This iPod weighs four pounds
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February 21st, 2008 by Alex
Today is the 8-day anniversary of my iPhone, and in those eight days a whole bunch of people have asked if I've lost weight. At first I thought it was just that the iPhone made me look thinner -- you know, like a good pair of jeans. But this morning I stepped on the scale and sure enough, I've lost four pounds.
I've done a retrospective analysis of the past 8 days of my life, and I think all four pounds can be directly attributable to significant iPhone-related lifestyle changes:
| More time spent surfing while standing up with iPhone, rather than seated with Macbook Pro | .1 |
| Walked to two meetings I previously would have driven to, because I can leave my Macbook at the office and can walk further when I'm not carrying it | .5 |
| Took kids for a long stroller ride while chatting on my Bluetooth headset | .25 |
| Elimination of snacking while waiting for Treo to S-L-O-W-L-Y load a web page | .5 |
| Skipped dinner because I got into bed with my daughter and my iPhone and couldn't tear myself away from the iPhone even after my daughter fell asleep | .25 |
| Walked to the bus after a meeting (rather than bringing the car) because I was able to have a walking-meeting-by-iPhone rather than rushing back to the office | .25 |
| Found a healthy recipe for dinner on Epicurious rather than ordering Thai food | .25 |
| Used iPhone during drive to work to access bank account, pay Visa card so there'd be money for groceries, rather than foraging for whatever (inevitably) higher-cal food happened to be in the cupboards when we got home | .75 |
| Avoided scheduling a meeting during my workout time because I was able to review an accurate current schedule on my iPhone | .25 |
| Overall reduction in anxiety-related snacking due to increased sense of well-being from iPhone-y goodness | .75 |
| TOTAL WEIGHT LOSS | 4 lbs |
When you compare the up-front cost of an iPhone the cost and performance of other weight loss programs, four pounds in a little over a week looks like a pretty good deal:
- If you sign up for Jenny Craig, you'll pay $77 to $119 per week (not including food) to lose 1-2 pounds a week; if it takes you seven weeks to lose 10 pounds, that translates into about $585 (compared to just $499 for a 16 GB iPhone, which at the current rate, will have me down by 10 pounds in just 2.5 weeks).
- NutriSystem charges $293 per month (including food), and you can figure on losing ten pounds in four to ten weeks -- so figure it may cost as much as $732 to lose the weight an iPhone can take off in just four weeks.
- People lose weight faster on the Zone -- something like 8 to 10 pounds a month -- but it costs $40 per day; you could buy two iPhones for that money -- with Bluetooth headsets!! -- and lose weight with a friend.
Coming soon, the latest Apple campaign: iSkinny.
Will the real Alexandra Samuel please stand up?
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February 18th, 2008 by Alex
I knew this charade couldn't last forever. Like lonelygirl15 and fake Steve Jobs before me, I went to great efforts to create a compelling illusion: not only an Alexandra Samuel blog, but a consistent profile on every online community site from del.icio.us to Facebook. Even a complete fake company with me as the fake CEO.
But today, the illusion is at an end. Darrell Houle has unmasked m
e as.....Suzanna Cavatrio, copywriter for Enormicom.
That's right, Darrell came across my alter ego on the tour page for Highrise, a CRM product from Basecamp. Check it out:
I'm happy to take this re-purposing as a sign that someone at 37Signals saw my obsessive blog post about Basecamp workflow. Or maybe it's a tribute to the talented man behind the camera -- Kris Krug, who took the original photo. Maybe this is kk+'s chance to become official photographer for 37Signals?
Raising community-minded kids: Not just for people in Morningside Heights?
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February 10th, 2008 by Alex
How can we instill social values in our kids? That's a question Rob and I struggle with constantly. In its least subtle form, the inculcation can begin as early as eighteenth months, as we've learned this election season ("No, sweetie, we don't clap forthat man.") At three or four we can toss in a little more complexity ("We don't say Indian, we say First Nations") though no greater nuance ("That kind of car makes the trees cry.")
Before you judge us too harshly for our brainwashing, let me say a few things in our self-defense. First, the "we" in all the above examples was actually me, so you can let Rob off the hook. Second, my long-held personal and intellectual justification for bringing kids into this already overcrowded world is that if the people who worry about the world's problems are the ones who stop having children, we're going to lose one of the most promising sources of would-be world-changers; the decision to have kids is for me inextricable from my commitment to building a better world with and for them.
A far more convincing defense is that my clumsy and heavy-handed efforts at passing on the leftie gospel amount to little when compared with the daily, granular and accumulating impact of the milieu in which children are raised. A community of cultured, socially minded, personally decent people is the best way to grow kids into a constructive social role -- or so I was persuaded while reading Morningside Heights
The novel centers on Anne, a former pianist and mother of three, and her husband, Charles, a second-string soloist at the Metropolitan Opera. As their neighborhood of Morningside Heights gentrifies, they soon find themselves pushed towards suburban exile from their beloved Manhattan, and struggle to reconcile their urban lifestyle with their financial means. We also follow Charles' best friend, Morris, in his quest for recognition by his fellow scientists, and Anne's best friend, Merrit, as she grieves over her rapidly diminishing prospects for marriage and family.
The juxtaposition of Morris and Merrit's single lives with Anne and Charles' family existence argues for the superiority of family bliss, but the kind of family bliss Mendelson portrays is located firmly and passionately within specific community ideals:
[Charles] abominated cars and grassy yards, could not comprehend why anyone would want a country home when the world provided perfectly good hotels. Buses and subways were how civilized people went about their business, and trains and planes were always preferable to cars. But most of all, what template of life would be visible to his children in some leafy town on the Hudson Line? Beneficent institutions and the kind of human beings who peopled them would be odd, absent ideals, not powerful living realities as they were here in Morningside Heights. What would life feel like in a world that did not set the pursuit of music or art or science or knowledge or justice and goodness at its core? What would the children become in a world in which their parents were eccentrics, startling individuals, rather than members of a modestly coherent society in which their tastes and temperaments were readable to others, even if uncongenial?
Even those who doubt that upper West Side Manhattan represents the apotheosis of family or community life may be gratified to find the relationship between family and community treated with serious attention. I myself have been starved for engaging, insightful novels about the experience of mothering young children; I've concluded that they're scarce because mothers don't have much time for novel-writing until the demands of mothering young kids, and its attendant puzzles, have passed from immediate view. But Michael Wells at Bailey/Coy came through for me once again when he predicted that Mendelson might be just what I've been craving.
Mendelson's implicit solution to the dilemma of inculcating social values in kids -- raise them in the rapturous world of Upper West Side Manhattan, but make sure you get a hell of a deal on real estate -- does bear some relevance to those of us raising our kids in the provinces. In Vancouver, no less than Manhattan, real estate is destiny: it becomes ever-harder to pay for a family home in the city while earning a socially- or culturally-minded living. But urban living isn't just about convenient shopping, short commutes or (in Vancouver anyhow) beach access: it's about the density of cultural opportunities, the density of pedestrian (as opposed to vehicular) experience, and most crucially, the density of human relationships that's possible when people with shared values also share a neighborhood.
The opportunity to raise our kids in a community of people who both speak and live the values of political engagement, creative expression, knowledge creation and spiritual presence is surely a better influence on them than my efforts at a crafted, controlled political message. Hmmm....supporting social engagement by holding space for community rather than delivering a pre-fab message...why does that sound familiar?
Target V.P. Michael Axelin on the seven components of successful innovation
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February 8th, 2008 by Alex
Tonight's symposium featured Michael Alexin, Oberlin College class of '79, V.P. of Softlines Design and Product Development at Target. Yes, this is the man responsible for keeping me clothed during my last pregnancy, and even tougher, the post-pregnancy pre-weight loss months.
Michael's work puts him at the heart of delivering on Target's brand promise of "affordable design", and he stressed that in this day and age, that comes down to the challenge of continuous innovation. He offered a nice summary of the seven key components of innovation:
- Observation: In focus groups, people often lack the clarity or expertise to articulate their needs. By observing people in various environments you can see what they may not see themselves. Tom Kelley in The Art of Innovation talks a lot about observation. Once you start observing carefully, all kinds of insights and opportunities can open up. Take example of elliptical machine: a GM guy noticed the elliptical path of his daughter's runnning and wondered if you could capture that movement without the impact of running, and sold the idea to Precor, which has turned it into a profitable business. Observation helps you identify problems that need solutions, or white space. Opportunities for true innovation.
- Imagination: Example of iPod: imagining what it would look like to build a company arouund an MP3 player combined with a music sales service. Imagination is an intuitive process that generates a lot of ideas. In preschool, imagination treated as a skill that has to be nurtured. But that's been lost in American culture, let alone American business. That's something we have to find and nurture in colleagues and employees. Need to create space for imagination. Create "white space" -- quiet time. Everything is going so fast, so how do you create time to allow ideas to spring forth. Need to create culture of idea acceptance not idea judgement.
- Brainstorming: Everyone says they brainstorm but it's not part of an institution's every day culture. Lots of companies love to go to an off-site...it may be fun, but it doesn't last. A brainstorm generates a lot of ideas in a short time. The more open the process, the more likely that the next big idea will emerge. Guidelines for successful brainstorming:
- Set ground rules: leave titles at door. Generate not judge ideas. Have fun.
- Strong moderator who doesn't dominate discussion.
- Sharpen the focus by starting with a clear statement of the problem that isn't too broad or narrow.
- Go for quantity not quality. Encourage any thought.
- Make the process visual. I work with 150 designers; they are visual not verbal. We encourage them to sketch their ideas and put them on the wall. Then as editing process we let everyone vote for their five favorite ideas.
- Creativity: Sheehy: creativity can be described as the letting go of cdrtainties. Embrace ambiguity and the unknown. Use originality to defeat habit. Defy convention to achieve greatness. Example: I.M. Pei's pyramid for the Louvre entrance. Initially very controversial. Eventually it got built, and the juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient set the stage for a new approach to architecture of Paris -- now the blend of old and new is almost their hallmark.
- Design. Design is the core of innovation. Success depends on having a funciton, and appeal. "What engineers were to the age of steam, and scientists were to the age of reason, designers will be to our age." Designers are in demand because great design enhances and differentiates. Design must be functional. It's the practical side. Kelly: Design is a way of life. Target: you don't have to have a lot of money to have great design. Target gets a lot of credit for making great design accessible to consumer. Coincides with trend towards upscaling of America. Sometimes seems like we have the right to pursuit of life, liberty and pursuit of luxury. Design is a huge differentiator for Target in the marketplace. Key thing is the emotional connection that gets established with the Target brand.
- Simplicity: Schumacher: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex... it takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction."
- Speed: Consumers want the latest thing know. Need to react quickly to design, market and sales trends. Apparel is pretty low tech so you can't speed it up that much. It's about how quickly you make decisions. Process needs to be quick to react to change. Have to take away bureaucracy to get speed. We reward team members for speed. Bias towards action that encourages people to get it done and get it done fast.
- Collaboration:Even though one person often has that crackling electric idea, it's really a team sport. One person may have the idea but it takes hundreds to implement and execute. ClearRx idea came from one woman who then brought it to Target. Hundreds of people involved from all parts of organization to make it live. Collaboration + shared focus = innovation.
Hmm. Somehow I ended up with eight. I'm hoping Michael will tell me which of these is the "bonus" component.
Jerry Greenfield on entrepreneurship at Oberlin (live blogging)
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February 8th, 2008 by Alex
PODCBZE. Percent off per degree celsius below zero.
They got through winter by selling to restaurants. Ben thought that people driving around selling stuff had a great job, because they got to drive around listening to music, so they turned Ben into a travelling sales person by kitting up a car with a freezer and a great tape deck. That got them through the next winter. The winter after that, they moved up to an old truck because they weren't able to fit enough ice cream in Ben's car. But soon they were spending more money fixing the truck than they were earning on ice cream. Then Ben got the idea of putting ice cream in pints so they could sell to stores. Then they got a couple of small distributors to start distributing their ice cream; then they got a couple of big distributors to take their product into major markets.
A few distributors were just starting to carry their product when they got an urgent call from the distributors, saying they had to meet. They met near Logan Airport, where the distributors told B&J that Haagen Daaz, which had just been purchased by Pillsbury, had told these distributors that they would no longer sell them Haagen Daaz if they were also selling Ben & Jerry's. Since Haagen Daaz was the distributors' most profitable product, the distributors were going to drop B&J.
This seemed to be a violation of anti-trust law, so B&J thought maybe they'd file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. But they were told the FTC had been Reaganized, so didn't expect that to work. They decided that if they were going to go down, they might as well first take their issue to the public, so they launched the "What's the Dough Boy afraid of?" campaign. Jerry went to Pillsbury
They took out classifieds. Then an airplane banner. Then some signs showing big white pudgy doughboy hands squeezing a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Then they decidced to go to their customers: they printed an 800 number on all points, and when people called in they were invited to leave their name & address. Then B&J sent an action kit to each person with a bumper sticker, a letter to send to the FTC, and a T-shirt offer. (For $10 you could get a "what's the dough boy afraid of?" t-shirt that said "
Started getting a couple hundred calls a week, mostly between midnight and 3am. Eventually got picked up by the media -- New Yorker, Wall Street Journal.
Thanks to the public outcry, Pillsbury/Haagen Daaz backed down, and B&J was able to get distribution, which is what let B&J get distributed across the country.
ARound that time B&J realized they weren't ice cream guys anymore -- they were business men. They were spending time on hiring and firing and accounting. We had grown up in the 60s and had all these negative feelings about business. We didn't want to be a cog in the machine.
Ben ran into Maurice Purpura and told him that we were getting out of business.
Ben said, you know what business does. It spoils the evironment! It exploits workers! It hurts the community!
Maurice said, if you don't like that, why don't you change it?
That had never occurred to us. But we decided to stay with it, and make something we could be proud of. Something good for the community. And that's been the journey since then: could we find a way to integrate social and environmental concerns into the business of the company.
When we first started to do it, there was no blueprint for it. We just started trying different things. There's this idea, this conventional thinking, that if you try to do some good, and also have a for-profit business, it won't work. But if you try to combine them the possibilities are essentially limitless.
I can give some examples. And I can also tell lots of stories that didn't work.
About fourteen of our scoop shops are partnerships that are co-owned by nonprofits. They employ youth who otherwise wouldn't have work. We make just as much money as from other shops.
Thinking about entrepreneurship in Oberlin
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February 8th, 2008 by Alex
This is the first time I've visited Oberlin since 2001, and it's extraordinary to be back here. My experience at Oberlin was everything people hope a college education can be: it expanded my intellectual horizons, balanced and deepened my political and social commitments, formed the basis for personal relationships and personal skills that have served me ever since, and was a hell of a great time, too. My time here was so fundamental to who I've become, and such a truly happy time in my life, that visiting here feels like a return to home in a profound way.
I graduated from Oberlin in 1992, and on this visit, I'm also struck by how very long ago that now feels. My attachment to Oberlin has made it a recurring place in my dreams over the year, and after so many years away, it now seems more familiar as a place I visit it dreamladn than as a place I actually live. As I see some of the faculty friends I've stayed in touch with over the years, I realize I'm now at the age and life stage they were at when I was an undergraduate. And then there is the most obvious change: students now walk around talking on cell phones.
I'm here for a symposium on entrepreneurship; I'm speaking tomorrow about social entrepreneurship in particular. In this context, I'm thinking a lot about how my experience at Oberlin contributed to my development as a (then future) entrepreneur. I started a couple of campus groups, gaining experience that in retrospect was key to my learning how to start stuff. And what I learned about social movements -- in class no less -- that has evolved into part of our business knowledge.
One of the things I spent some time studying -- in a preliminary way -- was ethical business practice. My very last paper at Oberlin was about labour relations at Ben & Jerry's, which provided a great excuse to think about what responsible business looked like while eating a lot of ice cream. I was totally obsessed with Ben & Jerry's at that time; when I get home I'll dig out and scan the photo of my freezer just before my 21st birthday party, when it was full of about 15 pints of ice cream, representing every available B&J flavor. So it's a great thrill that the first keynote of the symposium is being presented by Jerry Greenfield (Oberlin '73), who is talking about his own experience with entrepreneurship.
I'm live blogging Jerry's keynote -- and despite time changing, I'm still the only person in the room with an open laptop! It feels a little incongruous, but it does help counteract this feeling of being SO old.
Is Facebook trying to kill you?
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February 6th, 2008 by Alex
From Blade Runner to the Matrix, from Star Trek's Borg to Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, we've spent a lot of time imagining the day when our super-strong, super-smart robots get tired of vacuuming and decide they want to rule the world. You can even buy a witty and informative manual on How To Survive a Robot Uprising
.As a sci-fi fan and insomniac I've spent more than my share of hours staring at the ceiling and wondering whether our house is about to be stormed by robots who've made their escape from the Honda assembly line. That's given me an opportunity to consider a more immediate threat: Facebook. Not just Facebook, actually, but all the social networks and online communities to which we give our eyeballs, braincells, hearts and dollars. Could these online communities constitute the machine threat that sci-fi has taught us to anticipate?
Here's what we know about the prospect of machine takeover:
The machines share a common intelligence. Thanks to networking, the machines are all connected together. Networked, machine intelligence is way more powerful than solo, human intelligence, which is why the machines crush us like bugs (at least at first). Similarly, an online community links users (and their computers) in a giant network that agglomerates the knowledge, passions, and creative assets of its members. A single social network is a collective entity that is far smarter, better informed, and more interesting to talk to at a dinner party than any one of its members.
The machines evolve. In any scary robot movie, the shit hits the fan once your nice, domesticated robot develops the ability to build a nuclear missile or graft human tissue onto its exoskeleton. You want to keep a very careful eye on any machine that develops intelligence or skills that weren't specifically and deliberately engineered by its human creator. So please worry about social networks like Flickr (originally a set of tools for a multiplayer online game, turned into a photo-sharing community) or communities like Second Life (started as a demo, turned into a world). We may initiate our networks, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they remain under our control.
The machines figure out how to build new machines. Machines cease to be dependent on -- or beholden to -- human beings once they learn how to build more of themselves. That's why you've got to worry about networks like Ning, which are deliberately set up to spawn new networks. Talk about letting the genie out of the bottle. Before you engineer your network for a path of relentless, viral growth, get to know its social dynamics and trajectory, so you have some sense of the trajectory you're initiating.
The machines need a body. Aha! you're thinking. The robots need some sort of physical presence before they take over -- ideally something that goes beyond a computer-controlled jet or tank. Opposable thumbs are as helpful to robots as to humans. Well, Facebook has 128 million opposable thumbs: every Facebook user is a real-world avatar for the network. Don't believe me? Almost 100,000 Facebook users signed up for a worldwide water fight last July 14th -- that's right, the network already has us armed and turning on one another.
The robots always kill their creator first. That's bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, and for all the rest of us who spend our days and nights in the laboratory, coaxing our communities to life. Sure, a community may stagger around the room, thrusting out its arms and legs in a vaguely dynamic way, but you know it's ALIVE when it turns around and plunges a dagger through your heart. Anyone who's launched an online community, only to have the members completely reinvent the community's mission, user agreement and/or code, knows what I'm talking about.
Robots reflect and amplify the worst traits and behaviors of their human creators. Robots can do all the stuff we do: perpetrate mass slaughter (Matrix, Terminator, the Day the Earth Stood Still), take away our ability to make independent decisions (2001), exploit human energy/labor (Matrix), destroy the natural environment (Matrix, Terminator), and appropriate other species' cultural, biological and physical assets (the Borg). Likewise, the virtual being constituted by a social network can amplify the worst traits within the network: social networks have perpetrated mass frauds (hello, lonelygirl15!), turned peaceful coexisters into rotten neighbors, reduced people to whether they are hot or not, and -- in an especially horrific case -- even bullied at least one teen to her death.
Your Facebook profile page may not look a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it bears more than a metaphorical resemblance to the intelligent machines of our nightmares. Each half-machine (servers and software), half-human (coders and users) network you belong to is a collective intelligence. It may not be embodied (or rather, its embodiment may be distributed -- across all its users -- rather than unitary) but it is a new kind of being, a new kind of intelligence, that could have a crucial impact on the future of humanity.
You can understand that impact simply in terms of each network's social, psychological, and perhaps also economic and/or political footprint. A network can fan the flames of material aspiration by encouraging people to think about what's next on their shopping list. It can reduce human connection to the next hookup. It can reduce professional collegiality to notches on a virtual bedpost. Or a network can focus members and observers on how to change everything.
But network participation doesn't just affect us: it constitutes us. When we become part of the network's collective intelligence, the network becomes us -- and we become the network. The network consciousness is (to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to our participation) our own consciousness.
If our network aims at professional schmoozing, we're schmoozers: as genuine as our last message was forthright, as opportunistic as our last inquiry was grasping. If our network interactions play at zombies and vampires, we're zombies and vampires: undead, sapping energy from our more vital and dynamic selves. If our network focuses on change, it is change; and the consciousness of each member becomes change (and a force for change) too.
That's why it's time for you -- for all of us -- to join the resistance. Our social networks can be the malevolent, murderous creatures of dystopic science fiction. They can form collective consciousnesses that reflect, amplify and encourage materialism, exploitation and cruelty. We can give birth to these half-human, half-machine beings, and be remembered as the generation of foolish scientists who let the experiment escape from the lab.
Or we can constitute another creature entirely. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and the Terminator franchise all feature cybernetic creations who turn against their wicked siblings and instead join with humans for their salvation. Our social networks may have millions of users, but even in machine time, they are still in their infancy. Their first steps may be shaky, but there's still plenty of time for us to steer them on a path towards constructive engagement; towards claiming the best of their human legacy, and amplifying it with the power of machine intelligence.
The collective consciousness of your social network constitutes some part of your own consciousness...but you help constitute its consciousness, too. Your contribution -- your words, your photos, your choice of connections, even your choice of which networks to engage in -- determine the character of each of your network babies. Resistance is far from futile: resistance to materialism, exploitation and cruelty are the very qualities that we can model, embody and endow. A networked Terminator that reflects these qualities of resistance: now that's a cyborg I'd like to help build.