Address is approximate – Imagination is vital

I came across this piece which is a totally brilliant mash up on of film making and Google maps. There is no real technical genius in this. A few simple time lapse techniques is all it is. The real value is the imagination need to think of this new use of an omnipresent technology. As I have said before the art of business in the new world is taking the seemingly disparate and creating new meaning.

This almost made me cry. Enjoy.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Good ideas v bad ideas

We automatically jump to our personal conclusions on ideas that are shared with us.  It’s either good or bad. We can’t help it. But our opinion is somewhat simplified. What we are really doing when we jump to these conclusions is assessing the probability of success. How probable the ideas is to succeed. Good ideas are more probable in our mind.

The interesting thing about probability of success is that ideas that have lower probability are usually the ones with the biggest reward. The trophy ideas. But rather than pigeon holing ideas as good or bad – we consider them in terms of probability. It is only when we do this, that our appetite for risk can be part of the decision making process.

10 ‘just because’ projects

I’ve been thinking about a few different projects I’d like to do. Which at this stage have no real revenue or business associated with them, other than I find them interesting. I thought I’d list them here to see if anyone has similar crazy ‘just because’ projects. Maybe these fun crazy things are what we should be doing and building, instead of working out what other people want. Maybe the thing that really matters is what we want. Either way here they are;

1. Take a year to fly to every commercial Airport in the world – without a break. yes, including living in planes and airports for a full 12 months. Document it and what happens for some reason. Find interesting stuff and people. See what happens. Film it. Socialize it on live digital media. Find something no one has ever thought of or seen. Just because.
2. Live for a year only on food that is grown at home. Vegetables and animals. Cook using only wood and home made ovens. Every bit of food that goes in my mouth I will have grown, baked, killed cooked and created. Document it all. Just because.
3. Walk around the entire coastline of Australia. Beach by beach, headland by headland. 25,760 km’s of it. Learn something. Document it…. Just because.
4. Make a short film. Without any false ambitions of becoming the next Tarantino. Just to create. Be part of it. Just because.
5. Renovate a house. Yes, a totally dilapidated 100 year old timber home. To see what my eye and hands can really make when they collaborate. Build a house my family can live in, be safe in, grow together in. Take time out and do this. A non Grand Design for me and my people. Just because.
6. Start a cult. Just to see if we can make a positive one. A cult of good. To see if I could lead people in such a way that they live for the cause, but to flip it. To make the cause about fixing broken shit in the world….Like the banking system and the 1%. Just because.
7. Be a used car salesman. mainly because I think it would be really, really hard. To see how I could sell in a difficult environment. To test my skills, and see what I could learn to take into my future. To be the most untrusted person in the commercial world. To be that guy. The be that guy and see how I handle myself and what I become. Just because.
8. Coach A little league team. Pass on some skills, about the game, and maybe about life. Teach some youngsters stuff that matters – have am impact on their attitude without them even knowing. See how it feels to help out the people who will inherit our world. Just because.
9. Live in a tropical paradise. Mainly to remove the myth or confirm it. A place where little money is needed, the weather is always warm and technology and financial growth are irrelevant. Find out out if the picture of paradise is real or perceived. Stay forever if it is real. Just because.
10. Join a street gang. A real underworld style gang. Think East L.A. Get dirty and down and be part of something bigger than me that is from the opposite side of town. Learn their rules and play by them. Deal, steal and destroy. See if the emotional roller coaster is the same, or different. See if I like it more or less. Understand the plight and political machinations of a crime organization from the inside. Draw the analogies and comparisons to the legal world – find out the truth. Just because.

Sometimes we need to embark on startup projects, that aren’t really startups…. Just because.

The world belongs to the discontented

The person who was seen as most likely to succeed at your final year of school didn’t change the world. Not yet, probably not ever.

They’ve already had too much success in the early years. Too many congratulations, too many girlfriends, too many party invites, too many A’s on their report card. And so they’ve missed out on the most important ingredient anyone needs to succeed. Hardship.

The harder we have it, the more likely we are to change it. It’s only when we have a level of discontentment that we’ll ever develop the fire inside the belly that is needed to create a better situation.

Technology spoofs

I just happened upon this great Siri spoof. Just very funny.

What new technology can you spoof to promote your brand, idea, business or startup? It’s a simple time test method – Get on it.

Singing for their supper

You may have noticed that there are a lot of ‘Older’ Rockstars coming out to perform in your country. Bands we thought we’d only hear on Golden Oldies radio stations and never see live again. Well they are all back playing live again….

…I’m guessing it’s not buy choice. The fact that it’s pretty hard to find a record store these days is a good indication that the royalty streams old rockstars lived on have dried up for good. It’s much harder for older music to be promoted on iTunes than it was in a store that could only carry 2000 albums – from the artists who always got played on the radio. Their industry has been disrupted to the point where they now have to sing for their supper. Actively earn a living, versus passively receiving cash for deeds of yesteryear. Hence the deluge of 1980′s rockstars now touring again.

At some point disruptive technology effects us all. As startup entrepreneurs we are often the the creators of the disruption. As successful business people in years to come, our revenue streams will ultimately be disrupted by the next iteration. What we must do is create a war chest of revenue streams once we make bank. And the best advice I’ve ever been given that is future proof is this:

Build businesses, then buy real estate.

Sure it might sound boring, but one thing for certain is that it’s hard to see technology disrupting the value of good real estate. At least in our life times.

Human evolution and technology

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the speed of human evolution. Do humans evolve at a constant speed, or does our pace of evolution change dependent on our environment? What has the impact of technology been on human evolution? Especially given that this technology is created by us, for us. With the rate of technological change and power increasing exponentially, will it eventually leave humans behind or be the bastion of human dominance and longevity? There are of course juxtaposing views. I just thought I’d explore some of my own anthropological thoughts on this subject here and postulate a viewpoint.

Technology is becoming more human. Everything technology I see is replicating ultimately human functions, possibilities, senses and activations. My favourite and a recent example of this is the smart phone. If we think about the functions and features of the smart phone it’s easy to see the humanizing analogy. Firstly our phones can now see. The current model of the iPhone has an 8 megapixel camera, which is already about half as good as the human eyes acuity. By the way an 8 megapixel camera cost around $10,000 just 20 years ago, and now it is free in our phone so long as we sign up to a plan. Mind you, the iPhone also has eyes in the back of it’s head with the dual front and back camera. Something we wished we had since cave times and has entered common parlance. The phone can hear with it’s microphone, nothing new, until Siri came along and started translating voice and providing answers for us. Our phone knows where it is, via GPS and can recognise it’s surroundings using aggregate rich data from it’s eyes, ears, GPS and compass. And lastly, but probably most importantly, it has the smartest brain in the world. With web access, it knows everything we know as a species. It can access the collective intelligence of the entire world with a few finger swipes. With access to the web, it knows things like the current temperature in our location. It knows what the weather is like and can access live satellite data and tell us with closely accuracy when rain is on the way. A very very human thing for people to want to know and share. And if we don’t look this up on it’s ‘web brain’ our twitter stream from locals we follow will surely tweet visuals of the impending storms just like we saw in Sydney and Melbourne last week. It is also starting to mimic how we move and interact. Gesturing is quickly augmenting and replacing keystrokes. Codes is also starting to write itself.

We are the technology. I think that the rate of human evolution is actually increasing in speed. The speed of evolution has become so important to ultimate human survival (given impending environmental issues, unstable geopolitical environs) that we have had to innovate, and evolve in a new a different way. We are temporarily outsourcing our evolution – we are now evolving outside our bodies because the breeding and natural selection process is too elongated. Our latest method for evolving has been to change ourselves using our brain. Our only way of doing this quickly enough is creating new body parts outside of our body. A form of intellectual addendum or appendages. Which once these body parts have evolved enough – they will re-enter our bodies. I think that we have already seen some evidence of this. At a primary level with medical science creating human ‘replacement parts’ which we then install into our bodies when the original part fails. Which is a much quicker method than breading out people whose hips, knees and hearts (?) fail early in life. The other element of this that I am witnessing is the size of the machines – their constant reduction in size, and their closeness to us as humans. The computer has an interesting history if we think of it in evolutionary terms. It began very large, as big as a room. It was exclusive and only available to large military, industrial and educational institutions. But it (the computer) then multiplied and divided, becoming smaller and smarter. Eventually arriving on desktops, and on peoples laps.  Now it resides in our pockets. It’s constantly getting smaller and smarter. Closer to our bodies. Sometimes we even have an ear piece which injects it’s data directly into our human CPU’s. We too, send data into it. It also spends more time on our person. It no longer gets switched off, its heart beats 24 hours a day for us. The next steps I expect to continue this trend, for it to become smaller, closer to our body and eventually enter our bodies. Something people like Ray Kurzweil have been postulating for some time.

This had to happen. The complexity of data is too rich to digest and make sense of. Both our bodies and brains cannot cope. I think this is partly why we are seeing such a dramatic increase in mental illness. it’s just an internal code overload permeating in different types of human style 404 & syntax errors. It was the only way humans could evolve quickly enough in order to survive. Due to exponential change We had to evolve externally, initially. These tools, both mechanical and code related have become part of our evolutionary path. And just like all evolution it has happened without prior consent, knowledge or intention.

I feel as thought merger between human and machine is very close. I have never really believed that machines will turn against humans. Even if they became self aware. Self awareness for me has never been enough. They need to feel, believe and desire. Computational power beyond the human is only part the equation. They would need an emotional desire before any rivalry could occur in mind view. I feel that the machines entering our body is more likely. The final merger to end all mergers. The most important merger that humans have ever seen. it’s probably similar to when we left the water, or climbed down from the tree. Only different. But it wont be a day in time. An event, or even have a date. It’s already happened in some ways, and once it has become omnipresent we will only ever notice it in hindsight.

It makes me think that technology – and the next steps of web, smart phones and startups are beyond our own comprehension. It’s really important and probably much more radical than any of us could ever imagine. I just hope I’m around to be part of it, and that it moves us one step further to equal love, health and opportunity around the world.

The tender folly

Here’s the plan:

We’ll ask a bunch of companies to solve an important business problem for us.

It will be a big problem with large financial consequences.

We’ll give companies a written document on what we think we want.

We wont let any of the companies ask us more about what we want. They just get what is written.

We’ll have a deadline that is immovable. If a company is not inside it, they lose. Even if they are the best.

We wont meet with any of the people we will work with. We wont find out if we like each other.

We’ll only give these companies 1 hour to explain what they think we should do. Even if the project takes years.

We wont tell them the budget, or we’ll give an immovable budget. Either or.

We’ll get a purchasing person to run this thing. Not someone from the department who will work on the project.

We’ll keep certain secrets on the project in house until we choose a partner.

We will go through this process this every X years. Even if our current provider does this for us very well.

——

Sound silly? If it does, then maybe it is time we started re-thinking if we want to do business with anyone who believes in the tender process.

What I love about gifyo.com

I’ve recently been playing around with Rohan on a relatively new site called Gifyo. It’s such a simple idea it has the ‘why didn’t I think of that’ written all over it.

What it does: Gifyo is a social service that allows you to create animated gifs directly from your webcam. Simply capture, create, and share.

It’s like 3 seconds of filming, that makes an ‘Old School’ style gif. Which has a certain quaintness to it. It’s also very cool because it is so quick to do, and it makes people think about what might entertain other users. Just go to their home page and you can see how quickly this web service has caught on. Some other simple yet smart things it has done is create a live feed where every post gets a turn on the home page feed. Sure, this can only last while it is niche enough to feature everyone… but it sure is a good way of spreading the service – everyone loves a little bit of microfame.

We started a little #officedancing meme just for fun.

So for startup entrepreneurs it provides a couple of really cool lessons.

1. Sometimes really small, in fact tiny ideas are the ones that catch on.
2. People want to get attention, more than give it.
3. Retro technology is big. It is fun and creates a sense of simplicity & nostalgia which is very human.
4. If you love something, others might too. Don’t waste time thinking about it, build it and find out.

I can’t wait to hear my readers next fun, small and retro idea they have launched.

Home Made Advertising

Sometimes it is hard to make out if an advertisement is actually as it seems, or if it has been ‘gamed’. I came across one such advertisement recently. Chuck Testa had me in stitches (pun intended) with his Youtube advertisement that has now had over 7 million views. What is really cool, is the internet meme that has quickly developed on its coat tails. You can see many of the mashups here on youtube… and just for good measure I’ve posted my favourite below.

 

…and this Songify version…

 

 

The lesson for startups is simple. Have a crack at something funny to gain brand awareness. If it works you win. If it doesn’t, no one sees it anyway and you still win. Have a crack.