Category: Good things

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TED 2012: Leap Day Highlights

Leap year comes once every four years. But what to do with an extra 24 hours?

This year I had the opportunity to spend Lead Day feeding my mind at a simulcast of the 2012 TED conference. I am a big fan of TED. The conference was started in 1984 by my first year architecture professor who envisioned a gathering of great minds discussing big ideas in technology, education and design. Chris Anderson took the reins, expanded the scope and now TED is nearly omnipresent. The TED Talks videos can be found all over, and TEDx events leverage the popular format on a local scale.

Last year I attended the local TEDxOrangeCoast at Segerstrom Hall — a remarkable day in itself. And this year, the big TED conference in Long Beach (a 3-day event) opened their virtual doors to TEDx attendees for a simulcast of the Day Two talks. In Orange County, we met at the beautiful Soka University performing arts center.

TED speakers get roughly 18 minutes on stage to share their stories–which are varied. Their titles range from techno-illusionist to ethnobiologist; from secret keeper to code activist. Some are selected for their ability to move and inspire. Others for their research (and certainly NOT their speaking skills).  And some are just plain entertaining. The net result? Brain food for fertile minds. Leap Day inspiration!

Eventually you’ll be able to see these talks online. Until then, I wanted to share highlights from two of those speakers, as well as observations from the backchannel.

Reid Hoffman, Social entrepreneur

Reid Hoffman is probably best known as co-founder of LinkedIn, the popular professional network. He’s also an investor, and entrepreneur and most recently, an author.

One thing Reid is not: a great speaker. He referred to a written script during much of the talk, making for a dry presentation of an important topic.

The delivery was lacking, but the message — while not really new — was worth hearing again.

We used to “climb the corporate ladder.” According to that model, when you graduated from college, you took an entry-level position. You worked hard and got promoted. With each step up the ladder, you gained responsibility, power and money.

That model no longer works. Today, the paradigm is not the ladder, but the network. We need to think like entrepreneurs, and treat our careers like a business. To be clear, understanding and leveraging your network is not the same as “networking.” It isn’t exchanging business cards and calling prospects. It is looking at your actual network of friends, colleagues and cohorts. Your network includes the people that you can help, and who can help you solve problems, move mountains, and get things done.

Not surprisingly, Dunbar’s Number came up. Reid suggested that 150 is not really a network limit, but memory limitation. Tools (such as LinkedIn, of course) can extend our memory, allowing us to build bigger networks.

What piqued my interest was Reid’s thoughts on how your network is a reflection of who you are. This isn’t really a new idea. Even as teenagers, most of our parents wanted to make sure we didn’t hang out with the “wrong” crowd. But in today’s world of connected-ness, many people see a connection as a prospective customer — and the more the merrier. In reality, it’s less about the numbers (unless you’re only about the numbers), and more about who you want to be. Whether we lead or follow, the crowds we run in reflect who we are.

Lior Zoref, Crowdsourcing advocate

I loved this colorful kid from Tel Aviv. He opened with a video recorded a year ago, where he shared his dream of speaking at TED. His best friend mocked him, but Lior promised that when (not if) he finally did speak at TED, he would play this video to remind him of his words.

Lior Zoref is not a household name. He is not particularly famous. But he is an evangelist for crowdsourcing, and his fervor for the wisdom of crowds was his ticket to the main stage at TED. Lior presented what he claims was the first-ever “crowdsourced TED talk.”  He tapped into his network of friends on Facebook and Twitter to help him create his talk — a mix of crowdsourcing stories from around the globe, liberal doses of humor and an extremely fun, live crowdsourcing experiment.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Early in his talk, he brings out a live ox onto the stage. The audience is asked to pull out their smartphones, visit a special web site and enter their guess at the animal’s weight. He continues his talk, and towards the end…

Over 500 people submitted their guesstimate, with responses ranging from 385 pounds to over 8000 pounds. The average of the crowd came in at 1792 pounds. The actual weight of the ox? 1795 pounds… just three pounds more. An amusing, live illustration of the wisdom of crowds.

Can crowdsourcing really make us smarter? Perhaps, but not all kinds of questions are well-suited to this kind of “guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-the-jar” kind of problem-solving. Would you want to design a bridge the same way?

No matter what you think of crowdsourcing, you had to admire Lior’s enthusiasm and his ability to dream big.

Back in the Real World…

There are a few people that I repeatedly bump into online and offline, and at TED I had the opportunity to break bread with two of them over lunch. Chris Fleury and Emily Crume. We are perpetually crossing paths at various local events such as SMMOC, and over and over online. It was great to get a chance to know them better. The face-to-face interactions proved again to be as valuable — or more valuable — than the simulcast speakers of TED.

There was much more at TED than will fit in 1000 words. Here are some additional highlights:

This post was percolated with the help of the ingenius Dashter.

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The Correct Way to Hang the Toilet Paper

Having recently moved into a new house, expanding the size (and improving the quality) of the household by 100%, this is but one of the many essential decisions that we made. Yes, it’s the quintessential question — what is the correct way to hang a roll of toilet paper. 

Infographic source: CurrentConfig, who also has a PDF version suitable for printing, folding and hanging on a toilet roll (should you know of someone who needs illumination on the proper technique).

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Create Amazing Infographics About Your iPhone Photos

Infographics have become a popular way to convey a lot of information in a concise form. Rich with data, they leverage graphics to provide context to the numbers. Now a clever Swedish company called Dear Future Astronaut has released a $0.99 iPhone app that will analyze your photos and produce a beautiful infographic analysis.

I recently purged about 1,000 photos from my iPhone, but Photo Stats didn’t mind. It still created the following, beautiful infographic that analyzed the 266 photos still on my iPhone.

 

Photo Stats will show you where, when and how you took your photos, with location, time of day, your “most productive” days and various photo properties like portrait vs. landscape, ISO setting and photo app used.

The $0.99 price is reasonable, although they say it’s a promotion only good for the first week. After that, it goes up to a whopping $1.99 (still a deal, in my book). Go get Photo Stats, and share a link to your Photo Stats in the comments below.

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A Trip Down Memolane

UPDATE

Memolane announced that they were acquired and the Memolane website and services shut down on February 22, 2013. Hopefully good for the employees and investors, but sad for those of us who enjoyed this cool way to aggregate and visualize your online presence. Timehop is a similar (but in my opinion, not nearly as cool) service that can partially fill the gap. And of course the Facebook timeline took a lot of the wind out of Memolane’s sails. I wish them the best in their new endeavors. And thanks… for the memories.

The remainder of this post serves as a record of what was, but no longer works. – Jeff

Regular readers know I’ve been extolling the virtues of Memolane for a while now. Joan and I used it during our three weeks in Paris to create a travelog of our adventures.

Memolane

Some time ago, the good folks at Memolane made it super easy for self-hosted WordPress users to embed their Memolane or stories right on their blog, like my own “lane” below. Give it a try! Click and drag the “lane” left to right, or down to view days with many entries. Click on an item to expand the view.

Want to try it? Sign up for Memolane (be sure to add me as a friend), connect as many services as you want, download this WordPress plugin and follow these simple instructions. You can embed either your own “lane” or story on any post or page using a short code. Simple!

Do you use Memolane? Like it? Hate it? What do you think?

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360º Video Capture for the iPhone 4

I love playing with camera and video apps on the iPhone, and this one looks awesome. Kogeto is a New York-based company that specializes in high-end panoramic video cameras. They have a Kickstarter project to create an elegant, inexpensive accessory that turns your iPhone 5 into a panoramic camera. Dot snaps on to your iPhone 4 and works in conjunction with an app that removes the distortion and creates an interactive 360º video. You can capture video to your iPhone or even stream to the web.

Check out the video below for examples of Dot in action.

Interested in supporting Dot? Check it out on Kickstarter.

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Vertical

This weekend I had the pleasure of meeting screenwriter and novelist Rex Pickett, perhaps best known for his novel Sideways (and the film by the same name).

I always had wondered whether the author had modeled Miles (the aspiring novelist) after himself. As it turns out, he had in many ways. What I hadn’t considered was the risk he took in doing so. By laying bare so personal a story and putting it out there for others to accept or reject, he risked the ultimate rejection. If his novel had turned out to be a failure, wouldn’t that have been the proverbial nail in the coffin for his writing career?

As it turned out, Sideways was turned into a movie and enjoyed tremendous success. It’s hard to imagine some of the casting choices the studio had originally wanted (George Clooney as out-of-work actor Jack? Sean Penn as self-deprecating Miles?). Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church stepped into those roles as if they were made for them.

Pickett has published a sequel called Vertical that picks up with Miles and Jack seven years later. Miles has written a novel that was made into a wildly successful movie, and it’s changed his life (sound familiar?). Jack is divorced and is on the skids (no surprise there).

I’ve got a copy of Vertical that I’ll be reading on my flight to Abu Dhabi this week. I’m looking forward to seeing where life has taken Miles and Jack, and keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll a film adaptation in the future.

You can follow Rex Pickett on his journey at VerticalTheNovel.com.