single book, making more significant rev shares possible.

Play to the 1% Fans

Just like vinyl is making a comeback, it is certain that fans of certain authors will want special editions. This doesn’t just mean a normal hardcover. Take a lesson from Josh Freese. Don’t just publish a hardcover, give me a goldleaf, dragon leather wrapped tome!

Of course, this isn’t easy either. If each special edition costs you a million dollars to create, book publishers are still hosed. The challenge is to make it easy for a particular publisher and author to choose the right options for them. J.K. Rowling probably doesn’t want to have dinner with a fan, but should definitely offer super-premium editions of Harry Potter.

As Charlie Stross points out — just like making music — there are a host of costs in the lifecycle of a creating a book. Unlike music or newspapers, book publishing has not gone through a recent period of internal misalignment — with music, institutions optimized for physical distribution during vinyl replacement, while newspapers built staked the business on classified ads. As a result, ebooks aren’t likely to be as immediately destructive.

However not “immediately destructive” doesn’t mean “be dumb.” Losing local bookstores will badly damage discovery. Reduced price points for eBooks can hurt margins. Making smart decisions about book publishing has the chance to make books more useful than every before. Unlike the music industry in 2002, book publishers should be focusing on their customers and how to make books better now.

Open Government and Innovation Keynote

2010-05-04T00:00:00-07:00

Just finished delivering this. Great, engaged audience despite being early in the morning, tons of good questions afterwards, too.

Cory Ondrejka OGI Keynote

Facebook Inoculation

2010-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

Earlier this week, a friend hit me with a request for an Unvarnished Review on Facebook. Normally, I respond to nothing on Facebook — the Werewolf bites were fun while they lasted — but since I trust Hunter I thought “what the hell?” and clicked through. It’s an interesting concept — get anonymous feedback from people you (in theory) trust and an area Hunter just posted about — so I gave a few reviews. Was going to leave it there but instead decided to do an experiment.

I was curious how inoculated Facebook users were to spammy-looking invites. Facebook has made a host of changes to their home pages and alerting rules, plus the various social games dominate whatever attention space is left. My hypothesis: even with a careful selection of likely responders, very few would respond.

I sent out 35 Unvarnished invites to likely responders. The results?

12 (35%) people emailed to ask variants of “was your account hacked?”, “are you advising this company?”, “was this an experiment?” (Answers: No, No, Yes. I have no connection with Unvarnished and have since removed the app from my Facebook account.)

6 (17%) people left reviews

A bit higher than I expected, but the law of small numbers applies. Thus endeth the experiment. Apologies for the spam added to your Facebook wall, but thanks for the tidbit of data.

iPad First Impressions

2010-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

Kindle, as a hardware platform, is dead dead deadski.

I was all ready with the arguments for why Kindle was going to be fine. Better screen, longer battery life, lighter weight. I even have a mini-spiel about the battery life in particular, where the 2 week battery life means you stop thinking about Kindle as technology. And, to be clear, I think the Kindle is still a superior device for reading.

Just not superior-enough.

Of course, this should be great for Amazon, as they now have an even-more-killer platform for Kindle digital books. The Kindle has done its job. It has convinced people that digital reading works and created a digital book market Amazon dominates. The question for Kindle hardware becomes one of cost. At $99, or free, I’d hold onto the Kindle for reading at home, where the superior reading experience trumps the disadvantages of E-Ink. The mistake for Amazon would be to get into a consumer electronics arm’s race with Apple, since Apple has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to sell high-margin hardware in markets where everyone else is racing to the bottom. Amazon has brilliantly created a new market for books, now they should gracefully step aide, ensure their books can be sold to as many different readers as possible, and work on building the best possible digital reading experience on all devices.

Now, back to iPad.

The good: the iPhone UI works very well with a larger screen. The screen itself is bright and touches accurate. Combined with a bit more processing speed, the interface is very responsive and switching between apps is fast enough to obviate the need for multitasking in most situations. The Keynote app is strikingly cool, although time will tell if I can produce an entire talk using just the iPad. The keyboard works shockingly well for me, although finding positions where you are sitting comfortably and can type tends to be a legs-on-something affair — Fatboy beanbags should start selling the “iPad productivity” edition. iPad has also finally solved my “read technical PDFs on the go”-problem, something Kindle never managed to do. I’m using Dropbox to backup my PDFs online (can’t say enough good things about Dropbox, by the way, but that’s another post). Then I installed the Good Reader app, which lets you grab PDF files from Dropbox.

Mobile PDF bliss.

Other good parts: the 10-hour battery life claim seems conservative. For browsing, email, and using apps, the iPad is an absolutely killer device. If I wasn’t writing code on a daily basis, I would no longer carry a laptop around. App reviews coming in a later post.

The bad: 1.5 pounds doesn’t seem like much, but compared to the Kindle, iPad is a bit heavy. The Apple case is functional — the weird tackiness of the material holds the iPad in place when you’re typing on the iPad with your legs up — but uncomfortable in your hands. I would still recommend it, but I would expect 3rd party cases to trounce it eventually. The handling of iPhone apps is just horrible. I don’t really mind having the app run in a window, but the window doesn’t recognize the orientation of the iPad, so if the iPad is in landscape mode the iPhone app is running on its side. Worse, when you aren’t doubling the iPhone app, centered is often the least convenient place for the window to be — why can’t I drag the default location around?

The various SSH and VNC clients are this close to being useful, but aren’t yet really designed to take advantage of the big screen on the iPad. App competition should fix this, but it still means waiting.

The ugly: the iPad’s WiFi antenna is not very good. It regularly drops to 1 or 2 bars in my house despite iPhone and laptops being fine. Lots of folks commenting on this online. Not a deal-breaker for me, but still annoying. The other ugly bit is that my MacBook Air’s USB port doesn’t effectively charge the iPad, so either I need to use the wallwart or turn off the iPad and charge overnight off of the Air.

All-in-all, for version 1 of a new product, iPad seems very strong. Apps will solve many of its limitations, while version 2 will almost certainly bring us a camera and other hardware improvements. If you are thinking about buying one, think about what you use your current computer for. If it is primarily email and browsing, iPad might be a better device for your needs. If you need to write extensively or create code, maybe not. So far, I’m happy with mine!

4 Simple Features to Get My E-Reading Dollars

2010-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

E-books and e-readers have come up a couple of times recently. Between the 150+ Baen e-books and 95+ Amazon e-books I’ve purchased for Kindle, I strongly suspect I’m in the top 1% or so of book purchasers, so I’m going to use myself as the target market for what I’d want out of an e-reader. So, what would get my money?

1) Early access. I already pay Baen an extra $15 per book when I can get it early. This is free money for any publisher who wants it, and Baen has gotten a lot of mine.
2) Automatic purchases by series and by author. I follow dozens of series and until they start sucking, I will always buy the next book. Why not automate that for me? I’d even pay a small amount for the service, but at the very least you stop losing money when I fail to notice a new release. Ditto for authors I follow.
3) DRM-free. Baen’s received far more of my dollars than Amazon, despite the Amazon purchase process being quite a bit easier. Why? DRM-free means I can move the book where I want it, read it how I want. I’m happy to vote with my wallet on this one. Didn’t the book industry learn anything from iTunes and DRM-free music?
4) Social features for my books. Give me an e-reader that makes it easy to record comments and thoughts, to share those thoughts with friends, recommend books, buy books for friends, etc.

None of these are difficult features, either technically or from a licensing standpoint. Who’ll do it first?

Kindle and the Technomob

2010-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

I am in a particularly pro-Amazon mood today, since they are sending me a replacement for my dead Kindle. However, wanted to point out this result from Amazon dumb decision to delay releases of Kindle book editions:

Kindle owners flooding reviews with 1 star ratings

This shouldn’t come as too much a surprise. Amazon is snubbing the community of Kindle owners and missing a huge opportunity to increase digital revenues (as I wrote a couple of months ago). Let me buy a Kindle version early at a premium and I will.

Right now I have half-a-dozen Kindle pre-orders queued up. Why not let me get them now for an additional $10? That’s free money Amazon, publishers, and authors are just leaving on the table. Dumb.

The Most Important Project You've Never Heard Of

2010-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

Tuesday night, Mitch Kapor held an event to introduce his network to a project he’s been involved with for about a year, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. I left convinced that OSDV is critical to America and our democracy. I will be giving money and time.

Why?

Most of my readers will have followed the many times security researchers have exposed flaws in voting machines and election processes.
Did you know those same, flawed machines are used in 88% of elections in the United States?
Did you know that with the acquisition of Diebold by ES&S, that those 88% are all owned and operated by one company?

Why, as technologists, do we get up in arms about a browser monopoly, but we accept a monopoly in how we vote?!

As OSDV says, how we vote is as important as who we vote for.

We have all watched the increasingly significant flaws in our election system in national elections since 2000:

2000 Florida recount — Supreme Court decided election
2004 Ohio recount — Widespread voting machine malfunctions
2006 Nationwide voting machine malfunctions
2008 Minnesota — Ballot confusion leads to 8-month legal battle

OSDV arose from a simple premise: how could you ensure that every vote counts in American elections?

From 2006-2008, foundation volunteers researched US voting systems and connected with stakeholders throughout the voting process, collaborating with state elections directors to ensure the architecture meets state requirements.

In 2009, OSDV began acting on their research:

Deployed an online voter registration service with Rock the Vote
Launched Trust the Vote to coordinate open source development around voter registration, ballot design, ballot tabulation and auditing
Released the first open source election system source code

But this is just the beginning. OSDV is now ramping up to deploy open source voting systems in time for the 2012 election cycle. Doing this will be an enormous undertaking, but one that is necessary if we are to ensure our votes count.

Please, click here to find out how you can help.

Video from Government 2.0 LA Conference

2010-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

Video from the talk I previously posted the slides to.

Cory Ondrejka Delivers Keynote Address to Gov20LA 2010 from Gov20LA on Vimeo.

Big Brother versus Little Brother

2010-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

The following essay was written for The Futurist Magazine’s Visionaries series:

We live in the future.
I am writing on a three-pound sliver of a laptop that can execute billions of operations every second, connected to the Internet over a mobile broadband connection. I am juggling competing deadlines for this article and writing Web code for a project running on a cloud infrastructure I will never see. I send e-mail, listen to music, publish updates to Twitter and Facebook, and test machine-learning algorithms, all while enjoying a double espresso.
When I run into a bug or can’t remember the syntax for a command, I Google the question, knowing the Web’s answers to be faster and more accurate than the documentation stored on my hard drive and Kindle. My phone is a pocket computer with nearly the power of the first desktop machines used in Second Life’s development. All of us can find, manage, remix, and share information with an ease we are already taking for granted.
We live in the future. Big Content does not. Big Content — shorthand for the publishing, music, movie, television, and news industries and their powerful lobbying organizations — is staggering into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Despite the largest, wealthiest, and most connected global audience in human history, Big Content faces precipitous declines in sales and advertising revenue.
Because Big Content does not embrace the world we live in, two wildly different outcomes exist for media in 2020: Big Brother or Little Brother. Which future we get is a function of who participates in and drives the ongoing debates around media, innovation, copyright, piracy, and Internet access.
Content owners have railed against technological change since before Big Content even existed, from John Philip Sousa’s denouncing of the player piano to former Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti’s famous comparison of the VCR to the Boston Strangler. But for the most part, national governments have acted to maximize growth and prosperity through a balanced approach to intellectual property law. History validated that approach, with content creators and owners repeatedly adapting to and mastering new technologies and business opportunities.
The massive advantages that Big Content has when leveraging new technology — existing audience, established talent, and institutional expertise — are not enough for the incumbents. Instead, Big Content wants regulation to control technology, to force the law to define what artists and fans want in the future. As laughably bad as our ability to regulate the future is, it is fortunate that previous attempts, focused on limiting what artists and fans could do with their content through digital rights management (DRM), met with limited success at best.
Recently, Big Content has changed tactics, determined to create a Big Brother future for us all. At the heart of this new approach is the idea of “graduated response,” embodied in France’s recently ratified “three strikes” law. “Three strikes” is fairly simple: Be accused of violating copyright law three times, and you lose access to the Internet for three months to one year. A mysterious official body, the High Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet, or HADOPI, would enforce the measure in accordance with a broad mandate to “prevent the hemorrhaging of cultural works on the Internet.”
This bears repeating: If HADOPI accuses you of violating copyright law three times, you could lose your access to the Internet.
“Three strikes” is gaining support worldwide. Today, most of the developed world is engaged in negotiations around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The parties to the agreement, including the United States, the European Union, and South Korea, have kept negotiations secret, but leaks indicate “three strikes” is under consideration.
This is akin to having your phone service terminated for making a mix tape. Or your electricity turned off for wearing a homemade superhero Halloween costume.
This is the Big Brother future. Abuses of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act have already shown that content owners will allege copyright abuse to hamper business competitors, suppress free speech, and block innovation. How much more powerful a hammer is “three strikes,” since it can effectively cut off the accused from their community, co-workers, and family by blocking Internet access? For many people, such a move would destroy their livelihood.
Thus, a bleak media future for 2020 is on the horizon, one where any content owner is able to invoke Big Brother to cut off your access to the Internet. Use the Internet as your phone service, for playing games, watching television, paying your bills, attending school, or working from home? Too bad! Three alleged copyright violations and you are back in 1990. Three mistakes by notoriously error-prone filtering software, and you are a second-class citizen, blocked from interacting with the rest of civil society.
What will this lead to? In 2020, the Internet and World Wide Web will be the most important technology any of us have access to. Fearing the loss of that connection, you will take the only option available and avoid media on the Internet entirely. No posting pictures, no streaming content, no cloud storage of your data, no user-generated content, no discussion groups about media. Any of these uses of media could lead to inadvertent copyright infringement or false positives, resulting in the loss of your connection to the Internet and the Web. So, ironically, by driving a Big Brother agenda, Big Content is sowing the seeds for its own destruction by eliminating the largest and most easily addressable audience ever.
Alternatives to Big Brother and Big Content
Fortunately, Big Brother is not the only option. We — innovators, politicians, and citizens — can demand a better option: a Little Brother future.
Among the changes brought on by the Internet age, one of the greatest is the tremendous increase in capability available to individuals and small teams. First, the dramatic decrease in computation, storage, and transmission costs makes it far less risky to experiment with new technology. Next, the explosion of wired and wireless connections to the Web ensures an addressable audience. Finally, intense competition between tools and technologies makes Web development faster and more approachable. It has never been cheaper or easier to create content or to find and deliver that content to the right audience.
In broader terms, the costs of communication and learning have never been lower, and will only drop further if we refuse to allow Big Content to drive the debate. Cheaper learning should matter to all of us, because innovation is constrained by the cost of learning. Innovation — turning knowledge into products — drives per capita economic growth through productivity gains, so any nation that fundamentally reduces the costs of learning has a global competitive advantage. History is replete with examples, most recently the United States’ productivity gains in the 1990s due to the expansion of the Internet and information technology.
In 2010, as the world pulls out of a dramatic economic downturn, we are on the cusp of a new period of innovation and growth, driven by wireless broadband, mobile devices, and ubiquitous connectivity. Rather than succumbing to Big Brother policy demands, citizens should rally for a Little Brother future, where everyone has the maximum chance to create the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter. A Little Brother future relies on net neutrality (unrestricted movement of data) and a reasonable balance between the rights of content owners and music, movie, and content fans.
This is the future where artists and audiences have the best chance to find each other and create the next great ideas for Big Content. New media companies and business strategies can only emerge if the regulatory framework enables experimentation. Recent examples abound. EMI Music led first with non-digitally rights-managed music and a focus on the music experience; the company announced a significant upturn in revenues. YouTube was able to launch and grow while the courts worked on the legal questions related to hosting user-uploaded videos. Trent Reznor, founder of the rock band Nine Inch Nails, works with fans to create new media projects. Second Life’s users created successful virtual venues for live music. A Little Brother future ensures that innovators continue to have the space to try.
As the last decade has taught us, they will try and try! And TRY! This doesn’t guarantee Big Content’s ongoing success, but when compared with a Big Brother future where their demise is guaranteed, the choice is obvious. Big Content should be joining the rest of us as we lead the charge for a Little Brother future.

Nota Bene The choice of “Little Brother” was inspired by Cory Doctorow’s novel of the same name. A brilliant book exploring life in today’s Big Brother world.

Two (Well Three) Books Worth Reading

2010-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

Just finished two books via Kindle that are well worth a look:

Patrick Rothfuss The Name of the Wind

Recommended by the incomparable Syd Schwartz, “The Name of the Wind” took a couple of tries to get in to. Not sure why, but the prelude smacked of fantasy hackness, so despite Syd’s recommendation, I had shelves it.

Then I tumbled into Pat’s blog. Several hours of laughing later — do yourself a favor and read coolness — I realized that nobody who was a) this funny and b) from Wisconsin was going to write crap, so TNOTW got another shot.

And good thing it did, because to me it ranks up there with The Deed of Paksenarrion as one of the truly great modern fantasy epics. Wonderful characterization, believable tragedy, and evocative world building.

The only problem is the whole “Day 1” issue. I want the next part of the story now!

So, Pat, please limit the blogging — as brilliant as it is — and get back to Kvothe!

Daniel Suarez Freedom™

Freedom is the sequel to Daniel’s strong debut, Daemon. Daemon introduced us to the delightful power fantasy of a game developer using a virtual world and AI to take over the world. “Daemon” was a great read, it somewhat preposterous — it counted on bug-free code from a game developer, after all.

Freedom improved on Daemon quite a bit. Still fast moving and action packed, but more character development and even a pinch of redemption. Daniel plays with concepts familiar to most of you — using virtual worlds to coordinate activity, overlaying digital currencies on the real world, fabrication — and overlays them with a large dose of paranoia, corporate greed, and cynicism.

My only concern is that “Daemon” and “Freedom” are poised to become the Atlas Shrugged of the Web 2.0 digerati, credulous wanna be digerati, and geeks who think programming skills mean they are world experts on military history, sociobiology, evolutionary economics, philosophy, and thermodynamics. In other words, people who forget that it is fiction. People who think fMRI’s are truth machines., corporations need evil overlords to do wrongs, and alternative energy options are easy and just being ignored.

I hope that doesn’t happen, because “Daemon” and “Freedom” are too good to become religious texts.

Limit Hold 'Em in Vegas

2010-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

A couple of weeks back I spent the weekend in Las Vegas. Despite almost 20 years of work in technology, this was my first trip to Vegas. A primary goal was to figure out if I could kill time in a casino without hemorrhaging too much money. Lots of friends — and fellow geeks — argued that Blackjack is the best way to conserve cash at a casino, turns out for that — for me — limit Texas Hold-em seems to fill that niche.

I don’t play much poker. I don’t play online and only occasionally join friends for games. I like playing poker, but for whatever reason the chance to play just doesn’t come up that often. Also, after an introduction to Ed Felten “teach your daughter to kick your butt at poker”-method in Singapore, I’ve been teaching my daughter how to play. But, to be clear, I am not a serious player by any stretch of the imagination.

So, I didn’t know what to expect. At the Mandalay Bay Casino, it turns out the cheap game is “3-6 Limit.” That is to say, Texas Hold ’em, but with $3 big blinds, $3 calls and raises until the turn when the minimum bet goes up to $6. Since it’s a limit game, there’s no all-in, pots stay relatively small, and fewer sharks are swimming around. Plus, the cheap tables are a goldmine of people watching.

After 3 days and probably 12-hours at the tables, I ended up about $450. Much of this came from hitting a straight-flush, which payed out a high hand bonus of $250, so really I was up more like $200. Still, given that I had a self-imposed limit of “lose no more than $200 over the course of the weekend”, this was a pretty good outcome.

Three quick takeaways:

I’m glad I was playing low stakes, as at one point I was about $150 down. If I was playing higher stakes, I would have hit my limit and had to stop.
I played too aggressively. Way too often I’d stay in with off suit queen seven, or similar. This is a good way to chase pots and lose money. Laying down crap is important.
I rarely used early, aggressive betting to scare people out of hands

On the flight home, I got curious about how the numbers worked out. You can go online and look up the odds of various hands winning in Texas Hold ’em, but that isn’t any fun, so I wrote some code to simulate random games. My results matched what you look up online. With 7 players, starting with paired aces gives you about a 40% winning percentage, with a steady drop through the face cards to paired jacks’s giving you about 25%. Open ended straight-flush draws, say queen jack on suit, start a bit below that.

What surprised me a bit, however, was what happens if you are able to pare the field down a bit. If you assume a bunch of smart players — people generally laying down if they had neither a pair, two high face cards, or open straight flush, your odds rise pretty dramatically, about 20% across the board. For example, the high pairs move into 50-60% range of winning percentages. What this says is that while I played too aggressively, I didn’t use aggressive betting to narrow the field. Obviously, with low stakes limit, people will pay to stay in longer, but a bit of up front betting would have helped.

Anyway, it was a fun weekend and a nice excuse to play with Ruby, rspec, and Cucumber to do some modeling.

Government 2.0 LA Conference

2010-02-06T00:00:00-08:00

Just delivered the opening keynote for the Government 2.0 LA conference. This talk was the most fun that I’ve had in a while, both because of the engaged and active audience who interrupted with lots of questions and because pulling the talk together required a bunch of research and exploration.

I first heard the story of Matthew Fontaine Maury from Professor Doctor Herbert Burket. The more I learned about Maury, the more I thought I could build a Government 2.0 discussion around his story of transforming navigation and the collection of global meteorological data.

What makes Maury’s story so interesting is in the mid-1800’s he was able to build a multinational, viral, crowdsourced, and meta-data system. His approaches and techniques are exactly the same as Google and other Web 2.0 companies from 150 years later. Even better, he did it all from within an institution — the United States Navy — not necessarily known for innovative and original thinking. His story also perfectly illustrates four tools that government has available to drive change: data, regulation, bully pulpit, and commercial excitement. Even better, Maury’s story connects the California gold rush, the Cape Horn Sweepstakes, and the amazing achievements of Eleanor Cressy and the Flying Cloud.

It all makes for a nice reminder that if history doesn’t repeat, it certain rhymes and there are lessons to be learned from the rhyming.

Cory Ondrejka Government 2.0 LA Opening Keynote

Amazon Folds

2010-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

So, the Macmillan books are back. I was going to write about poorly Amazon handled this, but John Scalzi has done an infinitely better job.

The interesting thing about the fans of authors: They feel somewhat connected to their favorite authors. So when their favorite authors kvetched on their blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter feeds about the screwing Amazon was giving them, what did many of these fans do? They also kvetched on their blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. So in pissing off a myriad of authors, Amazon also pissed off an exponential number of book readers, many of whom followed their favorite authors’ leads in complaining about Amazon, and who themselves were read and followed by an exponential number of others. Even on a weekend, the traditional slow time for the Internets, that’s a lot of pissed-off people.
So, two and a half days of the Internet being angry at Amazon. To be sure, there were people taking the side of Amazon, too. But those people lacked the social cohesion of an aggrieved class (writers) backed up by a mass of supporters — not to mention the relatively high profile of these writers online, which, if you were a journalist looking for reaction quotes while on deadline, made them the go-to sources.

Are you Listening, Amazon?

2010-01-31T00:00:00-08:00

While I spent the weekend in Las Vegas with some friends for a honest-its-not-really-a-bachelor-party (some poker thoughts to come), the blogosphere has been vibrating to the news that Amazon has decided to stop selling all Macmillan titles, both physical and digital, over a pricing dispute with Macmillan. Let us accept as given nobody outside the negotiation knows all the details, but the current consensus version of the story is:

At the iPad announcement, Steve Jobs mentioned in an interview that Amazon and Apple book prices would be same, at a rumored $14.99 price point — which is $5 more than Amazon’s price
The day after iPad’s announcement, Macmillan proposed a new variable pricing scheme, with digital titles launching at $14.99 and then declining to $5.99
Amazon responded to this pricing demand by pulling all of Macmillan’s titles

Odd twists here. Apple only recently announced variable pricing on mp3 downloads via the iTunes Music Store. Amazon famously built its mp3 business on DRM-free music when iTunes was selling AAC with digital rights management. John Scalzi is one of may authors to weigh in.
Amazon, of course, claims they are doing this for the customer, but as a customer who has been annoyingly positive about Kindle for years, a point of order.
I like variable pricing.
Hell, I love variable pricing.
More to the point, I really love Baen’s variable pricing, where ebook prices run from $15 for advanced reader copies all the way down to free. This model is fantastic. New release from author I read everything by? Great, order the e-arc and get to read it months ahead of time. More of a “maybe I’ll like this”-release? Get it via webscriptions for somewhere between $1-5. Taking a complete flyer on a new author? Read something of their’s in the free library.
Oh, and did I mention all of Baen’s releases are DRM-free? This makes them approximately 186,282% cooler than Kindle DRM-ed books and is why Baen’s Universe has received so many thousands of dollars from me. Of course, apparently I was the only one doing this as Universe is closing, but I doubt this is a failing of variable pricing.
Obviously, Macmillan’s model is not this cool. Instead, it just transliterates from the physical model of hardcover and softcover releases into digital. Like so many areas of publishing, it leaves money on the table and doesn’t actually seem to leverage the differences of digital very effectively.
But, it still means that if I’m willing to wait and surf the back catalog, I can get a discount compared to new releases.
So, Amazon, as a customer and Kindle owner who’s purchasd 88 books for Kindle in 15-months, are you going to listen?

Google Privacy Vows and "Meaningful"

2010-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Who knew? Today is International Privacy Day — probably not created by Hallmark. In celebration, Google decided to renew its privacy vows:

Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
Make the collection of personal information transparent.
Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

Read in the light of my earlier post on this topic, a couple of issues jump out.
If Google wants to couch this in terms of personal information and truly wants to make the collection transparent, they’d will need to make all of their data collection transparent. All information is ultimately going to be personally identifiable — and therefore potentially private form a user’s perspective. Are they ready to do this?
“Meaningful choices” is going to be a huge challenge. First, given Moore’s Law, we don’t have a useful framework for talking about private or personal data. Second, even given a framework, teaching users about complicated and ephemeral concepts is difficult. On the plus side, we can look at Creative Commons for some guidance on how to approach education.
I would propose some necessary but (perhaps) not sufficient conditions for me to make a meaningful choice about data collection. Answer:

What data is being collected?
How long the data will be retained?
How will the data be shared?
What datasets the data will be aggregated with?
Context for how the data will be used — will it be aggregated across other data sources related to me? aggregated across other users? used to optimize services I have opted in to? to advertise to me?
Can I opt-out at a later date?
What is the impact of opting out now?

Presenting this information is going to be user-experience nightmare, but without it, informed consent is at best a polite fiction.

Yup, I'll Be Buying an iPad

2010-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

Oh, the highs and the lows. Nothing could possibly have lived up to the hype, excitement, and rumors that have been swirling around the long-rumored-but-now-real Apple iPad. Tech Crunch has already decreed the iPad a dud:

I mean, I already did a whole spiel on CNN (what?!) why the iPad is sorta “meh” in my eyes, but to recap: I simply don’t get it. It’s not an iPhone replacement because it’s not a phone (duh); it’s not an iPod touch replacement because it’s not portable; and I already have enough “real” computers that I don’t need a tablet.

Engadget is decidedly luke warm, while Gizmodo posted 8 Things that Suck About iPad:

A lot of people at Gizmodo are psyched about the iPad. Not me! My god, am I underwhelmed by it. It has some absolutely backbreaking failures that will make buying one the last thing I would want to do.

Once you get over the iJesusPadTablet and the epic MadTV skit, there is some very interesting stuff going one with the iPad.

First, as Gruber already nailed, Apple building custom silicon for this device is a sea change in terms of optimizing performance for the product. In a lot of ways, this is back to the glory days of 80’s and early 90’s arcade development, where the game design and hardware were developed together. It made life hell for the poor saps trying to port your games to a SNES, but it meant the arcade games always blew the home market away. Then the arcade business started crashing and developers switched to commodity PC hardware or modified consumer hardware like the PSX and arcade games weren’t special anymore. Suddenly your home rig played the best games. Mobile computing was stuck in the same, commoditized rut. Until today. Wonder how long until that chip makes it into the iPhone. Or the next MacBook Air.

Second, the design. Get over the bezel, folks. Where the hell are you supposed to hold a one and a half pound device? You don’t want your thumbs in front of content, accidentally generating inputs all the time. Get over the lack of wide screen, too. This isn’t just designed to be movie player, you want to be able to surf the web in portrait mode and that would stink if it was 16×9. Instead, we see Apple’s first cut at a mobile computer that you sit around with, with a host of intelligent decisions made around that use case. You will lounge with iPad — maybe we’ll see a resurgence in beanbag sales. The design of the iPad — much like the Kindle — makes you treat technology like a book, something you cozy up to.

Third, battery life for a mobile device. No, 10 hours isn’t my Kindle‘s 2-3 weeks of use, but it may be long enough. Using a Kindle, you forget that it is an electronic device precisely because you aren’t worried about when to juice up. iPad may do this as well.

Fourth, unlimited 3G for $30, without a contract. While not quite as good as Kindle’s free Whispernet, this is still dramatically cheaper than what we’ve seen before.

Fifth, iPad is a ridiculously cool game machine.

Sixth, however good it might be as a game machine, it crushes as a textbook and education tool. For all of Kindle’s strengths, pdfs are still often fubared even on the DX and search/annotation doesn’t play well with e-ink. iPad becomes an extra screen for reference books while coding, will properly render pdf papers, and can be stuffed full of specialized apps for education.

Finally, lots of people are spouting about how this doesn’t replace a netbook for web browsing, but I’m not so sure. Making the intangible tangible — which the iPhone did and now the iPad does via high performance and multi-touch — changes how we engage and interact with media. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if tactile browsing is crushingly better than keyboard + mouse, and given how much of our day is spent on the web, something that makes that more fun is a big deal. Even better for the web, the iPad is a seriously big deal for HTML5 + javascript projects. Suddenly you have an always connected, full screen device with seriously high performance and HTML5 compliant browsing.

So, pundits be damned, I’ll be ordering one the day I can. I am worried about the virtual keyboard, but willing to chance it. I think the iPad will slot in quite nicely between my iPhone and MacBook Air, be a much better fit for light browsing and writing tasks when traveling, and would fit my presentation style. Looking forward to building and presenting a keynote on one!

Under the Dome

2010-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

Finished reading Stephen King’s latest book, Under the Dome on Kindle yesterday. Classic King and thoroughly enjoyable, even surprising as several main characters actually survive. I’ve read just about everything King has ever written and Dome, along with last year’s Duma Key and Just After Sunset he’s really been on a roll. He seemed to be in a bit of a funk after completing the Dark Tower series — who wouldn’t be after completing their life’s work? — but his last few books have been perfect airplane reading.

I wonder if I’ll be reading his next book on iPad? 10 hours of active use may be enough to make it a killer book reader, especially for PDFs and programming books.

If 37signals and Tech Crunch Post, it Must be True

2010-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

Vivek Wadhwa has been doing some very cool research into entrepreneurial behavior and trends. Today he posted on an article on Tech Crunch called Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big. This was linked to on 37signals’ bog as Where one studies has no correlation to entrepreneurial success and is making the round of the blogosphere and twitterverse.

You can read the actual paper. It turns out that it appears to matter where you went. Ivy League schools, which confer 1.6% of all US degrees, has 8% of the sample, so they were over-represented by 4 times.

More interesting, the top 10 schools, or 3% of the sample, accounted for 19% of the sample, so over-represented by over 6 times.¹

In fact, the authors themselves state:

As such, our results show a disproportionately high concentration of U.S-born tech founders with terminal Ivy-League degrees engaging in entrepreneurial startup activities in the engineering and technology industries

Now, there is still an important message here, since the top universities don’t have 80 or 90% of the success — although going to some college does matter, as 95% of the sample have college degrees — but to assert that “where one studies has no correlation to entrepreneurial success” is just the kind of meme that will take off.

And be wrong.

¹And this stat is fuzzy, because unlike the Ivy League stat it is calculated as percentage of universities represented in study, not students.

Moore + Metcalf = Everything Meta, Everything Identifying

2010-01-19T00:00:00-08:00

A basic issue when collecting, modifying, and sharing data online is whether that data is personally identifiable. A great example of how policy makers think about personally identifiable information is the HIPAA’s (Heath Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) “Privacy Rule”, which lays out rules for use — and notification to patients of use — of identifiable information. The problem is given sufficient storage, bandwidth, and computation, ultimately all information is going to be personally identifiable.

Thanks to Moore’s Law, storage, bandwidth, and computation are rapidly becoming sufficient. Backblaze offers unlimited online storage for $5/month. For less than the cost of a single machine, you can throw a substantial map-reduce job at Amazon Elastic Mapreduce to analyze staggering amounts of data. If you can get the data, you can store it and chew on it until you pieces start falling into place.

This also means that just about any piece of information you create — from your Twitter stream to your cell phone’s geo reporting — become subject to Metcalf’s Law, creating value from network effects. Metcalf’s Law is, of course, a heuristic about communication networks, but the principal of network effect — where the addition of one additional good or service generates additional value for everyone in the network — clearly applies to networks of information as well. More data and more analysis create more valuable data sets with more interesting correlations to explore.
This is positive reinforcement at its best (or worst). New correlations create new ways to examine old data and better filters to apply to new data, generating even more value and knowledge.
This virtuous cycle has two interesting outcomes. The first is the breakdown of the old distinctions between meta information and information. Meta information — or information about information, often called metadata — has historically been structured data used to reduce search costs. Effectively lossy, informational compression. Think index of a book or the stats line on a baseball game. Computing the metadata takes time, but once computed becomes a cheaper (faster) way to get some information.
What Google has shown is that with sufficient computation, meta information can be context dependent and recomputed as needed. Compare using the index to look up key information in a book versus googling for it. Or, standard baseball stats versus sabermetrics. This last example is particularly important, as it also illustrates how standardizing on meta information — the usual baseball statistics of RBIs, homeruns, etc — blinded baseball from looking more deeply into how to really differentiate player performance. Sufficient computation means constantly digging into the data in order to find new information, new order, and new ideas, rather than simply finding one viewpoint and sticking to it.
But this flexibility and the value of increased analysis may come at the price of all information ultimately becoming personally identifying information.
Currently, a basic assumption is that we know a priori what data is going to be personally identifying. Worse, it is assumed that it is possible for a consumer, a user, or a business to know the difference. This may have been a safe assumption in the past, but it clearly is not today.
Consider the Netflix Prize, where Netflix crowdsourced a better prediction model for movie ratings. In order to provide data to prize participants, Netflix released 100 million movie ratings from 480,000 customers. Customers were identified by a unique user ID, so Netflix clearly felt safe releasing this data. After all, with movie ratings linked back to a random number, this obviously wasn’t personally identifying, right?

Wrong.
Two University of Texas researchers, in Robust De-Anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (pdf link) demonstrated that by comparing reviews to public sources, such as IMDB, it was possible to identify users in the Netflix data. Unsurprisingly, a user who thought her rentals were private is now suing Netflix.
Nor is this new, as we saw when AOL released “anonymized” search engine logs.
Suddenly, the information virtuous cycle gets even more powerful, if less virtuous.
Any information that is created and stored is likely to eventually become personally identifying. Thanks to Moore’s Law, more and more of our lives are generating bits that are stored somewhere. Thanks to Metcalf, anyone with access to the information can create value by collecting and analyzing that information, ensuring that anyone who can afford to, will. Again thanks to Moore, analysis and storage is cheap enough to be available to almost anyone, not just governments and large businesses.
So, the limit case is that everything we do is stored and linked back to us. Sounds like either the Panopticon or David Brin’s transparent society. Or both.
Current trends and incentives seem to make that limit case inevitable.
What to do about it in a later post.

TARGUSinfo Keynote

2010-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Just gave the keynote for TARGUSinfo Kickoff 2010 event. What a great group, very reminiscent of Linden in 2005-ish. Work hard, play hard culture. High quality, charismatic leaders shining at all levels. Palpable hunger to win. Force of nature CEO open to ideas.

My peeps, in other words.

This talk is a blend of the NIST and iGate talks. Will be writing up the various ideas into independent posts over the next few months.

TARGUSinfo Cory Ondrejka 01-10

Fearless Predictions for 2010

2010-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Now that I’ve graded my 2009 predictions, it is time once again look into the future of what I consider to be a very interesting year. Many of these prediction will generate full posts on their own going forward.

1) A major telecommunications company will recognize the competitive threat posed by Google Voice and begin offering “voice is free” as a method to gain customers and transition into more profitable data services.

2) At least one of the ineffective, post-9/11 airport security theater provisions is rolled back.

3) The current crop of social games will go the way of the original wave of Zombies and Vampires as players tire of the repetitive gameplay and friends start a backlash — again, exactly as we saw with Zombies and Vampires. The winning social game companies will be those which pivot dramatically.

4) Apple releases a tablet and moves computing onto a 4th screen, adding a new form factor to their existing complement of full screen (desktop/laptop), handheld (iPhone), and living room (Mac Mini/MacTV). It will be incredibly fun to use for the range of activities currently least served by current screens — movies, reading, browsing/social media on the run, and video/text chat. It will bring at least one new UX tech to the party to help make it the “ZOMG, WANT!!” product of 2010 — for example, front facing 3D camera for gestural control without touching the screen.

5) The 2010 midterm elections will see a degree of negative campaigning and hate mongering the likes of which the United States has never seen. It will be so bad that political and media leaders from both parties will finally remember that the point of politics is not to win but to effectively govern.

6) Amazon responds to the gaggle of competing copycat ebook readers by turning Kindle into a full fledged book platform: author choice on DRM, p2p sharing, and loaning; community elements for book recommendations, annotations, and ranking; and, user-generated book metadata for series and sequels, to allow author and series subscription for automatic delivery of new books.

7) Backlash against the world’s biggest banks and their windfall profits will contribute to the emergence of new regional, community, and online banking options.

8) The threat of Three Strike’s coming to the United States via ACTA will generate a grassroots debate about the merits of Obama administration’s IP maximalist strategy.

9) Heath care reform makes it through the committee reconciliation process and passes despite complaints from all sides.

10) I will be back at work full-time on something seriously cool.

iPhone Games

2010-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve been looking at a lot of iPhone games lately, both to survey the market and to get a feel for what the iPhone can do. Before I dive into the games, a few general thoughts after playing a lot of iPhone games.

There are some strikingly fun games lurking on the iPhone. As you’d expect, the quality distribution is a pretty steep power law, but with many games offering free trials or 99 cent price tags, the mistake penalty is low.
There are a ton of licensed games developed by professional developers, but I’ve had a lot more fun playing out in indie land.
The great indie games are, from a game perspective, really amateurish. Nota Bene by “amateur” I don’t mean “crappy,” instead they aren’t taking advantage of 40 years of game development to make the games more fun, replayable, addictive, and rewarding. More on that in individual reviews, but the largest missed opportunity is recognizing the importance of pacing in gameplay. Just like great music isn’t all about the crescendos, players don’t want every moment of their play experience to be at maximum stress. Valleys define the peaks, and even brief transitions help the player feel their mad skillz progressing. And before you start complaining that iPhone casual games don’t have time for this pacing nonsense, it may be worth looking at how great pacing dominated the most successful arcade games — games built for 45-60 second plays.
Something obvious many developers don’t get: on the iPhone, the interface is also the display! If your fingers are providing control inputs, you’re blocking part of the screen. It makes me a sad panda when enemies use that hidden space to kill me.

I’m not going to try and rank all of these or give them ratings. Suffice it to say that these represent about 20% of the total iPhone games I’ve downloaded or purchased and are the ones I keep playing. They all have at least some flaws, but were fun enough and easily worth their purchase price. This is the order they’re on my iPhone screen right now.

Geodefense Swarm

Geodefense Swarm is the first tower defense game game I played on iPhone and I think it is by far the best. GD Swarm is a free path tower game on a hexagonal grid, so where you place your towers controls the paths of the creeps. The graphics — an obvious ode to Geometry Wars — are simple, beautiful neon with an appropriate level of gratuitous particles. GD Swarm, especially on later levels, is quite hard and at times almost overwhelming, but I enjoyed all of it. The sense of accomplishment when you realize you are going to win a level and your fully-upgraded towers are wailing on creeps is excellent. This is easily my favorite game on iPhone and I hope Critical Thought Games start selling level packs soon!

Geodefense

Geodefense is the second tower defense game I played on iPhone but Critical Thought Games developed it before Geodefense Swarm. While I very much enjoyed completing it, it is the weaker of the two games. In Geodefnese, the creeps follow defined paths. You place and upgrade towers along the path, with strategy focused on matching tower and upgrade selection to creep order. Most of the early levels are very well paced, with a real sense of progress and accomplishment. Unfortunately, many of the last few levels are defeated by similar, degenerate strategies — particular many level 2 and 4 laser towers. As with Geodefense Swarm, it is a no brainer for Critical Thought to start selling level packs, which I will eagerly buy.

geoSpark

geoSpark is Critical Thought’s third game and is beautiful and flow inducing. It feels like a bit of a step back to me, unfortunately, because unlike the wonderful pacing of their two tower defense games, geoSpark sort of goes on and on. Both the mechanic of dragging like shapes together — and accelerating the other shapes — and the bonus lives feel delightfully old school, but it would really benefit from a bit more feeling of progress. Still, I have been playing it a fair bit.

Canabalt

Canabalt was a strikingly successful flash game before it moved to the iPhone. With a single action — jumping as your character runs to the right — Canabalt is the ultimate single-button, x-axis tourism game. With a gorgeous, gray aesthetic, Canabalt is fun game both to play and watch. Thanks to its randomly generated background, every game is different, so you play it reactively, rather than simply memorizing the jump sequence. Unfortunately, as good as Canabalt is, I am left frustrated because it could easily have been so much better. The problem, unsurprisingly, is the lack of pacing. With every game simply a run to the right — and the wildly differing challenges presented by the level creation — games vary dramatically in length, with success feeling more like a result of a particularly easy sequence than player skill. This could have been fixed by making the escape a series of levels with the random generator creating progressively harder transitions. Perhaps in Canabalt 2?

Doodle Jump

Doodle Jump is riding a wave of well-deserved popularity. The simple mechanic is your player jumping from platform to platform, using the accelerometer to control direction and a screen tap to shoot enemies. It’s adorable, instantly accessible, and delightfully challenging. Alas, you could transplant the pacing discussion from Canalt. Exactly the same problems here, despite the developers trying to convey progress via changing challenges. Like Canabalt, still worth buying and playing — just a tease that makes you wonder what version 2 will be like.

Siberian Strike

Siberian Strike feels a lot like the classic Capcom arcade game 1942. It’s a vertically scrolling shooter, all pixels are dangerous, and powerups give you completely over-the-top weaponry. Great fun, extremely silly storyline, and even a well executed set of trenchrun interstitial levels. Early versions were crashing my iPhone so I had set it aside, but the current version ran solidly. Played it all the way through.

Ken Ken

Ken Ken is, like Soduko, a puzzle built around satisfying simple mathematical constraints. I like it, as the harder levels have a delightful feeling of “no way” when you look at them. Sure, it’s basically solving a bunch of linear equations, but I’ve found it a perfect way to burn a few minutes.

Spider: the Mystery of Bryce Manor

Spider is an amazing game. It is gorgeous, perfectly leverages the iPhone’s screen as an input device, and almost perfectly paced. You’re a spider exploring an abandoned mansion, eating bugs to replenish your silk supply. Each level introduces new bugs, different challenges for web creation, and pieces of the underlying mystery. I can’t wait to see what the Spider team does next, because I couldn’t put my iPhone down until I completed Spider.

Meteor Blitz

A lot of games try to use virtual control sticks on the iPhone, but Meteor Blitz is the first one that I found to consistently work well. Think Robotron meets Asteroids meets Sinistar. Waves of asteroids and geometric enemies appear. You shoot them and collect the bonuses left over. Suffers a bit from pacing problems, but the action is so fluid that for some reason it bothers me less than the other games. Gorgeous and fun, Meteor Blitz has been sucking up more of my time lately.

Field Runners

Generally considered the gold standard of iPhone tower defense games, I enjoyed Fieldrunners enough to play it through, but it felt clunky, slow, and easy compared to GD Swarm. The graphics are adorable, but the each level takes a surprisingly long time to play. While waiting for more GD Swarm levels, Fieldrunners was plenty of fun and filled the tower defense void.

Defender Chronicles

Defender Chronicles has a lot going for it. It’s an innovative take on tower defense, with pretty, vertical levels and detailed troops and creeps. Unfortunately, many of the actions take an annoying number of taps to complete and I couldn’t find a screen zoom that balanced the state of the level while still allowing me to enjoy the detail. Several levels also seemed to suffer from required first moves — much like Geofense — which bugged me. Despite that, I played it through and liked the inventory and RPG elements. It was easily as fun as Fieldrunners, though like Fieldrunners felt a step below both the Geodefense games.

Flight Control

Flight Control is so popular, I don’t think it needs an introduction. It has spawned a ton of similar games and was the second game I bought for iPhone after Spider. Drawing paths is natural on the iPhone and helps get your fingers out of the way, so the overall experience just feels right. Unfortunately, Flight Control is another game that suffers terribly from pacing problems — it just gets harder — but that hasn’t stopped me from playing it a fair amount.

Overall, I think iPhone has probably changed video games forever. I don’t have to carry an additional device and for less than the price of one console game, I’ve enjoyed dozens of different games. Plus, when I like a demo, it’s so easy to just buy the full game that I generally do. The downside, of course, is that the iPhone is likely to undergo the same inevitable quality arms race that every other game platform has, which is problematic given the economics of iPhone development already seem marginal. Certainly, in-game purchases and digital items will help, but 2010 is definitely going to be an interesting period for mobile gaming!

Grading 2009 Predictions

2010-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

With the end of the naughts, it is once again time to grade predictions from last year.

1) Second Life will return to steady growth and have a shockingly good 2009

I defined “shockingly” as 50% growth and as James Au points out, Second Life saw an almost precisely 50% growth in active users. Dead on and a good start.
1 for 1

2) Another Republican Senator leaves his party to become an independent, largely caucusing with Senate Democrats.

Awfully nice of Senator Arlen Specter to help me out on this one. I sense a trend.
2 for 2

3) Microsoft gets its shit together

While MS is getting flack for some recent moves, they did make efforts to slim down, Bing nearly doubled MS search share, and Windows 7 has outsold any previous MS operating system release. The roll continues.
3 for 3

4) Across the industry, 2009 global recorded music sales contract by low single digit percentages, pulled down by double digit physical sales drops but buoyed by large digital gains.

Alas, I can’t find this stat yet, so will leave this unscored for now.
3 for 3

5) Linden Lab gets acquired

Oops. Still surprised by this.
3 for 4

6) Fiber-to-the-home becomes part of the economic stimulus/economic recovery package

ARRA contained nearly $40 billion in broadband stimulus, with FTTH part of the overall mix. Back on track.
4 for 5

7) New models for innovation, entrepreneurship, and education emerge during the downturn

While Y Combinator continues to spawn successes and we’ve also witnessed an explosion of Hacker Spaces, sadly I don’t think either really captures the prediction. Damn.
4 for 6

8) Israel learns that there must be a balance between legitimate national security concerns and its moral responsibilities to those it governs

While the recently announced moratorium on new settlements is definitely a great step, exceptions seem to abound. Fail.
4 for 7

9) Something completely new in the web, social space will successfully launch in 2009

I set the bar pretty high for this one, but it’s hard not to point at four square. Sure, it’s resurrected Dodge Ball, but the real-world MMO/leveling/achievement elements are new. Back into the win column.
5 for 8

10) I will travel less in 2009 than I did in 2008

Amazingly, despite spending a ton of time on the road with EMI, my actual mileage went down slightly for 2009. Now to keep that trend going this year!
6 for 9

With one prediction left unscored, my 2009 total is 6 for 9 correct, or 0.667. This compares favorably to previous scores of 0.600, 0.500, 0.500, 0.600 and 0.600 for 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, with an overall average of 57% for one year predictions, which isn’t too bad.

Predictions for 2010 coming soon!

visting nist

2009-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

Yesterday I spoke at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Thanks to the first big winter storm, Dulles is down for the count, so I’m catching up on email and blogging. First, my talk from NIST:

Cory Ondrejka NIST Talk 12.09

I could have attempted to fly out Friday afternoon but would have meant passing up a tour of the NIST facility and I am too much of a geek to miss that. Huge thanks to the many NIST researchers who took time out to answer a ton of my enthusiastic but amateur questions about quantum computing and neutron research. Awesome flashbacks, as this was my first visit to a nuclear reactor since the Navy. The neutron imaging facility is simply amazing, using neutron interferometry to image the interior of operating hydrogen fuel cells — a striking collision of pure science and applied research.

For the fabrication geeks in the audience, the key to neutron interferometry is precision machining of neutron interferometers from silicon. Requiring micron and mico-radian accuracy, fewer than 10 useful interferometers have been successfully fabricated in the last 30 years.

On the quantum computing side, NIST is exploring quantum communication at broadband (> 2Mb/s) rates via the quantum communication testbed

On the opposite side from broadband testing — with the conventional approach of strongly attenuated photon source — NIST is also experimenting with single photon sources and detectors.

This single photon detector uses magnetic resonance cooling to reach 50 microkelvin and detects a single photon through the temperature change of the sensor. Traditional single photon counters generally can detect 0 or “more than 0” photons, a real problem with attenuation-based photon sources which probabilistically generate 0, 1, or more than 1 photons.

NIST is also exploring using correlated photons in single photon sources. A beautiful part of the experiment was being able to use the experiment display the expected phase curve in its own light. You can also see a movie of the result

All-in-all, the most geek fun I’ve had in a while. Well worth being stuck in this:

what's in a name?

2009-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

In 2005, Second Life and Linden Lab were both growing. For a company with a “no management”-mantra, communication and feedback were becoming a challenge. One of my tasks was to invent a new system for employees to give each other feedback, one that would be fun, so easy everyone would use it, and that would generate interesting aggregate information about how individuals and the company were doing.

The design that emerged was tipping.

Tipping — via an internal web tool — would be a positive-sum, transparent game, a way to publicly thank a fellow Linden for going above and beyond. Finding a crucial bug, crunching some extra numbers, helping you figure out the right person to take a question to. Think “Twitter plus $1.” The key was to make it a small amount of money, as a payment makes it real but you don’t want to distort behavior with meaningful payouts.

Tipping was designed to solve three problems: help Lindens know what their fellow employees were doing, generate aggregate data on connections within the company, and identify extreme outliers. It wasn’t clear to me if your tipping rank would be important, but it might be meaningful data if you were generally at the top or the bottom of the list.

Philip loved the idea and renamed it “The Love Machine.” He carved out some time and built the first prototype implementation in November of 2005. It was a serious hit and people started using it. As far as I know, it is still in use today.

So, it is with a crooked smile that I see Philip and Ryan naming their new company LoveMachine with a stated goal of selling The Love Machine to business. At Linden, Philip repeatedly demonstrated his vision is for organizations to operate without management. That by collecting and aggregating numbers, you can generate emergent organizations able to take on any problem and act efficiently based on ratings and ranks.

The challenges that emerge, of course, fall into three broad categories. First, we optimize for what we measure, so unless you know what you are measuring exactly aligns with business goals, there are going to be misalignments. At Linden, people wrote tools to make it easier to use The Love Machine by irc, chat, email, and the web. This created “pile-on voting”, where an employee would thank someone and other employees would also deliver love to the recipient. This made the amount of love received a function of the time of initial delivery and the communication channel used, which may or may not have been desired. Second, people don’t like just being numbers, they want to understand what they can do to improve, so while The Love Machine should provide additional context for peer and manager feedback, it clearly can’t replace those conversations. Finally, with a transparent system like the Love Machine, are those ranked at the top retained? Are employees who leave or who are fired near the bottom? If not, you may introduce more communication and management overhead rather than reduce it.

LoveMachine will have to correct these deficiencies. Moreover, LoveMachine must overcome the basic impedance mismatch of a tool like The Love Machine. Small companies will get excited about it — may already be excited since there is a Love Machine on Facebook — but may not be big enough to really need it. Big companies definitely need better tools for communication and feedback, but implementing solutions like The Love Machine is just the start of broader cultural change.

So it will be fun to watch Philip and Ryan. Clearly, they’re both going to be a lot happier building something early again, and the technology is straightforward. More importantly, Philip will be speaking from the heart when he talks about why companies need The Love Machine.

Congratulations and good luck, guys!

igate keynote version 2

2009-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

iGate’s Insight conference is in 3 cities this year, so I am doing something unusual for me — giving the same talk again after audience feedback. As a result, this version has about 10% new content and refined focus on the overall “agile or toast” focus.

Cory Ondrejka iGate Keynote v2 11.09

change is hard

2009-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

I get it. Change is hard. Creative destruction and innovation can destroy your current business.

Tough. Progress is going to happen. Accept it. Embrace it. After 18-months in the music business, I fully understand the pain and fear upheaval brings, but I also saw how really understanding what change is doing to your business opens up new opportunities. Music companies can do a better job today than ever before of connecting artists and fans around the experience of music — and I know they don’t need a huge copyright land grab to it.

Which makes the current leaks from the ACTA negotiations deeply disturbing on two levels. First, willfully blocking your nation from building on inexorable technology trends is an act somewhere between criminal and treasonous. Second, as nations we all face enormous challenges around healthcare, war, displaced peoples, energy, disease, education, poverty and famine. We have a unique moment in history to capitalize on the worldwide excitement about the Obama Administration. So how do we capitalize on the moment? What issue is worth encoding into international law?

Unauthorized camcording. Yes, you read that right. Unauthorized camcording.

Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied against any person who, without authorization of the holder of copyright or related rights in a motion picture or other audiovisual work, knowingly uses an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make a copy of or transmits to the public the motion picture or other audiovisual work, or any part thereof, from a performance of the motion picture or other audiovisual work in a motion picture exhibition facility open to the public.

That’s the most important issue facing the world that the Obama Administration wants to expend political capital on?

Even worse, according the EFF discussion:

[T]he US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create – despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators.

For those who don’t know, Three Strikes is a potentially due process-free set of penalties for terminating your access to the Internet. The Obama Administration is supporting Three Strikes-style rules due to lobbying by the MPAA and the RIAA, despite opposition from the technology and telecomm industries. As the United States slowly emerges from the recession, are we really comfortable shackling innovation and technology progress because of lobbying efforts?

If you’re not, tell your Senator now.

igate keynote

2009-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

Last week I gave the keynote talk for the first of 3 iGate Insight 2009 conference in New York City. Enjoyed the opportunity to pull together a great deal of the Second Life and EMI experiences into one argument about where business is going.

Cory Ondrejka iGate Insight Keynote 10.09

augmented reality getting better quickly

2009-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

Imagine Second Life running anywhere you need it. Embryonic, but very exciting!

irobot researchers have big brains

2009-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

This is creepy and cool.

google building maker

2009-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

When we built the some of the first buildings in Second Life for Demo 2002, one of the great discoveries was how easy it was to create geometry if you had the images there in-world with you. Google goes one better by making it trivially easy to add simple building geometry to Google Earth date via Google Building Maker. It says a lot about Google’s organizational strengths, weaknesses, and priorities that they can create this but have difficulty seeing/capturing the value of virtual worlds.

super slomo impacts

2009-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Bullet impacts at 1,000,000 fps? Check.
Bullets hitting steel plate? Check.
Bullets hitting ice? Glass? BBs? Different bullet materials? Check, check, check, and check.
Trippy trance music? Check.
(From the Make Blog)

some speaking clips

2009-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

So much of the public speaking I do is for small CEO and C*O gatherings that very little video exists. Fortunately, Washington Speakers kindly shared some clips from a talk in 2008.

link to supernova talk

2009-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

Thanks to Chris and the rest of the Supernova and BlogTalkRadio teams! Skype ended up being an epic fail — three drops during the hour — but otherwise it was an enjoyable dive into how to learn from agile development throughout organizations.

mashing up cctv and google earth

2009-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

Privacy is over.

Some clever Georgia Tech students have combined a host of techniques — blended video, direct mapping, and interpolation — to bring Google Earth to life with data from a host of different sources. Wait till someone uses CrowdFlower to do the busy work of finding and aligning CCTV and mobile video views with Google Earth for entire cities.

supernova briefing 1 October

2009-09-29T00:00:00-07:00

Thursday morning at 9am PDT I’m on the Supernova Network Age Briefing. We’ll be talking about the reasons for — and challenges to — broadly applying agile methodologies to how businesses approach all of product development. Should be a lot of fun! Call in or join online.

goofing off... or not

2009-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

In my ongoing plan to take 2-months for decompression, my current tasks are:

5 speaking gigs (1 delivered, 3 more scheduled, 1 probable), which have given me a fresh chance to think about some hard problems.
A one-day-a-week project exploring some ideas around communication. Not sure if there is a product/company there, but I get to write code, re-learn various machine learning algorithms, and see what’s there.
Another one-day-a-week project testing to see whether a marketplace is the right solution to a business problem I see. Again, fun learning and writing code.
A third one-day-a-week project thinking about what lies at the collision between augmented reality, virtual worlds, and several related technology trends.
Advising/mentoring 3 early-stage startups on product design, technology options, and strategy. Exciting to work with a range of bright, early stage teams!

Guess this might no longer qualify as goofing off…

the guild outtakes

2009-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

Growing up watching Burt Reynolds movies at drive in theaters, it is my firm belief that every movie should be Constitutionally required to release outtakes. What can I say? I watched “Cannonball Run” at an impressionable age.

Anyway, it made me smile to see that The Guild had put up an outtake real, so get with the clicking — because how often do you get to see Wil Wheaten in a kilt swearing like a sailor?

a request for npr

2009-09-21T00:00:00-07:00

It’s pledge week on NPR, so lots of our favorite shows are getting interrupted in order to ask us for money. Now, I’m fine with this, even though I’m already a member, but this year I have a request in return. In fact, if NPR were to get this right — even for just one week — I’d gleefully up my donation and still be happy with pledge week.

What is it I want?

Stop using “scientists” as if it means something.

Some recent examples:

“Some scientists in Peru are closely watching microscopic marine life.”
“For more than 50 years, scientists who study the brain have been misled by squid.”
“Lasers on this scale can produce tiny light sources, which in turn can help scientists capture images of tiny things we really care about, like the molecules inside our bodies.”

Using “scientists” in each of these sentences is about as useful as saying “humans” or “adults.” Worse, by bandying it about like a talisman, the authors both attempt to make an argument from authority and assume that their listeners aren’t astute enough to care that we learn less from the story. Consider these versions:

“Some microbiologists in Peru are closely watching microscopic marine life.”
“For more than 50 years, doctors and biologists who study the brain have been misled by squid.”
“Lasers on this scale can produce tiny light sources, which in turn can help physicists and biologists capture images of tiny things we really care about, like the molecules inside our bodies.”

The real world isn’t Gilligan’s Island or Fringe, where the “professor” knows everything about anything. By granting the title of “scientist” as a blanket imprimatur for “knows everything”, speakers are allowed to speak as authorities when they shouldn’t. A Nobel Laureate in chemistry may have only a lay person’s knowledge of cosmology, evolution, or climate change. Knowing the domain of knowledge gives us clues about whether the person is really an expert or not.

I would expect NPR to understand this.

I am regularly disappointed when they do not.

photosynth scaled up to a city

2009-09-18T00:00:00-07:00

If you recall, Photosynth is a Microsoft Research project that used thousands of photos to construct 3D views of locations. Researchers at the University of Washington have scale it up. A lot.

There is an awesome convergence of photogrammetric techniques — like this as well as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth — and human edited geometry a la Second Life and Google Earth coming that is going to give us interactive-scale and fully up-to-date models of the whole world.

And wait for that convergence to hit augmented reality. Living in the future kicks butt.

wondrous fuzzy balls

2009-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

This is just amazing. By sending high voltage through a rigid strand of carbon surrounded by a phosphor screen, Ukrainian team has used a field emission electron microscope to directly image s- and p- orbitals. In 10th grade, we built these out of balloons — and quantum mechanics predicted these shapes — but how cool is it to actually see the orbitals?

Consider these pictures for a moment. Human thought, determination, and creativity first led to a theory able to explain chemical and physical behaviors, despite having no ability to directly observe the mechanisms involved. Now, 83 years after the Schrödinger equation was first solved, another long chain of determination, stubbornness, and ingenuity has led to something that feels nearly impossible — imaging of a single electron orbital. Awesome.

technology and marketing talk

2009-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

This was a really fun talk to put together, as the goal was a mixed 90-minutes of presentation and discussion. Moreover, first time really blending my tech background and my experience in a non-geek role at EMI.

Discussion leader, “Multi Channel Technologies”, Sapient MC2 Executive Summit, Miami, FL, September 2009.
Ondrejka Sapient MC2 09.16.09

speaking gigs

2009-09-15T00:00:00-07:00

Sitting at SFO, about to fly to Miami via Charlotte in order to give a speech on technology, product development, and transformation to a small group of senior executives. Although I gave talks for EMI, I haven’t built an original keynote in a while, so this has been an enjoyable exercise.

The client, to their credit, actually pushed hard to get an outline early, which kept procrastination to lower levels than I am used to. The themes that are emerging tie technological innovation, corporate transformation, and disruption together through community engagement and agile processes, so this should be a lot of fun. Since it is only a 25 person audience, the talk will be very interactive and allow for extensive discussions.

In particular, I look forward to kicking around who executives feel are the first to know when innovation has changed the market they operate in — employees? customers? partners? competitors? — and who within the organization is responsible for making sure that group is found and listened to.

Deciding whether or not to take speaking gigs was a difficult call, since I have enough interesting projects to mull over and being home has been so nice. However, with the economy beginning to recover and a regular flow of speaking requests starting up, I find that it is an efficient way to broaden my network and lets me produce (reasonably) coherent thoughts on diverse topics.

Need to get back to the talk. Kindle is telling me that Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol has just downloaded, so need to finish talk before I can crack the book.

Or, more correctly, turn on Kindle and hit next page button. “Cracking the book” is much more evocative, but I am glad that I’m carrying bits not atoms.

inverted pendulums

2009-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

Congratulations to Armadillo Aerospace on successful Lunar Challenge flights. I’ve written before about how much I love controls engineering and this is as pretty an inverted pendulum control solution as you’ll see. Very cool stuff!

Also, check out 1337arts, in particular their beautiful aerial photos from 93,000’ done on a $150 budget.

down time

2009-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

Now that I’ve completed my departure from EMI, there is an almost overwhelming urge to dive into whatever’s next RIGHT NOW. I haven’t actively been looking for something new since 1998, so it is surprisingly difficult not to take one of the options already available. Especially in the current economic climate, it is a little scary to say “no, thank you” to some very interesting opportunities.

But that is what I’m going to do. I’ve decided to spend at least 2 months of down time. Well, maybe “down time” is an exaggeration. Between speaking gigs, reading, studying, ideas that need fleshing out, and fun coding projects, I have plenty to keep to me busy and off the street, but none of them are really what’s next. At least, I don’t think so, but that’s what down time is about.

I’m also trying to get as plugged back in to interesting projects and ideas as possible, so if there’s something I should look at, please ping me!

sometimes it's the little things

2009-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Techcrunch has an article up using JS-Kit’s Echo for comments. Similar to Disqus, which I use, Echo is all about bridging conversations across the web. This image struck me:

This site requires registration before you can leave a comment. Select an authentication option under the “Leave a comment as” menu

Do you see a “Leave a comment as” menu? I see a “From” dropdown. Echo is already asking the user to do more than they are used to, why make life even more difficult?

time in a hotel room, site redesigned

2009-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

Had some time today to futz with the blog and site. Hopefully significantly more readable. Let me know!

speaking in metaplace today, 2pm PDT

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Raph Koster and I will be having a chat, moderated by my former Linden coworker Robin Harper, today in Metaplace. We just crossed paths at State of Play in NYC and we’re looking forward to chatting about the present and future of virtual worlds and the web. In related, and cool news, Metaplace just announced that their Flash client can be embedded, so you can join the discussion this afternoon through the client below.

hodgman at correspondent's dinner

2009-06-21T00:00:00-07:00

Sorry to be away for so long. Work and life have both been rather busy of late. For your patience, you are rewarded with John Hodgman at the Correspondent’s dinner:

the world of the future

2009-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

I know, I need to do a Google Wave post, but for now, enjoy the World of the Future!

texas messing with itself, may go blind

2009-05-22T00:00:00-07:00

Well, blind to science at least.
Texas’ senate is currently blocking Don McLeroy — endorsed by governor Rick Perry — from resuming his role as the Texas State Board of Education Chairman. Why, you ask?

Really, Texas, you want someone running your board of education who wants to teach what is so clearly wrong? Of course, maybe he’s just afraid of getting sued.
The United States really needs another sputnik.

photos to maps

2009-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

Microsoft’s Visual Earth has been doing this for a while, but these new movies from C3 are quite pretty. Definite style points for all the matrix-camera action, too. Very impressive for a straight imagery-to-model conversion. What would be really cool would be to see their engine running in Unity3D or another web platform.

rubyflashbake automatic web-aware git and github checkins

2009-05-20T00:00:00-07:00

A Ruby project inspired by Thomas Gideon’s python Flashbake project

What is rubyflashbake?

Automatically checks in files from watched directories to git and github with time, location, weather, and recent twitter comments in the commit comments.

“But, why?” you ask

I thought that Flashbake was a very cool project, but since I spend time in the Ruby world – and do more blogging than writing – converting it to Ruby seemed like a fun weekend project. Plus, I wanted to experiment with monitoring directories, building an app that works well with small Ruby plugins, do some web scraping, automate git, and building a gem.
As always, it’s all about writing snippets of fun code. This gave me an excuse to look at

Use

You can find the project on Github. It is also packaged as a Ruby Gem, so you can download and install it by:

sudo gem install cory-rubyflashbake -s http://gems.github.com/

Run rubyflashbake —example in the directory you want to watch to dump the configuration file. Fill in as needed and then launch rubyflashbake and enjoy automatic git and github commits with lots of fun location and web aware commit comments. Bask in joy.

annoying github, git, jeweler, ruby gem "bug"

2009-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

Trust me, this is too geeky for words, but while mucking around with a small ruby test project ran into a bug that consumed most of the flight back from London and a late night debug session last night. Google didn’t find the answer, so posting here in case someone else runs into it.
Let us imagine you are:
- Building an app that automatically checks directories into git. For me, this is rubyflashbake.
- Testing this app using autotest and rspec.
- During testing, you are creating and destroying git repositories, adding files, etc.
- You decide to jump on Github’s Ruby gem hosting.
- In order to play nice to Github’s gem generation, you follow their recommendations and grab the jeweler gem and add it as a rake task.
- Decide to check for test coverage with rcov, so you create a rake specs task

Hilarity will ensue. Not only will a ton of your tests fail, your main git repository will have a ton of staged files and act as if you just triggered a ton of git commands from your project root, even though all your tests take place off in a test directory. Unfortunately, all attempts to reproduce the behavior from the command line fail. Autotest still works fine, too. Hmmm.
Lots of code cleanup later I had the “Eureka!” moment and thought “I wonder what the environment looks like within autotest versus rake?”
(puts ENV.to_hash.to_s is your friend!)
Lo and behold, three environment variables were set by rake — GIT_DIR, GIT_WORK_TREE and GIT_INDEX_FILE — and these three variable will override git command line settings. Turns out, jeweler, in an attempt to be helpful, sets these environment variables up for you, hence the difference between rake and autotest.

This was easy to fix in an rspec before clause:
ENV[“GIT_DIR”] = nil
ENV[“GIT_WORK_TREE”] = nil
ENV[“GIT_INDEX_FILE”] = nil
So, strange mystery solved and a bit of knowledge gained.

it's important to reboot the jokes, too

2009-05-11T00:00:00-07:00

why jim is in the dictionary under "awesome"

2009-05-11T00:00:00-07:00

Jim Purbrick conducting the London Geek iPhone OScestra at Open Hack London. Very cool and terrifying at the same time.

thinking about insurgencies

2009-05-04T00:00:00-07:00

Just finished reading Reza Aslan’s new book, How to Win a Cosmic War on Kindle. Read it. It will almost certainly piss you off, but read it anyway. Kudos to Reza for slaying many sacred cows along the way to providing a remarkably insightful look at jihadism and extremism.
It was especially interesting to read it just before plowing through Malcolm Gladwell’s story on the New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath, It focuses on the often-ignored lesson of history that when Davids compete with Goliaths, David had better not play by Goliath’s rules. He has his usual mix of engaging examples — ranging from girl’s basketball in California to Laurence of Arabia — but the key concepts are probably familiar to anyone who reads my blog: innovation comes from collisions between formerly disjoint knowledge and when the rules change existing advantages can go out the window.
What was new to me was Gladwell’s examination of how hard it is to stick to insurgent behavior. Given almost any combination of outside pressure, easier paths, or changed opportunities, the vast majority will return “normal” behavior. Full-court presses trump skill in basketball, but don’t feel normal, so even very smart coaches don’t run them. It’s like research from several years ago that football teams should go for it on 4th down far more often then normal, which is almost universally ignored despite demonstrations that it works!
Which brings us back to Reza’s book. Conventional thinking on fighting extremism is to use military might despite many historical examples of what happens when extremists are actually brought into the democratic process. But deciding to allow former terrorists to attempt to govern is hard. Focusing on economic challenges is hard. Recognizing that the world isn’t simple black and white is hard. These are all outside our normal worldview, so it’s easier to go back to “normal” methods.
Even when they don’t work.

how cool would this be on the iphone or as a game?

2009-05-01T00:00:00-07:00

Jack Schulze has created a sweet method of looking at a city:
He explains what he did on his blog, but what jumps out at me is a) what a beautiful approach this would be for pedestrian navigation on portable devices and b) a core display mechanic for dozens of different games.
For navigation, the approach smoothly blends between a first person view in the near field (which is useful for aligning the map to what you actually are seeing) and a useful 3rd person, god’s eye view for seeing the big picture/setting context in the distance. Especially when thinking about applications where situational awareness is important, this could open up whole new lines of research on UX. Imagine this running on iPhone, with a smooth animation between current positions and where you tap in the distance. The change in view point again helps you, since in the near field you’re tapping “forward”, so your taps are on buildings, potentially to see nearby points of interest. In the far field, you’re tapping “down”, so taps naturally map to addresses.
As for games, how cool would it be to play an RTS or FPS on that map?
Very inspiring work!

brain simulations

2009-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Cool story on the BBC about the Blue Brain Project recent success in simulating neocortical columns. This 6-layered, 2mm x 0.5mm column of neurons is the basic building block of the neocortex.

These columns, and the complex wiring between them, is what makes us us, so accurately simulating one column is the first step in simulating all of them. Humans only have about 2 million neocortical columns, so even though it took a supercomputer to simulate one of them today, getting 2 million times the processing capability isn’t that far away, especially given the relatively modest bandwidth requirements between columns. With the time horizon for enough computing horsepower to simulate the entire brain only 10-15 years away and a theoretical blueprint for design and simulation well underway, synthetic brains may finally achieve what we’ve been promised since the 1960’s.

The focus on neocortical columns was made famous in geek communities by Jeff Hawkins’ book, On Intelligence. Philip was very excited by the book in 2004 and it made the Linden rounds in 2004. Soon after, Jeff announced Numenta, a company focused on developing the book’s ideas. At the time, I would have bet that by 2009, a group of us would have moved on to the brain project. After all, building Skynet always felt like an appropriate follow on to Second Life.

The exciting/terrifying part, of course, is that much like Juan Enriquez’s arguments about homo evolutis, reaching a barely functional brain is likely to be vastly more difficult than taking that brain to levels that far exceed human norms.

reza on daily show

2009-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

My friend Reza Aslan was on the Daily Show last night promoting his new book, How to Win a Cosmic War. I’ve already downloaded it to Kindle and am looking forward to reading it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M – Th 11p / 10c

Reza Aslan

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

the ultimate obscurity is not security story

2009-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

Cool story on Wired about Brazilian hijacking of US military communication satellites. Apparently, $500 gets you the kit and the knowledge to bounce off the FLTSATCOM transponders, which happily repeat any signal that hits their uplink antenna in the 292- to 317-MHz range. Think about this discussion: “Do we need to have a security protocol for these birds?” “Nah, who’s going to figure out where the satellite is, what frequency to hit it with, and then cobble the equipment together?” Oops!

google's move into 3d on web

2009-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

About a year ago, I wrote about betting on the web, surfing the wake of the whole world trying to make the web work better. Since then, much has happened around graphics on the web. The canvas tag has taken off, great game engines like Unity are emerging, and OpenGL has turned its attention to the web. Now, Google throws its hat in the ring with o3d. Very cool stuff when you think about how this will blend with Google’s 3d warehouse and sketchup. A much more interesting starting place for online collaboration than Lively.

xkcd makes me happy to be a geek

2009-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Geek humor at it’s very best.

more kindle tech books

2009-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

I wrote a few days ago about O’Reilly bringing a bunch of their tech books to kindle. Just noticed that The Pragmatic Programmers now support the mobi format, too. Thanks, PragProg!

an xkcd book!

2009-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Ok, sorry for two xkcd posts in a row, but just saw this story. Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, is releasing a physical book with 200-ish cartoons in it. Very cool, as well as an excellent discussion of how digital artifacts can effectively transition into the physical. However, how come 10,000 copies at $19? This is an artifact for us, the fans of xkcd. Where is the leather bound, vellum coffee table edition for $200? Want!

thanks o'reilly!

2009-04-18T00:00:00-07:00

Today O’Reilly announced that over 160 books were coming to Kindle. I’ve been using Amazon’s PDF conversion service but programming books often ended up mangled, so this is good news as the O’Reilly blog posts mentions improved table rendering. A quick glance seems to support this. Hopefully we’ll see many more technical books converted in the coming months.

holy crap awesome

2009-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

I know, you’re sick of GitHub love, especially if you aren’t a programmer, product manager, or developer of one stripe or another, but I really think these guys are on the right track. They have opened up their developer site and have all the pieces to make just about any project tool you can imagine. Thanks, guys! Wonder if they’ll figure out some profit sharing, bounty, or referral program to encourage you to make tools that generate paying GitHub accounts?

national geographic infinite photograph

2009-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

The National Geographic website has a very cool infinite photograph on it. It doesn’t seem to have enough photos (there are a lot of duplicates making up specific colors/intensities) but it is a neat effect.

github picks up issues

2009-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

GitHub continues its push to become a complete hub for development by adding quick-and-easy issue tracking to projects. For example, when Heather next has a complaint about the color scheme, she could open an issue on it.

How long before GitHub takes a few pages from the Innocentive playbook? They could easily add challenges and rewards via PayPal (or TipJoy), simple project management, more collaboration tools, etc.

second life growing again

2009-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

James Au posts about his own GigaOm story showing that Second Life is returning to significant monthly growth. Congrats, Linden!

balsamiq mockup xml to html conversion routines

2009-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

I needed something fun to do as a general learning project while learning the programming language Ruby, behavior driven development, and the testing tools rspec and autotest. I wrote about the early exploration here. I decided to play with converting from Balsamiq Mockups to HTML because Balsamiq is very cool, it provided a relatively complicated text case, and I can imagine some cases where being able to go straight to HTML would make Mockups even more useful. Full description, instructions for use, and code on GitHub. This is unlikely to be worked on again, but was fun to write.

hosting this blog on github

2009-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

This blog has the text, markup, and css hosted on GitHub, a most excellent service that provides storage of git repositories. Git is normally used for revision control of software code, but it is also possible to use it for storing text or other data. This blog uses GitHub pages to automatically convert the repository into the blog. I am also using the open source project Jekyll and to test changes to style, layout, and to preview new posts.

why lowered barriers to participation are so cool

2009-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

Seen the leak about the crunchpad? For those who haven’t been following this, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch fame posted about a tech idea. He wanted help to build a small, light, touchscreen pad for browsing the web. 6 months later, they had a prototype. Yesterday, what looks like a final prototype leaked. It’s cute and I can imagine many tech geeks wanting one. Sure, Michael has some unique advantages here, but this is hardware engineering done almost as quickly as a software project. Yes, that sound you hear is the world changing, again.

lots of laughing during user testing

2009-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

Major changes coming to the blog styling. Just got a rather extensive critique, so when I get some free time I will work on version two. Thanks for the patience (or for reading via Feedburner link).

tipping, aka the love machine, hits the big time

2009-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

One of the ideas at Linden Lab that I am most fond of was tipping, which Philip renamed to “The Love Machine.” The idea was that as people become busy, it becomes easier to forget to thank coworkers for going a bit out of their way to help you. Finding a crucial bug, crunching some extra numbers, helping you figure out the right person to take a question to, All no problem with a bit of help, but serious suck if not. My idea was to create a positive-sum, transparent game, where anyone could give a coworker a tip and bit of text as thanks. This way, when someone helped you, you could say “thank you” publicly and give them a tiny amount of money. I expected this to have a few benefits.

First, people like being thanked, especially publicly. Second, by giving a bit of money with tips, the thanks felt real. Third, the overall network was interesting to study. Who got the most tips, what subnetworks evolved, who wasn’t every getting any tips, who tried to game the system were all possible questions. Ultimately, because of the transparency, nobody was dumb enough to try and game it and the a lot of the data was interesting, at least early on. The system, like so much of Linden Lab, ran into organizational scale issues, but the basic idea ended up being very cool.

So, I am completely jazzed to see TipJoy take the idea to the big time, by combining TipJoy’s easy micro-payment system with Twitter and PayPal. This is seriously awesome. Obviously, it is zero-sum rather than positive-sum (although you could use it just like the Linden Love Machine if you had a central funder) but it is incredibly low friction and flexible. I expect we’ll see some very cool ideas layered on top of this!

making podcast music show up in iPod shuffle play

2009-04-05T00:00:00-07:00

The is a ton of online discussion of what to do in iTunes if you get a lot of music in podcasts. iTunes tries to be helpful and by default doesn’t include podcasts in shuffle mode. More confusing the Google searchers, older versions of iTunes treated podcasts differently than other music, so there are hints on line ranging from “remove the ID3 tags” to “reencode as AAC.” You don’t need to do any of these things.

Instead, it’s very simple:

Move the podcast songs into playlists you like
Right-click (or control click) on the song to bring up the context menu, choose “Get Info”
Select the “Options” tab and uncheck the “Skip when shuffling” checkbox

Re-sync your iPhone and you’re done. Your entire playlist will show up in shuffle! If you have lots of Podcast music, you can multiselect them and bring up “Get Info” on all the songs at once.

google not interested in this blog

2009-04-04T00:00:00-07:00

Probably not at all surprising, but my old blogger blog is indexed many dozens of pages higher than this page. Obviously, that blog has a year of posts, links, and connections, but I wonder how much bias is inherent to being on blogger. If you were linking to the old blog, please link to this one.

As a side note, I’m getting Jekyll to do excerpts by adding an excerpt variable to the liquid header. Seems like it might be possible to do this with by indexing through the content and looking for whitespace to break on, but just copying the first paragraph was easier.

why learning projects are fun

2009-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

Dropped Peldi of Mockups fame a note letting him know about my quick-and-dirty Mockups-to-HTML Ruby learning project. He’s pointing his community at it!

I hope that someone finds it useful. I’m unlikely to revisit the code any time soon, but even if it only serves as inspiration for a more useful project in the future, it has served it’s purpose.

Plus it was fun to write.

Even better, Peldi just documented his BMML spec which I had just picked through by hand, so I bet more interesting projects will be on the way soon!

blog revamp

2009-04-01T00:00:00-07:00

Based on suggestions, added excerpts and tightened the site up a fair amount. Adding in excerpts required editing existing posts, so this may blitz existing comments, which is a bummer. However, this is what testing is all about.

collaborative creation

2009-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

One of the aspects of Second Life development that made it so amazing was collaborative creation, the joy of being able to work with people around the world, in real time. From the very beginning, we made sure that as much of your activity as possible was reflected into the world. It has amazed me that nobody has picked up on this.

Apparently that has now changed.

The Hero Engine, which powers the new Star Wars MMO, is built around real-time collaboration inside the engine. Massively has a nice write-up of why this is so cool. Simutronics has been working on this engine for a while, so congratulations on getting it to the point of being production ready!

the world needs more jane mcgonigals

2009-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been lucky enough to know Jane for a few years now and she never ceases to amaze. Few people bring a broader mix of knowledge and experiences to fun, engagement, and play. She has a special genius for remixing ideas in ways that make you first go “huh” and then smack yourself in the head and go “duh!” Thanks for making us all a little smarter, Jane!

Great interview on Boing Boing Video.

engine yard is back, tweaking contrast

2009-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

Looks like Engine Yard’s problems are fixed, so Github is back up. Rough day for them and definitely brings back memories of rough days on Second Life.

In other news, tweaked the contrast a bit. Programmers seem to broadly split into light text on dark background and dark text on light background camps — ok, we also split on emacs versus vi, command line versus ide, and perl verus python — and I have always preferred light on dark.

Combine that with the MBA’s amazing screen, and I didn’t realize how hard the site was to read.

Let me know in the comments whether this is better.

posts out of order

2009-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

Looks like running Jekyll locally generates different results than when Github runs it after a push. My local site shows these posts in the correct order. A mystery!

rock and roll jihad

2009-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

My friend Salman Ahmad just wrote to let me know that his memoir, Rock & Roll Jihad, is now available for pre-order from Amazon. I’ve been fortunate to read the first few chapters and look forward to reading the full version. I’ve known Sal for a few years now and never fail to be amazed by the challenges he faced — and continues to face — as a rock star in Pakistan and South Asia.

a whole new blog

2009-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

took you long enough

Yes, it has taken forever, but I’m finally ready to move over to Jekyll full time. Will turn Feedburner on, move DNS over today, and put up a goodbye post on Blogger. I’ve pulled my talks and presentations into more web-friendly formats, found videos of talks where they exist, and had fun moving docs to Scribd.

really, why the delay?

I mucked around with Wordpress and other blogging options but didn’t find anything that really grabbed. Self-hosting seemed like too much work. Moreover, static sites + lots of javascript fits into my ideas of The Right Way™ to use the web, so being able to use Github, Disqus, Scribd, et al made sense to me.

Plus, it was a chance to learn more HTML and textile.

Overall, Jekyll seems to mostly work. The LSI approach to “similar posts” doesn’t seem to work at all. May try turning it back on once I have more stuff written. As a templating system, Liquid is quirky and makes we long for just using Ruby a la Rails, but it has been good enough so far, although I’m not happy with the options for categories and tags yet.

I may just be using it incorrectly.

is this blog going to stick?

I don’t know. There are small elements that are annoying, because I don’t have my work flow down. I think I want to write something akin to Cory’s Flashbake more targeted to blogging. Probably already written somewhere on Github, but small, fun side projects are one of lures of Ruby.

disqus for comments

2009-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

Along with a lot of the other geeks moving over to jekyll, it makes sense to try disqus for comments. Disqus lets you login with Facebook Connect so you can either sign up via Disquq or use your Facebook login.

foreclosure math

2009-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

Via Google, estimates on total number of US homes current foreclosed or being foreclosed vary between 1M and 2M.Let us assume an upper bound of 2M homes. Median US home prices are freefall, currently around $175,000, down from a peak of over $300,000 in 2006. Of course, in foreclosed areas like Cleveland, the real value is basically $0. So, let’s try to determine the sum total of wealth lost by these “toxic assets”, assuming 50% of foreclosed home are worth effectively $0 and half are worth the current median.

(1M homes) x ($300,000 lost) + (1M homes) x ($300,000 – $175,000 lost) = $425 billion

So, $425 billion to keep 2 million families in their homes, make it easier for those families to hold on to jobs and to keep working, to prop up the all the credit default swaps, etc, that are collapsing because these mortgages aren’t being repaid, and to ensure that banks don’t collapse due to unpaid loans. Why are we pouring the money into the banks directly rather than protecting tax payers? Oh, because doing this would reward a bunch of predatory lenders? First, which is more important: keeping people in homes as we enter a second great depression or punish those who took advantage of lax regulations to cause it? Second, and more importantly, the act of repaying these loans would enable a process of identifying the top 20% of most egregious loans, allowing those who broke the law to be prosecuted.

OK, I’m not an expert, but given the astronomical sums we’re talking about, keeping a sizable percentage of the workforce in homes plus propping up the umpteen trillions of dollars leveraged against those mortgages, $425 billion is starting to look pretty reasonable.

formatting and such

2009-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

Starting from scratch on design, as opposed to a Blogger template, feels very different. Trying to do a little bit at a time and see where it leads.

moving blog to github

2009-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

After a little over a year on Blogger, the incredible quantity of comment spam has exceeded my threshold of annoyance. So, it is with a mixture of trepidation and excitement that I decided to start playing around with hosting on GitHub and Jekyll.

Expect many changes as I master Liquid and Textile.

changing views

2009-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

At Linden Lab, we took a brief look at Ruby in 2006. Some Rails code had snuck into deployment and as we were digging into refactoring back end communications, Ruby and Rails came up as an option. At the time, I remember thinking that Ruby had a comfortable syntax and was as easy as Perl for whipping out quick-and-dirty tasks. Early performance testing was not encouraging and that first production piece of Rails code had issues, however, so Ruby and Rails got lumped together in the collective Linden hive mind as Bad Technology™.

Thus, when Peter decided we were going to build on Ruby and Rails, it gave me pause. Of course, since Peter was going to run engineering, it was his call. Plus, James Currier and his team at Ooga Labs were happy building on it.

So, Ruby it was.

The last six months at EMI have been a blur of learning the music business, adapting to working within a large company, and building a technology team. In making initial hires, I realized that my lack of Ruby expertise was hurting my ability to interview candidates. I had been through the pickaxe book, and various bits of data analysis code had moved from Perl to Ruby, but I hadn’t built anything of substance. So, over the holidays I took on a chunkier side project. Details to come in a later post, but in building it a bunch of useful Ruby lessons emerged.

First, if you know other programming languages and want to bump your brain into Ruby context, read Design Patterns in Ruby. Best Ruby book I’ve yet read and its intro to Ruby chapter is a superb intro to the language.

Second, embrace behavior driven development, rspec, and rcov. BDD takes things a step up from unit testing. If you’re an old time C coder, you probably are used to whipping your design out in broad comments and then coding the elements in. BDD changes this from writing comments to writing user stories and then your unit tests as you go. Hard to describe how addictive this style of coding is until you’ve done it, but it explains the evangelical nature of its adopters because it’s fun! At a mental impasse? Write a few more stories. Haven’t had your first cup of coffee yet? Sketch in the class structure to pass early tests and add a few more stories. A few minutes before the end of the day? Bump your code coverage to 100% on a file that currently is at 70%. Note that none of this applies universally to Ruby, nor did Ruby invent any of this. What Ruby does give you is a fairly easy to install and use framework of tools.

Third, if you’re on a Mac, use Growl and ZenTest and then configure reporting. What this does is to automatically rerun your tests every time you change a file and then report the results via growl. You can even have the Doom marine tell you how you’re doing! It’s all about reducing the development process to small, bite-sized chunks, with the added hook of continuous feedback.

Fourth, I’ve already talked about git and github for source code control. Having lived in the CVS/Subversion world for so long, git continues to impress. Super fast, flexible, and integrates well with TextMate.

Finally, we’ve started having movie time at lunch and watching the Pragmatic Programmers series on Metaprogramming. Very useful, without the “look how clever my code is” aspect that seems to permeate a lot of the online discussions.

talks from 2009

2009-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

2009

Discussion leader, “Multi Channel Technologies”, Sapient MC2 Executive Summit, Miami, FL, September 2009.
Ondrejka Sapient MC2 09.16.09
Panel speaker, “View from the C‐Suite,” Council on Competitiveness, State of Innovation Summit, June 2009.
Fireside chat, “Future of Virtual Worlds,” Metaplace, June 2009.
Public forum, “Cory Ondrejka and Jonathan Fanton,” MacArthur Foundation Island in Second Public forum, “Cory Ondrejka and Jonathan Fanton,” MacArtur Island, Second Life, May 2009.
Keynote, Canadian Music Week, Toronto, March 2009.
Canadian Music Week 2009 – Cory Ondrejka Keynote Canadian Music Week 2009 – Cory Ondrejka Keynote cory.ondrejka
Publish at Scribd or explore others: Presentations & Slid music emi
Panel speaker, “Arts and Culture”, US Islamic Forum, Doha, Qatar, February 2009.
Panel speaker, “Digital Music – Forging Ahead with New Business Models,” MusicEcon Conference, Los Angeles, CA, February 2009.

* Panel speaker, “Listen up – Why knowing your fans matters,” MIDEM, Cannes, January 2009.

yes we did

2008-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

I’m writing 38,000 feet over the North Atlantic and I feel like jumping up and down. I’d probably end up arrested and the flight diverted to Reykjavik if I did, so perhaps not.

But I want to.

One of the flight attendants just passed along “200 to 90. Obama won Ohio.” I can’t remember enough of Nate’s work to know if this makes it a sure thing and part of me is still convinced that he’ll somehow lose and I’ll have to move to New Zealand.

I was a Linden employee for 3 days when I got on BART to head home and heard they had called Florida for Gore. People were laughing and joking on the train, happy the math looked promising. It was a good night. New job, world’s coolest project, cool people to work with in Philip, Andrew, Tessa, and Frank, and the country going in the right direction.

When my fiance picking me up at BART, she said Florida was back in play. We spent the night huddled around the television, waiting to see what happened.

I listened to a lot of NPR over the next weeks. Wrote the land code to arguments about chads, fairness, and the democratic process. Worked on strain gauge geometries with Andrew as we played with the rig. Created predator-prey models for the forest and whipped out the first version of lltask. Called Philip from the train home, excited about an idea to integrate a 3D Sodaplay.

And then it was over. The Supreme Court ruled and Bush was our President.

Fast forward 4 years. Our country went through 9/11, invaded two sovereign nations, failed to capture bin Ladin, survived the dot com bubble, and become more partisan than any time in recent memory.

Interesting times for Linden as well.

The forest transformed into Linden World and then into Second Life. We launched, failed to grow, laid off 1/3 of the company, gave residents IP ownership, changed the economic model, and received a big round of funding just before the State of Play 2 conference in New York. Everyone I knew was excited for Kerry’s prospects, expected it to be close, but had faith that American’s would see what a disaster the first term of Bush’s Presidency had been.

Jerry Paffendorf had asked me to speak at the Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, so I was writing on Tuesday as the exit poll numbers started leaking out. A Salon article riffed on those numbers and suggested that Kerry was going to win. Again, a happy trip home on BART. Again, very different numbers by the time I was home. Another night up late watching the numbers. My wife and I went to sleep knowing that Bush had won again.

The next day half of Linden stayed home and commiserated over irc and email. We had more people in the office on 9/12.

On Thursday I was staring at a talk that just wouldn’t pull together. Angry, depressed, sad, it was hard to build the kind of talk Accelerating Change deserved. Philip suggested I write angry, so I did. It wasn’t filmed, but the audio is online.

I listened to that talk while waiting for my flight. As hard as it is to listen to myself — I sound like that?? Seriously? — it was a nice trip back, because this was the first time I spoke about some of the underlying drivers of Second Life that have impacted so much of my thinking since then.

Cultural production. Real-time, collaborative creation. Continuous improvement of content in the world due to breadth of participation and competition. Economic motivations driving massive and long-term cooperation and organization. Using Second Life for education, training, and as a filter for hiring.

People and communities not being evil.

As mad as I was, I’m a little surprised I remembered that. After all, my community, my country, just let me down. We allowed bigotry and fear to profoundly impact our decisions. Listened to sound bites rather than each other.

But the evidence of Second Life was compelling. Given tools and capabilities, people worked together in amazing ways. Leveraged amateur-to-amateur education on a scale no one anticipated. Cooperated. Created. Innovated.

Which brings us to now.

Virtually everyone smart I know was somehow involved in the Obama campaign. I first brushed against the campaign nearly two years ago and they were already asking questions, creating a ground game, and building on what Trippy and Dean accomplished with everything learned about viral communities in the intervening years.

I didn’t end up involved with the campaign to any degree. Sure, I blogged about it and donated, but mostly I was working. I was asked to sign on to Obama’s tech policy when it was released last November and would have, except that the final version hit my inbox a few minutes ahead of Philip’s email informing me that he wanted me to leave Linden. Unfortunate timing, that.

Fortunately they had plenty of voices of support. It was, and is, a good start for thinking about technology. More on that in a later post.

I do smile remembering a wide ranging brainstorm session at Aspen airport on the way home from the Aspen Institute. There were both Obama and Clinton advisors there and we were talking voter registration and turnout. Traditionally, ground teams focus on getting people to make 3 commitments in order to ensure turn out.

Make a donation. Go to a rally. Vote in the primary.

If you do those things, you’ll vote in the general election.

We talked about how to use technology to help. Give volunteers online communities to feel more connected. Use participation in social networks as overt acts, commitments. Mashup data to help registrations. Remember that email is for old people, so focus on cell phones and SMS to connect to the youth vote. I doubt much of this was new to the Obama team, but over the next year there were some follow up questions and phone calls. A lot of knowledgeable online community people get very, very busy.

All of which led to an historic, game-changing election.

An election where we spent more time learning from each other rather than from Rovian sound bites. Where communities connected both internally and across boundaries. Not that we’re done, but Obama’s broad base of support should be a mandate to heal the destructive red-blue divisions so exacerbated during the last 8 years.

Healing that should serve as a model for how America — and more importantly, Americans — reengage with the world.

A flight attendant just passed along “Obama has 324.”

Maybe I will start jumping up and down.

Congratulations, President-Elect Obama! Hooray as well for everyone involved in his campaign.

Yay, us!

two books worth reading

2008-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

How to foster and sustain disruptive innovation has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been coalescing my thoughts on how I would do it and reading up on other approaches. To that point, I recently read two books that apply.

The first came via the 37 Signals blog. Maverick, by Richard Semler, is the story of how the Brazilian firm Semco reinvented itself during the early 1990’s. Semco is a diverse 3000 person firm that has units doing everything from industrial mixing units to property management. What makes Semco interesting is that it is run in an incredibly democratic fashion, including groups and individuals setting their own wages, virtually nonexistent hierarchy, and limited management. Having helped craft and drive Linden’s culture, it was a fascinating read to look at what it meant to take many of our ideas farther, but also gave great insight into some of the basic differences.

Semco’s business units — by virtue of their extreme diversification — operated almost independently of each other, allowing different groups to generate high communication rates within the group without flooding other business units with excess information. Much of Semco’s business revolves around improving on existing engineering processes, and their model works remarkably well for that. In order to generate more disruptive innovation, Semco adopted a model somewhat akin to the Skunk Works model I described, with rotating participation in a team of outside the box thinkers. Semco also discovered, as I would have predicted, that an organization without structure is vulnerable to politics and rumors, so transparency — all the way up to Richard Semler as CEO — was critical to making it work. In addition, great people management and rigorous feedback and reviews — great people process — was absolutely required to make it all work. Finally, different parts of the company organize differently, so some teams and groups are hierarchical within Semco’s less structued whole.

So, empower employees, build interfaces between different units, support (embrace) differences between how groups function, and make sure that people are well managed. Lots of companies experiment with this, but Semco makes for a great case study in going all the way.

The second book came via Jon Taplin, The Dream Machine, by Mitchell Waldrop. This amazing book covers the entire history of the personal computer, from the early work of Norbert Wiener at MIT (who’s history is told in equally good Dark Hero of the Information Age), through the WWII advances in computers, the impact of ARPA, the breakthroughs at SRI and PARC, and the subsequent creation of the personal computer. The story is tied together through the life of J.C.R. Licklider, who’s career is touches nearly every aspect of the emergence of the PC and the Internet.

From an innovation standpoint, what makes “The Dream Machine” such a remarkable read is how crushing a blow it provides to anyone who wants to argue that incubators don’t work or that it isn’t possible to foster disruptive innovation. The story of the silicon revolution shows again and again the importance of allowing ideas to cross polinate and remix, of supporting knowledge and experience collisions in ways that preseverve the ideas and allow later thinkers to riff on them. It details the kind of management structures and support innovation needs to thrive. Young and old turks alike need impossible challenges to inspire them, but then the freedom and resources to overcome the challenges.

Both books feel timely. Larry Page had a recent interview in Fortune talking about these issues. What’s interesting is that it still doesn’t feel like he’s really looked at the history. Google’s 70/20/10 goal is a good one, but what is the unit of time it operates on? If 10% of Google’s workforce focused on disruptive innovation, where would Google be in 5 years? After all, many of the breakthroughs in “The Dream Machine” were years or decades in the making. Is Larry sure that we’re so much smarter today that we can get the same results in our spare time? Or, consider Microsoft. Rather than buying Yahoo! to gain some market in what is most profitable online today, why aren’t they leveraging their phenomenal resources to create what will be profitable in 2015? $40 billion could support a lot of disruption.

Enjoy both books and let me know what you think!

innovating innovation

2008-04-28T00:00:00-07:00

One of the best parts of the Second Life experience was its impact on how I think about innovation. From the first conversations with Philip about how to build Linden and our embrace of user-generated content to ESC and Rivers Run Red, innovation has been central to the process. And I do mean innovation – the commercialization of knowledge – not just invention – the creation of knowledge. It’s not enough to come up with interesting new ideas; those ideas need to be taken to a market.
As I zero in on what to do next, innovation is once again a central discussion, so I wanted to write up my thoughts on how I would approach creating an environment to maximize innovation. To maximize the commercialization of knowledge.
(nota bene: “Commercialization”, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean “for profit.” It means that it has been released into a market. Case in point would be a new standard or piece of open source code released for free in order to create later opportunities.)
Innovation is very much a random walk. As much as we want innovation to be like throwing darts at the bull’s-eye, particularly in disruptive innovation it is extremely difficult to recognize a priori that an idea will be good. Moreover, most disruptive innovation emerges at the intersections of (largely) disjoint communities of practice and of different social networks.
These two realities – no certainty of direction and the need for heterogeneity – have implications if you want to maximize innovation. First, it means you want to create situations where you are able to try lots of different ideas. Second, you want as much diversity as possible in how and who tries. Third, it means you want to recycle ideas as the people and expertise around them changes.
Some of these implications are easier to leverage than others. Y Combinator, for example, does a very good job of optimizing for the first one and a reasonable job on the second. By drawing from a large set of submissions and then pushing participants through a short development cycle, Y gets to do a lot of experimenting and draw from a broad set of people. By focusing on such junior, hungry teams, Y creates massive incentives for those teams to bring a project to market in order to get funding or to be acquired.
However, there are tradeoffs. The micro scale of the funding means that participation is biased towards younger, more junior entrepreneurs. The cyclic approach of not being an incubator means that projects are strongly incented to succeed enough to get the next round of funding, rather than having the opportunity to fully explore an idea, decide there are better options and start over. Finally, Y doesn’t directly participate in funding projects at the next level or supporting more expensive experiments, constraining the exploration space.
(None of these are criticisms of Y, by the way. Paul, Trevor, Jessica, and Robert have adopted a specific strategy that is generating lots of interesting ideas, is clearly a blast, and may end up being financially successful.)
It simply may not be an optimal strategy for innovation, so there are a few aspects that I would approach differently.
You need greater diversity of participation, particularly of experience, temperament, and expertise. You want to be able to build teams that can blend years of expertise with youthful fire, impetuousness with wisdom. Filtering participants down to only those who can dispense with income, health insurance, and non-Ramen caloric sources robs you of the ability to leverage this diversity. Instead, I would argue to make them employees, to give them the scaffolding and support — salaries, health care, vacation — required to take huge risks, to experiment freely.
(Of course, this adds cost. Worse, it risks creating a comfy environment without innovation, but I think you address that through cultural and other means.)
Innovation needs a high failure rate. Paul et al are justly proud of the incredibly high percentage of Y teams that reach demo day with a product and that later to go on to achieve funding. However, what if the incentives that drive this performance – the Y team picking projects likely to launch in 3 months, teams not having an easy second chance, tight finances – mean that they are also more risk averse than they should be? If you change those incentives and support greater failure, the initial project ideas can explore a far larger set of ideas, resulting in more failures, but also more learning. Philip had a great saying about the benefits of “noble failures” which I think was dead on. You need to celebrate failures, capture the experience of them, and then preserve that information so that a later group can decide to riff of the failure, to build knowledge and try again.
About now, some readers will be commenting that this looks like an incubator and that all incubators are failures. Yes and no.
This does look like an incubator, but an incubator in the Bell Labs, ARPA, PARC, or Stanford grad school sense, not the modern “will trade space for equity.” Existing teams don’t need incubators, so the idea of providing a home to a set of them doesn’t seem like a good one to me. However, incubating ideas – where you bring bright, motivated, diverse, interested people together, give them challenges, and then get out of the way – has a long history of producing world-changing innovation. So, historically incubators weren’t failures, it’s just that we’ve changed what we mean when we talk about them.
The downsides, of course, are cost and comfort. If you have to employ everyone, to give them competitive salaries and benefits, you have a much higher burn rate. Worse, you must ensure that employees take great ideas out of the incubator to go start them. On the comfort side, you need appointments, contracts, or term limits, combined with a culture that your goal is to join startups. You can probably incent this as well – unpaid parts of your contract get transferred to the startup so startups recruit people, greater ownership of startups you helped launch if you also launch one, etc – but transparency and experimentation is needed here.
The cost is still a challenge, especially if you insist – as I think you should – on focusing the value generation on the launched ventures rather than the incubator. The incubator builds knowledge and expertise but should not be trying to IPO itself, since this strongly misaligns incentives with maximizing innovation.
Because of this, an attempt to innovate innovation may require very different – dare I say innovative? – approaches to funding in order to have enough runway to have a chance to succeed. It might be best applied within a larger company rather than as a stand-alone incubator. Consider a large company with a need for disruptive innovation but suffering from the “raising mice in elephant cages” problems common to large corporations. Rotating employees through a Skunk Works – and potentially letting them mix ideas with academics, outside experts, or interns – might form the kind of catalyst needed to break out of the innovator’s dilemma. As employees came and went from other groups and divisions, a Skunk Works would act as an innovation virus, spreading innovation processes and ideas throughout the organization. More importantly, by committing to experimenting with innovation, funders or the supporting corporation can avoid the micromanagement and hyper focus on short-term gains so deadly to innovation.
When we think about markets or technologies that seem moribund and unable to change, disruptive innovation is probably looming. The challenge is how to avoid Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and drive that innovation rather than letting it happen around you. The answer may be to look backward — to PARC, to Bell Labs — in order to reinvent a path forward.

connections and networking

2008-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

I was chatting with Pathfinder at the Virtual Worlds Conference 08 in New York and we realized that there were two particularly long chains of personal connections that were relevant to the event and Second Life. The first was the State of Play conference, the second a video I had just been emailed showing Second Life being used for public diplomacy in Doha, Qatar.

The inaugural State of Play conference in November, 2003 was the first inflection point in Second Life’s growth. It was where Philip took down the house by announcing, during a shared panel with There.com’s Will Harvey, that Second Life residents would retain intellectual property rights to their creations. This announcement, the culmination of months of debate initiated by Larry’s comment about ownership (1) and a complete rethinking of our EULA, generated incredible excitement and is a huge part of Second Life being what it is today.

But how did Linden Lab end up at State of Play, a small conference about games, economics, and law, created by Beth Noveck and held at New York Law School?

To answer that, we back up a few months to the first Austin Game Conference. Chris Sherman — who also created the Virtual World Conference — had decided the time was right for an MMORPG-focused games conference in Austin. Robin Harper and I attended, largely because we were still unsure of whether Second Life was a game or not. Second Life had around 1000 users, so basically nobody had heard of it or knew who we were. On the second morning, Raph Koster delivered the keynote that later became A Theory of Fun, which hit many topics related to user-created content and motivations for creation, so I decided to go up and say hello.

I hadn’t met Raph yet at this point, but he knew about Second Life because our first community relations employee, Peter Alau (2) knew Raph from Sony and had setup a meeting where Philip and Peter visited SOE and demoed Second Life. Raph recognized the Linden Lab t-shirt I was wearing as I waited after the talk. We started chatting and ended up talking about music, along with an ASCAP lawyer who had some very interesting questions about music in online games.

As we walked across the main hall, Raph mentioned to the lawyer that he was speaking at a law and games conference at New York Law School. He said that Ted Castronova was going to be there, too, and this it would also focus on economics. I thought that it seemed like a good conference for Second Life, but then didn’t think much about it until I was sitting at Austin airport with Robin, waiting to fly home. We were discussing the fact that even though AGC was a great conference, Second Life didn’t really seem to fit in. I remembered Raph’s comment, did a bit of googling – since I hadn’t remembered which New York school – and showed it to Robin. She thought it looked interesting, especially since we were in the midst of our IP transition, so once back at Linden, she and Catherine Smith reached out to NYLS and Beth.

And to think that Robin and I considered skipping the keynote!

This will seem like a left-turn at Albuquerque, but it isn’t. I just received a pointer to this video:

This video is thrilling to see, because it raises some of the ideas possible when virtual worlds are applied to public diplomacy. It also demonstrates how far networks can extend.

After State of Play, Beth gave a talk at Harvard on virtual worlds, law, IP, and economics. This talk generated a lot of excitement at Harvard and led to me being invited to speak at the Berkman Center, where I met John Clippinger, a Berkman Fellow. John was working on the user-centric identity project Higgins (3) which seemed very applicable to Second Life, so he invited me to a later Berkman conference. At that conference, John, BCG’s Philip Evans, and I ended up kicking around the idea that the massive entrepreneurial activity within Second Life could be a model and tool for real-world collaboration and market activity, and that Dubai might be the perfect test case.

John thought he knew the perfect person to ask about it, so a few weeks later we met Della van Heyst in Palo Alto. Della deserves a blog post — hell, an entire blog — all to herself, but for this story it is enough to say that she didn’t think Dubai was the right place to start but that she was organizing AMD’s Global Vision conference and would I like to speak at it, since Second Life was running on a huge grid of AMD-powered computers? That seemed like a great opportunity for us, so I accepted.

Ironically, by the time of the conference, Intel has reclaimed their lead in the MIPS/watt game and Linden had switched back to Intel CPUs, making for a somewhat awkward talk. The evening before my talk, Della hosted a speaker’s dinner where I met Juan Enriquez and talked his ear off about virtual worlds and their uses. Juan subsequently introduced me to Cynthia Schneider, the former US Ambassador to Holland and one of the organizers of the US Islamic Forum in Doha (along with Peter Singer at the Brookings Institution.) Thanks to Cynthia, I attended the conference, spoke at Brookings (4) and re-introduced Cynthia to Josh Fouts at the Center for Public Diplomacy (5).

Which led to the panel and video at this year’s Doha conference.

Pathfinder had seen the video — and has met most of the connections in this story — but as we laid them all out, we were amazed by how infectious the promise of virtual worlds are. It was against the backdrop of that conversation that I found the sudden smallness of virtual worlds disappointing.

Notes, because there are even more connections…

(1) I’ve written about the impact of Larry’s comment in Collapsing Geography.
(2) Peter, worked at Linden because his then-girlfriend/now-wife and my wife had met at a mutual friend’s wedding.
(3) Higgins also has historical links to Andrew Donoho’s Papillon project, which arose in part due to State of Play and a tech talk I gave to IBM Austin’s Advanced Technology Group.
(4) Which led to the hiring Sue Singer, who Congressman Markey specifically thanked at the hearings last week!
(5) How I met Josh and Doug, and ended up teaching at Annenberg, is in a previous post.

demo 2002

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

The Demo conference is going on right now and the blogosphere is abuzz. Certainly, Demo doesn’t have the same glow that it did during the dotcom bubble, but I’m hearing more about it this year than I have for a while. This got me thinking about Demo 2002, when LindenWorld was first showed to the public.

I don’t recall why we picked Demo 2002 as the venue for our launch but we started pushing in January — Demo that year was in February. A lot of the pieces of what would be Second Life were in place. Primitar had finally been replaced with human avatars. Those humans even had some rudimentary customizations, mainly around t-shirts. Using LSL1 we had built a small city with operating doors, an elevator, a slide, and music mix table. As the planning came together, we spent a lot of time debating exactly how to use our 6 minutes. If you aren’t familiar with Demo,you have 6 minutes on stage, with a big timer. They give you the hook when it gets to 6:00.

Someone had uploaded scans of US coins and we realized that a very cool effect was to alt-zoom onto a coin on the ground then back the camera up into the sky, past the clouds and the space station, before zooming in rapidly. We decided to have the coin on the floor of a copy of the hotel Demo was being held at, so we all scoured the Web looking for source images. Soon, a rough approximation of the grand ballroom appeared, with lighting keyed to switches and huge sliding back doors to fly out.

Meanwhile, Philip was writing out his speech. It was — and as far as I know still is — the only speech he ever wrote out and practiced. It evoked Legos and Tinker Toys before switching to a rolling description that I would fly to. Philip would say “So, let’s turn on the lights, open the doors, and fly out into the world!” and I would click on the scripted objects before flying out the back of the room, over the hills and onto a platform where I road an elevator down to the town’s main street — with Philip joking about the “elevator pitch” — before a quick walk through some LindenWorld tutorials, a trip to a dance club, and then fireworks. We practiced this demo dozens — hundreds — of times, until we had it down.

But, there were problems. We had no idea what kind of net connection was waiting for us in Phoenix, so we packed extra computers to run a local grid. Worse, no laptops in early 2002 could run LindenWorld at all well, so we shipped high end Dells and carried out top-of-the-line nVidia cards. James Cook became the master organizer, taking over several desks in the office to collect everything we needed. He tested and packed spares of everything. Mice, graphics cards, network cables, switches, power cords. He figured out how to spread items between different boxes so if shipments were lost we’d never be SOL. We didn’t trust Dell to deliver w
orking computers, so James and I would went to Phoenix early to test the network, pick up the machines, and solve any problems.

We got to the hotel and after wandering into a lot of random rooms, stumbled into Chris Shipley and the Demo team. We found our computers and their networking gang. They were just getting the network up and initial results looked bad — incredibly high ping times. However, the route settled out during the day and soon we were happily running LindenWorld from the show floor. Sweet! We went to the airport to meet Philip and Hunter Walk before having dinner with Mitch. We were able to do a run through in the demonstration area and it went smoothly. Everything seemed to be going well.

We were the first demo of the conference, so I was up early the next morning and wandered over to the ballroom. Small problem — no network! I woke James up and he and I started thinking through how to run a local grid when the Demo network team found their problem and got their network up and running again. Everybody started getting tense as time ticked down to the start of the conference.

I went into the bathroom and all you could hear were nervous geeks vomiting into toilets. You could smell the fear and tension. Remember, this was February, 2002. We were deep in the crash, 9/11 had seemingly just happened, nobody was getting funding for anything. A Demo performance could be make-or-break for dozens of companies.

Philip and I went backstage and waited. Chris gave her opening speech and then it was us. There were three steps up onto the stage and Philip clipped his toe and nearly wiped out. But, he recovered and launched into his talk. The demo computer was working fine — did I mention that we crashed the demo about 1 in 10 run throughts? — and I zoomed the camera in — “Philip joking about the 30,000’ view” — trying to sync with Philip. I flew out, avoided biffing the landing at the elevator, and watched the time. We were dead on. Linden employees in San Francisco were logged in, too, so we walked past them at the demo area, and headed for the dance club. I tossed grenades and shattered a box textures with a horrible Power Point slide — no Power Point at Demo! — which was especially cool as this was when we briefly had real-time vertex shadows on the terrain, so the tumbling pieces cast shadows. The I hit the Windows key and dumping out of full screen mode.

Yes, after practicing a billion times, I hit the fucking Windows key. I had a moment of panic before maximizing the app and continuing. Unfortunately, the transition from full screen to windowed caused my avatar to stop rendering, so I flipped into first person, hit the dance club, spun some tunes, before going outside, rezzing some fireworks, and launching them as the clock hit 6:00.

We had done it! To thunderous applause, we left the stage and high-fived. Philip was laughing about almost tripping and hadn’t noticed my Windows key snafu. James came back stage and said we had rocked and that the stage dress had hidden the almost trip. We watched the rest of the demos before heading for the show floor to do demos and talk to people for two days, laying groundwork for our private Alpha and some of the mainstream interest that would follow.

In hindsight, we spent a lot of time kicking ourselves for not just showing a movie. Sure, Demo is all about the ballsy, high wire, live demo, but the reality is some people play it safe. We were watching one of the broadband wireless demos — supposedly live — when James noticed the he and I were in the background of a “live” shot outside. Either we had mastered the art of bilocation or those guys were faking it. Different strokes for different folks.

For Linden Lab, it was a huge turning point. We had met an external deadline, had proved that people not at 333 Linden Street would find the idea interested, and had the pieces in place to open for Alpha. All-in-all, Demo 2002 was a pretty important moment in Linden history.

And, from then on, whenever I have used a Windows PC, I’ve ripped the Windows key off the keyboard.

lsl1

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

I just had a chance to read James Au’s new book, The Making of Second Life. It was a fun read, but like any collection of memories, it captures only a tiny slice of the events that went into making Second Life. So, I think it would be fun to make a semi-regular part of this site different moments from my memories of the first 7 years of Second Life.

So, my first metaverse memory:

Around August of 2001, back when Second Life was called Linden World (note 1), there was no scripting language in SL. Primitar was about to replace the spaceships and floating eyeballs that were the original avatars and James was doing the first major UI revamp so that we could add to the world without shooting. The entire team had been debating how to add behavior into the system for months, with Philip arguing that we should just use physics. Philip had some really good points, because if we were able to use Havok for all of our behaviors, residents would be able to gauge the complexity of an object by just looking at it — like mechanical systems in the real world — and we wouldn’t have to divert scarce resources into a project that could take significant time and effort. Mitch was also an advocate of visual complexity representing behavioral complexity, and I think there was something to that idea.

Unfortunately, Havok running on Pentium 4 servers was nowhere near powerful enough to represent complex systems in a general way. We had built some simple slides and teeter-totters, and while these were good geek fun, they didn’t extend to create the kind of behaviors we all knew the world needed. But, I also believed that Philip was right. We just didn’t have the development resources to divert a large number of people to build a scripting language.

So, I decided to crank one out in a night. Andrew and I both did semi-regular all nighters during those early Linden days — including a memorable night when Andrew managed to lock me out of the room my keys were in and set the alarm, but that’s another story. I am a huge believer is limiting developers to 40-50 hour weeks in order to maintain long-term productivity, but it is fun to occasionally proving you can still create something in a night. A simple language seemed like a perfect fit.

LSL (or, what became LSL1 when I wrote LSL2 to replace it) looked a lot like assembly, because this allowed the least amount of work to go into the parser and compiler. It had some of the functionality of the LSL2 — for example, it could detect if you clicked on an object or a collision — and had functions. It also was already event driven, an approach central to LSL2. Most importantly, it was working just in time for a Friday “Show and Tell”! I built a simple garage door, where a box would move from open to closed when you clicked on it, as well as some rotating objects, and demonstrated it.

Everybody was jazzed and after some discussion, we agreed that it should get rolled into the code. Philip immediately combined LSL1 with the physics engine to build the wind chimes that graced the original starting area. It would be about 8 months before I found time to revisit it and build LSL2 (note 2), the scripting language used in SL today. Finding time to build LSL2 became critical because our Alpha residents were building content so quickly in LSL1 and we knew that we couldn’t support LSL1 going forward.

But that is a story for another day.

(1) There have been various reports of where the name Linden World came from. Sadly, that name was my fault. When I gave my signed offer letter to Philip, we met down at Accel’s office in Palo Alto. One of the best parts of the early Linden offer letters is that Philip wrote them in a relatively informal style that perfectly captured his excitement about Linden. If I recall correctly, it had a wonderful phrase about how happy he was to be hiring me and that we were going to change the world. I was excited and worried, since I was walking away from what I knew — game development — and trying something quite new, and a bit intimidated by the whole Accel VC vibe. Philip set me at ease and introduced me to several of the Accel partners, including Jim Breyer. I handed him the paperwork that would put me on a new path and he shook my hand, saying how much fun we were going to have building this new world. I responded with “Yes, building Linden World is going to a blast.” I paused. “But, let’s never call it that!” Unfortunately, the name stuck in early discussions with Andrew and Frank — and was cemented thanks to Frank’s “Welcome to Linden World!” audio sample — despite all of us agreeing that it was a horrible name. It wasn’t until after Demo, the hiring of Hunter and Robin, and the move to 2nd Street that we were able to really revisit the name.

(2) LSL2 was designed and built over the course of about a week in early 2002. I had done some general Lex-Yacc homework before that, as it had been years since I had used them, and we did one meeting where we brainstormed what the structure of LSL2 should be. The initial LSL2 implementation didn’t have lists. An extremely broken list implementation was added a few months later and then debugged for months. LSL2 will soon be running on the Mono open source CLI engine, which will make it much faster. For all of its challenges — nobody is harder on LSL2 than I am — it is still satisfying to know that over a million people have collectively written over 2.5 billion lines of code with LSL2.

talks from 2008

2008-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

2008
• Keynote speaker, “Recursive Innovation – Building Linden Lab and Second Life,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work, San Diego, CA, November 2008.
CSCW 08 Keynote Cory Ondrejka

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Internet & Technolog Presentations & Slid second life

• Keynote speaker, “Riding the Wave – Innovation and the Future of Music,” Digital Music Forum West, October 2008.

• Keynote speaker, “Virtual Worlds,” International Market Assessment India, July 2008.
• Panel speaker, “Collapsing Geography,” Games, Learning and Society Conference, Madison, WI, July 2008.
• Keynote speaker, “Future of Virtual Worlds,” Freescale Technology Conference, Orlando, FL, June 2008.
• Gerson Lehrman Group seminar, “Virtual Worlds – the Next 18 months”, Palo Alto, CA, May 2008.
• Panel speaker, “Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus,” Case Western Reserve University, May 2008.

• Panelist on the future of virtual worlds, MetaverseU, February 2008.
• Faculty seminar on virtual worlds, Annenberg School for Communication, January – May 2008.
USC Faculty Lecture 1

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USC Faculty Lecture 2

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USC Faculty Lecture 3

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USC Faculty Lecture 4

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USC Faculty Lecture 5

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USC Faculty Lecture 6

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USC Faculty Lecture 7

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talks from 2007

2007-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

2007
• Keynote speaker to European Commission Publisher’s Forum, December 2007.
• Presenter to US-Arab Economic Summit, Bahrain, December 2007.
• Presenter to National Science Foundation Summit, Boulder, CO, October 2007.
• Presented Second Life and “Collapsing Geography” to House Commerce Committee chair, ranking member, and staffers, Washington, DC, October 2007.
• Panelist on “Get a (virtual) life” on NPR Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, August 2007.
• Culture and communication working group participant at the Aspen Institute FOCAS conference, August 2007.
• Participant in Rendon Group working session on “Discrediting Suicide Extremism,” August 2007.
• Keynote speaker on virtual worlds and user-generated content at the iMBx SEASIAN Ministerial Conference in Singapore, June 2007.

• Panel speaker on virtual worlds and education, iCommons Conference, June 2007.

• Participant and provocateur at the 2007 Rueschlikon Conference on “Information Governance” in Zurich, Switzerland, June 2007. This invitation-only forum is hosted by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
• Presented “Collapsing Geography” to UC Irvine MBA students, May 2007.
• Panelist on user-generated content, Media in Transition conference, April 2007.

• Keynote speaker at Cisco, ISBG offsite conference, March 2007.
• Presented “Future of Innovation” at Freedom to Connect conference, March 2007.
• Presented “Collapsing Geography” at Microsoft Academic Days conference, February 2007.

publications from 2007

2007-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Ondrejka, C. “Collapsing Geography,” Innovations: Technology | Governance | Globalization, MIT Press, 2007
collapsing-geography

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Ondrejka, C. “Education Unleashed,” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media, MIT Press, 2007
education-unleashed

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Ondrejka, C, et al. “Second Life: The Official Guide,” Wiley Publishing, 2007

talks from 2006 and earlier

2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

2006
• Keynote speaker at Beyond 2006, November 2006.
• Featured speaker at the New Context Conference, September 2006.
• Panelist on “The Future of Virtual Worlds” and “Beyond Subscriptions” at the Austin Game Conference, September 2006.
• Presented Second Life at the Aspen Institute FOCAS conference, August 2006.
• Presented “Building Reality” at Nature/MacMillian Publishing Group Tech Talk, July 2006.
• Presented “Imagining Reality” at the TransISTor 06 Conference, July 2006.
• Presented “Education Commons” at the iSummit 06 Conference, June 2006.
• Participant and provocateur at the 2006 Rueschlikon Conference on “Innovative Entrepreneurship” in Zurich, Switzerland, June 2006. This invitation-only forum is hosted by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
• Panelist on the “Profiting from Innovative Online Communities” at E3, May 2006.
• Presented “Digital Institutions” at the Berkman Workshop on Digital Institutions, May 2006.
• Demonstrated Second Life as part of the Games for Health Capital Hill Demos, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, April 2006.
• Presented “Online Worlds as Online Nations”, Game Developers Conference, March 2006.
• Presented Second Life as a High Order Bit, O’Reilly ETech, March 2006.
• Panelist and moderator for “Physical Simulations and Virtual Worlds”, American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, February 2006.
• Keynote speaker at “Microsoft Academic Days: Are Universities Dead?” February 2006.

2005
• Presented “Changing Realities” at the 22nd Chaos Computer Club Conference, December 2005.

• Presented “People Powered” at the Berkman Luncheon Series, November 2005.
• Presented “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” at the National Academies, November 2005.
• Panelist on the “State of Play Dinner Panel” at State of Play 3, October 2005.
• Presented “One Thing to Tell the World About Games” at Accelerating Change, September 2005.
• Presented “People Powered Places: Some Missing Pieces” at FooCamp, August 2005.
• Presented “People Powered Places” at Microsoft Research Tech Talk, August 2005.
• Presented “Innovation at the Edge” at the Navy R&D Partnership Conference, July 2005.
• Presented “Building Better Places: 5 Missing Pieces” at IBM Tech Talk in Cambridge, MA, July 2005.
• Presented “Brace for Impact” with Dr. James Cook and Dr. Megan Conklin at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference, Madison, WI, June 2005.
• Panelist on “Intellectual Property and Virtual Worlds” at the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Law Conference, April 2005.
• Presented “Case Study: Building Serious Game MMPs using Second Life” at the Serious Game Summit, March 2005.
• Presented “Building Better Place and 5 Bottlenecks” at IBM Austin, February 2005.
• Panelist on “Ownership in Online Worlds” at the Rules and Borders Conference, February 2005.
• Presented “Building Better Places” at the Palo Alto Research Center, January 2005.

2004
• Keynote speaker at “Accelerating Change 2004: Physical Space, Virtual Space and Interface.” November 2004.
• Panelist on “Intellectual Property/Digital Property” at the State of Play 2 Conference, hosted by New York Law School and Yale Law School, October 2004.
• Moderator for “How to Break into the Game Industry” mini-conference, hosted by the Austin Game Initiative, September 2004.
• Speaker at the “Virtual Worlds: Design and Future Directions” workshop, part of MIT’s DCC04 conference. July 2004.
• Participant and speaker at the 2004 Rueschlikon Conference on “Openness, Trust and Sovereignty” in Zurich, Switzerland, June 2004. This invitation-only forum is hosted by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
• Guest speaker on the relationships between intellectual property and digital worlds at Yale Law School and New York Law School, April 2004.
• Moderator for “How to Break into the Game Industry” mini-conference, hosted by the Austin Game Initiative, January 2004.

2003
• Panelist on “Designing for the Future” at the State of Play Conference, hosted by New York Law School and Yale Law School, November 2003.

publications from 2006

2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Ondrejka, C. “Finding Common Ground in New Worlds”, Games and Culture, January 2006
common-ground

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Essays Academic Work Virtual worlds Innovation

publications from 2005

2005-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Ondrejka, C. “Power by the People: User-Creation in Online Games,” Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2, Charles River Media, 2005

Ondrejka, C. “Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse.” New York Law Review, 2005
Escaping the Gilded Cage

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Essays Academic Work Virtual worlds Innovation

Ondrejka, C. “Changing Realities.” Themis Group (www.themis-group.com), January 2005
Changing Realities

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Internet & Technolog Presentations & Slid Virtual worlds Economics

publications from 2004

2004-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Ondrejka, C. “Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons: Economics and Ownership in Second Life.” Gamasutra (www.gamasutra.com) 2004
Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work Virtual worlds Economics

Ondrejka, C. “A Piece of Place: Modeling the Digital on the Real in Second Life.” Linden Lab whitepaper, November 2004.
A Piece of Place

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work Virtual worlds

Ondrejka, C. “Living on the Edge: Digital Worlds Which Embrace the Real World.” Linden Lab whitepaper, June 2004
Living on the Edge

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Essays Academic Work Virtual worlds

publications from 2003 and earlier

2003-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Ondrejka, C. and P. Rosedale. “Enabling Player-Created Online Worlds with Grid Computing and Streaming.” Gamasutra (www.gamasutra.com), 2003