Paper or digital?

Trying to figure out what the heart of the debate about e-readers is a little difficult. I just read a short bit about a new e-reader, the iRex Digital Reader 1000, being released on Monday that got me thinking about whether it was time I bought into the technology. Reading the comment stream of the article pretty much captured all my internal conflicts on the subject. I like having a bunch of text at my fingertips, but I like the feeling of a book in my hands. I like the idea of having less clutter of books around the house, but I like to see them there on my bookshelf. I like the idea of digital media being cheaper, but I doubt that I read enough for the cost difference of the material to offset the cost of the hardware. I'm not sure if I'm part of the book retailers mass market, but I think I've figured out features that would reach the tipping point for consumers like myself.

1. Pricing. There has to be a price advantage. There's no getting around it. I buy about 2 books a month. The price of a top notch e-reader is about $650. I would have to save about $18 a month buying the digital form of a book for 3 years to make back the price of the e-reader. Unfortunatly a lot of ebooks I've seen are selling around the cost or even more then the printed edition. Even the music industry gives a better deal then that. The Kindle books through Amazon sometimes gives you a few dollars savings, but it doesn't really add up for me. A possible value may come from something other then book purchasing. For example, although I only buy a couple books a month I have about 50 in the queue. If there was some kind of model where I could "rent" a book for a week for a few dollars that would be good or if they used a subscription plan like Netflix for digital books that might even be better.
2. Convenience. The ability to browse through books and purchase them from anywhere almost pulled me into buying a Kindle. I'm one of the most impatient people in the world so I like the idea of getting the books I want right now and reading them from wherever I am. Beyond the purchasing convience I think they could also add other things that would make my life a bit simpler. For example, since most e-readers use E Ink they can be read in direct sunlight. I would hope they would take advantage of that and put a solar charger on it somewhere. If that feature were there I think I would have to get one just in case I got stranded on a deserted island somewhere.
3. Compatablility. All things text. Okay music and video would be cool, but it needs to be able to display all things text. I don't want something that can display anything but PDFs, that's just silly. There are about 75% (maybe) of the books I want in digital form, but that's not enough. There also needs to be all the magazines I can think of. Magazines usually contain about 10% useful information, but we hang on to them for years. To me that's a perfect thing to have digitally archived.
4. More Awesomeness. The expensive features pedicted on the iRex are almost a necessity for me (except for the bluetooth, I've never really figured out what that's for). I think that they have the right idea about the touchscreen and the stylus. I hate having to print out technical journal articles just so I can mark them up and then lose the article in a big stack of others. I would also want my markup and notes to be archived, searchable and shareable. I want to be able to to search all the text in all types of documents. I know it's a lot to ask, but I want it to have a deep amount of customization that's very easy to setup.

If all the above features were there I think I could justify buying a e-reader. I would use it for all the magazines, pop fiction, scientific papers and time sensitive technical books. The books would get in paper form would be books I would like as a perminent part of my reference library like Thinkertoys or fiction I really enjoyed like The Great Gatsby. Until then I guess I'll need to make room in the house for another bookshelf.

Cool more video ...

I've been seeing a lot of news about how IMDb added video to their site. I like the addition because it allows you to center around a video and work yourself around the web of actors, photos and random information tied to it, but for me I don't understand the huge value around it. It's convenient not having to go to Hulu or YouTube I guess. I think IMDb's value comes mostly from being such a comprehensive and "connected" site. I think Amazon would benifit more from doing a better job of integrating it's other staple products (books and music) to the site pages. Like the new movie "Watchmen" for example. If I go to Amazon and search for "Watchmen" I get these results. If I'm looking up "Casablanca" there's a good chance I saw the movie and there was something about it that interests me. Give me links to history books about WWII and how it affected parts of the world like Casablanca or get me to music like As Time Goes By. When people love a movie they want stay apart of it after it's over. Amazon should take advantage of the ability to offer these connections to movies like Casablanca and help keep them in Rick's Cafe a little longer.

NOTE: I forgot mention that IMDb is owned by Amazon.

More about the other half of my brain

Coincidently after I just finished reading Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future the NY Times wrote an article called:

Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.

The article references the book and restates it's premise saying, "much of the left-brain-centric work that the Information Age workers of America once did — computer programming, financial accounting, routing calls — is now done more cheaply in Asia or more efficiently by computers. If it can be outsourced or automated, it probably has been."

After reading the book and article I wasn't worried about losing my job as a software engineer I was excited that I could find a better fit for my creative desires. I've always been torn between art and engineering. They live in houses on the same block, but tend to face in opposite directions. If you've been reading my blogs you'll have noticed this recurring theme. After a little bit of thinking my excitement died down because I still couldn't figure out how this was supposed to work.

Apparently, "Now the master of fine arts, or M.F.A., Mr. Pink says, 'is the new M.B.A.'", but how much faith am I supposed to put into that? I'm pretty sure an MBA or PhD
still has a better chance of getting a business started or finding a job as a strategic manager.

Still it's a interesting thought. I could see how understanding creating a artistic composition would be useful in developing functional requirements. In the book Pink also addresses Story as a right brained skill that would be useful in the conceptual age. If you write use cases you could see how this would be advantageous.

I agree with Pink at some degree. But I also agree with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea, in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, that a solid knowledge base of the domain is required to develop new creative ways of doing things in the domain. I guess it's really the teaming of the right and left brain that has the potential to make great things. (Not going to do the Apple reference)

Personal Professional Plan

I created this document a few weeks ago and sent it to a bunch of different people, but unfortunately it hasn't had any traction. I'm thinking of creating multiple branches for myself in order to look at my options from a wider scope. I think it would be useful to perform this exercise with the intent of staying in your current company, with the intent of changing companies and also without any company in mind.

This is a pretty rough draft and any suggestions as to why this wouldn't help, what could make it better or more useful are welcome. Thanks.

Personal Professional Plan

This is based on an idea that maybe business plans aren’t just for business, but a lot of it can be applied to an individual. I believe this can be a useful tool for an individual trying to develop a strategy of any objective. In this case the objective is to maximize the amount of motivation, reward and fulfillment you get out of your work. Because this is going to be different for everyone, nobody else is going to be able to do this as well as you can do if for yourself. I know it looks like a lot of hard work and it is, but if you want to get somewhere I think you got to know where that is.

1. Executive Summary

A lot of this section should probably be done at the end, but I think the Mission section can be done first. For this particular plan we have a predefined Objective, but feel free to modify to be more specific.

1.1. Objectives

My objective is to do work that motivates, rewards and fulfills me.

1.2. Mission

This is going to be one of the most challenging sections to fill out, but it’s going to help define the way you work everyday so I would put a lot of thought into it. Don’t worry trying to make it perfect. I believe that it should be revisited every few months anyways.

1.3. Keys to Success

This may be easier to also do after finishing the rest.

2. The Work

This section defines more specifically the kind of work that’s going to achieve your objective. Some questions you may want to ask yourself when you’re trying to figure this out are: What work has challenges that you enjoy? What kind of work motivates you? What kind of work provides you with the kind of reward you seek?

When I was trying to fill out this section I didn’t put an exact position, but rather I just made a list of general characteristics of the type of work I think I’d enjoy, then I tried to find a career direction that matched.

3. Work Analysis

This is where you put why you want to do the work. Not just because its “rewarding, motivating and fulfilling”, but why they are these things. What this will help do is to identify what qualities of the work are important to you. This is where you validate that the work that you choose in the previous section matches what’s important to you.

4. Personal SWOT

Okay, now that you said what type of work you want to do and why here’s where you start to figure out how you’re going to do the things you want to do. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

This has been a strategic planning tool used since the 60’s for many things from business plans, projects, organizations and individuals. It’s not intended to be a pure formulaic way to create the strategy, but rather it’s a way of creating a starting point for a strategy.

Here the external is the company you work for.

· Strengths: your attributes which are helpful to achieving your goal. What skills do I have to do the work I want to do? Where do I find my flow ( http://austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm)?

· Weaknesses: your attributes of the individual which are keeping you from achieving your goal. What skills do you need to develop to do the work I want to do? If you’re not exactly sure what these are go get information on people who are doing what you want to do?

· Opportunities: external conditions which are helpful to achieving your goal. What types of processes or opportunity exist within the department that allow me to do the work I want to do?

· Threats: external conditions which are preventing you from achieving your goal. What’s lacking in the department that make’s it hard to do the work I want to do? What can the department do to help you do the work you want to do?

5. Strategy

This section is where you put your start to find your path to your goal. Here’s where you say how you’re going to leverage strengths, improve or reduce the influence of weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and mitigate or adapt to threats. For example, if one of your weaknesses is a lack of knowledge in a particular area then your strategy would be to get training or going back to school. If your department through the company provides partial tuition reimbursement, it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of. Another strategy would be to improve on particular strengths to help you even more qualified to do the work you want. You may want to write out several different strategies at first.

6. Long Term Goals (I would put a solid deadline here)

These are long term action items. They should come from your strategy that developed in the previous section.

7. Short Term Goals (I would put a solid deadline here)

Take you long term action items and find short term (about 1 year) goals you can make from them.

Now go back and fill in the first section. Your Mission should be your mind for everything you’re doing at work. The Keys to Success are also helpful because they will help keep you on track.

Good luck. Any feedback is welcome.

Fundamental Discontinuity Platform

Looking for the next Facebook

Interesting little segment about what Jim Breyer of venture capital firm Accel Partners thinks is important to invest in. For Mr. Breyer it seems like the most important thing is investing in a new fundamental discontinuity platforms. In other words, what you want to do to get funded by Accel is to create a platform that builds on top of a new technology paradigm shift. An example of a platform during a paradigm shift was Microsoft when the personal computer was being introduced into the market because Windows became the PC platform. Why is the "platform" such a important aspect? Probably because it probably means that the product inherently has the potential to be feature rich. It's probably why Apple released the SDK for the iPhone and why Facebook skyrocketed when they released their API for applications.

Competitive Learning

Hawaii robotics teams advance to national competition

I think that this type of exposure and recognition is great for Hawaii students. Most of the popular news about Hawaii students talks about falling test scores and how they compare to national averages. There's nothing like competition to give you that extra fire to do something great. I'd like to see more press on non-athletic competitions, not that I don't enjoy sports, but I think that a greater exposure may lead to greater participation and interest. What if there was a whole section in the newspaper dedicated to art, music, composition, software, engineering or other competitions. I think that would be pretty cool.

Just trying out the w.bloggar tool. The responsivness is nice. But it's a little wierd that the format tags are all over the place.

Trying a link

I guess it's not much better then the built in one for Blogger. If anyone has a really good one let me know.

Future of Facebook?

Facebook's collision course with the big portals

I'm always curious about a company's strategy especially when it deals with direction and growth.

"Facebook is about to introduce a basic chat service and have some rudimentary e-mail capabilities. While Facebook executives have been cagey about specific plans to build more capable communications applications, they will evolve to be competitive with what AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo offer.

I would also expect Facebook to include Web search that takes advantage of the social-graph concept. For example, Facebook could implement a search for friends that also surfaces public information about them from the Web, or Web search results, that factor in what friends in an extended social graph click on for similar queries.

Facebook may even take on Google, possibly working with investor Microsoft, to deliver a comprehensive search service with a social dimension. Facebook could also acquire or partner with one of the semantic search start-ups, such as Hakia and Powerset."

If the author of this article is correct then I'm confused what Facebook is thinking, but it's probably the same thing Google is thinking. If they can make one thing better then their competitors they can add a few other things to keep people around. (As a side note I just spent 5 minutes trying to get this text not italic.) Maybe from that they figure they can rule the world. Is that what their thinking? I guess it makes sense that Facebook would try to leverage user base they have, but I have to stick with my current philosophy, "Creating better stuff is more valuable then creating more of the same stuff."

What Apple's got that you dont

There's this NYTimes article that talks about statistics of IPhone users compared to other smartphone users.

IPhone Users Love That Mobile Web

It's funny that you can even make the comparison that way. There's Palm, Windows, Blackberry, ect. and then there's the IPhone. I have to say I'm not an owner of an IPhone. In fact the only thing I own of Apple is stock. When you think about it the IPhone doesn't offer anything new, so what is it that makes it so different? From playing with it a little I'd have to say it's the depth of the features. I have a T-Mobile Wing and I actually use the mobile web quite a lot, but I've played with an IPhone and noticed a distinct difference in experience. I could probably try to reproduce that experience somehow on my own phone, but I don't think I should have to. What do you think?

Odd Couple?

Video segment on what can come from pairing engineers with artists.
http://www.forbes.com/video/?video=fvn/business/km_match031908

This interview wasn't that great but the thought was interesting. I think there is a lot of potential from this, but finding focus for the partnership between engineering and art isn't straight forward. It probably requires a good medium for communication and collaboration.

Software & the Creative Process, does it work?

There was this interesting article about writing and creativity.
www.creativity-portal.com/cca/emily-hanlon/why-cre...

"Creativity is a subtle and magnificent dance between the rational and the intuitive, between the left and right parts of the brains, between technique and imagination. Both partners in this dance are absolutely necessary and are needed in equal proportion, which means that imagination is not more important than technique and vice versa. If you only live in the imagination, you will never get organized, you will never complete your story. However, if you start from the rational, linear, organizational part of the process, (i.e. Gotta have the perfect opening sentence and first paragraph... better yet, an outline...) you will never fall into the rich, passionate cosmic landscape of the imagination where anything is possible."

This article is interesting if you think about the writing process being analogous to the software development process. Are there similarities? Sometimes I think it's hard to find the same flow one does when being creative while writing. How can I capture that when developing software?

This blog...

I'm going to try and use this blog as a way for me to share my ideas about... stuff. Just a little background information, I'm a software developer working for a software company in Hawaii. I have a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Biology. I have a pretty broad interest range including, general technology, psychology, music (listening and playing), small business strategy and cooking (you can check out my other blog at www.honolulufoodandwine.com). I tend to have something to say on most things, but I'm sometimes just throwing things out there. Let me know what you think.