Maker Faire Bay Area 2009, the World's
premiere DIY (Do-It-Yourself) event, is returning to the San Mateo Event
Center this weekend May 30th - 31st, which is officially Maker's Weekend as
proclaimed by the county of San Mateo. With more than 600 Makers scheduled
to show off their inventions including robotics, rockets, crafts and food,
organizers are expecting record crowds with attendees from across the
state, country and beyond for this one of a kind event. (Last year's show had 50K+ attendees).
Produced by the folks who bring you MAKE Magazine, Maker Faire celebrates things people
create themselves -- from James Bond-worthy electronic gizmos to Martha
Stewart-quality "slow made" foods and homemade clothes. Inspiration is
ubiquitous at the festival and there are surprises around every corner for
people of all ages.
What I Am Presenting (from Program Guide)
Imagine a universal remote control device that controls your home
entertainment center, home alarm system AND functions as your
interactive programming guide.
This presentation, by digital
entrepreneur Mark Sigal and Square Connect (doing the demo) will
discuss the hardware and accessories that you need to build an iPod
touch/iPhone powered universal remote control “touch pad.”
It will show
you the necessary wireless signaling protocols that you need to control
your home entertainment center, activate and deactivate your home
alarm, turn on, off or dim lights, and more.
Finally, premised on an
objective of making media more interactive, Mark will introduce an
framework (lifecycle) for thinking about social, metadata and services
overlays and interconnects.
In ‘Den of Thieves,’ James B. Stewart’s brilliant expose on the Insider Trading Scandals in the 80s (that brought down Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert), you read about people doing unquestionably illegal and amoral things. Ultimately, they are carted off to prison.
This storyline plays out again during the S&L Crisis and following the Tech Bubble burst.
But, this time…not so much. How could that be?
A better proxy for the present times is the Collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, which required a joint save by the US Government and the major Investment Banking houses to avoid a major earthquake hitting the global financial markets.
Then, as now, the ultimate crime was embracing as the gospel that models are always right and human intervention won't offset or derail them.
True believers, not deep cynics, who assumed that the level of risk that they were taking was so unlikely to yield a doomsday type of outcome (and corresponding negative returns) that such outputs were treated as rounding errors, and NOT one of the central equations to be continuously re-calculated.
Add in compensation, investment and liquidity externalities that incented behaviors that were asymmetric to national and personal security/stability, and you have a pandemic case of people's eyes deceiving them.
Thus, at every turn you see people putting a large percentage of their balance sheet and liquidity in play versus running for the hills.
The individual investor, the institutional investor, the investment banker, the real estate broker, the loan officer, the developer and the entrepreneur were all (or mostly) true believers.
To be sure, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight a great many truths appear to be patently obvious, almost demanding (for the benefit of our psyches) that crimes MUST have been committed.
Yet, once you get beyond the Madoffs and schemers/deceivers who arise whenever the ground is fertile, my honest belief is that (in the moment) there were very few canaries in the coalmine that were signaling imminent danger.
Intellectually, maybe a tiny alarm bell sounded that outsized returns, in absence of a corresponding REAL risk to principal, was perhaps too good to be true.
But let's not be too hard on ourselves, or too quick to blame others.
The road ahead looked pretty clear - until the hard data arrived in the form of a series of seismic events that VERY quickly became the New Normal - doing long-term damage to personal portfolios and mortally wounding our financial system.
What is most amazing about the carnage that resulted is how few people were required to perform the actual trades that resulted in the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.
In ‘AIG: We Own It,’ 60 Minutes interviews Ed Liddy, the emergency CEO parachuted in to stabilize the company that is one of the poster children of this saga.
He shares this interesting tidbit. While AIG has 116,000 employees, it took only about 20 people to bring AIG down. Think about that one from a systemic risk perspective.
UPDATE 1: Good article by Michael Lewis in August, 2009 Vanity Fair, 'The Man Who Crashed the World,' on Joseph Cassano, head of the AIG Financial Products business unit that is considered Ground Zero of the credit default swap meltdown. Read this article, if for no other reason to affirm the fact that while there is/was plenty of arrogance and ignorance left utterly unchecked (at multiple levels), this crisis was/is more a product of zeal and certitude than smoke and mirrors and criminality. Again, argues for the merits of better systemic checks and balances.
When you think of companies that are not only built to last, but rather, built to thrive – in boom times and tough times; in times when incumbents rule and times when disruptors rule – what companies logically sit at the top of the pyramid?
Equally important, what should be the criteria for assessing them?
Beginning with the second question, let me propose a straw man for assessing the "Built-to-Thrive" bunch:
Differentiated Products: the company’s core offerings are not commoditized relative to the competition, which gives the company pricing power.
Diversified Revenue Sources: the company’s aggregate revenue is split up across multiple lines of business.
Depth of Product Pipeline: the company’s R&D engine is healthy, delivering with regularity and predictability not only new commercial-grade products, but also new revenue sources that favorably impact the bottom line.
Quality/Depth/Durability of Management Team: the company’s management team is high-caliber, the "bench" is deep, and top management tends to stay at the company for the long haul.
Operating Margins: the company exercises stringent fiscal controls and operates within prescribed operating margins.
Profits: the net effect of the above is a highly profitable business.
Cashflow: the business generates positive cashflow and lots of it.
Cash Reserves: the company has ample cash reserves to weather storms, accelerate R&D, up marketing spend or M&A activities as needed.
Healthy Balance Sheet: The balance sheet is not weighted down by debt, uncollectible receivables or other financial engineering that hobbles the company.
Well-defined Corporate Culture: Employees know what the company stands for, how that drives decision making, prioritization thinking and it serves as a unifying force within the company.
Based on the above criteria, the following are my Gold, Silver and Bronze standard-bearers:
Apple is the Gold Standard It should be no surprise to readers of this blog, that I put Apple at the top of the pyramid, inasmuch as they do spectacularly well on all of these criteria, save for a perceived dependence on Steve Jobs (gut: we’ll find out soon enough if perception is reality) and an uncomfortable (for me) proclivity to mislead/abuse press, partners and investors on fringe items (Exhibit A: matters pertaining to health of Steve Jobs).
Google is the Silver Standard From Search to Keyword-based Search/Display Advertising to Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Earth, Desktop and Maps for mobile, Google does very well in a lot of categories, has achieved a dominant position in a couple of others, and runs a very profitable enterprise. Some recent brain-drain and a failure to materially diversify revenue sources must be counterbalanced by a strong corporate culture, the courage to dive aggressively into new markets (e.g., mobile devices via Android) and a recent increase in fiscal discipline; most notably, the maturity to feed the winners and starve the losers product-wise.
Amazon is the Bronze Standard Amazon has so totally reinvented retail, and its model is (somewhat) category independent that, combined with a relentless focus on customer satisfaction, their foundation is solid. No less, Bezos and company have built a platform that enables third-party merchants to plug into their technology infrastructure, their consumer base and their physical fulfillment capabilities. Plus, they are pioneering cloud services (via Amazon Web Services - Elastic Compute, Mechanical Turk) and reinventing the book for the digital age (via Kindle). Finally, they have a very strong, healthy culture, subject to the caveat that Jeff Bezos so overshadows his executive team that they are in a similar bucket to Apple with Jobs, and their fiscal discipline seems to ebb and flow based upon real-time reads of the market.
Cisco: Close, But No Cigar While Apple, Google and Amazon regularly swing for the fences on the innovation front, all the while protecting and nurturing their core businesses, Cisco tends to “talk” about swinging for the fences; namely, wholly new services that combine voice, data, video and information. In practice, however, they feel more like they are in the "ingredient" business when they need to be in the "recipe" business. In other words, while they are the unquestioned leader in networking gear, have a tremendous sales organization, and are aggressive on marketing spend and on the M&A front (e.g., Cisco’s Consumer unit bought Pure Digital, makers of the consumer-friendly, Flip Video video camera), they seem to be more rhetoric than revolution these days. They are IBM, which has its merits, but the downside is that they no longer feel like a game-changing company.
Am I Showing a Consumer Bias? Maybe I am showing a pre-disposition to favor consumer-oriented companies in my Gold, Silver and Bronze selections, but that is also a reflection of a core belief that post-tech bubble, innovation flows from the consumer realm back to the enterprise, and not the other way around (i.e., the enterprise is a follower, not a leader, in adopting technology innovation).
As a result, this tends to make companies focused on the enterprise segment less dynamic in terms of their cultural and operational DNA. This obviously can change if and when enterprises embrace technology innovation with greater fervor than they have in recent years.
Who Else? Who Did I Miss? Did I miss anyone obvious, especially outside of tech? Who looks better than these three companies on a long-term basis in terms of differentiated products, diversified revenue sources, depth of product pipeline, quality/depth/durability of management team, operating margins, profits, cashflow, cash reserves, balance sheet strength and strong corporate culture?
Being a bit of a Buddhist at heart, I subscribe to the axiom that experience "cuts." Simply put, when you climb steep mountains, when you aspire to meaningful accomplishments, when you put yourself out there emotionally, with true skin in the game, you will get cut. And being sliced up, hurts. That's just the way that it is.
Unfortunately, human nature is to convert the real "physicality" of pain into a confused state. We do this by attaching our egos to the suffering at hand, and giving birth to a discursive thought that begins with the question, "Why is this happening to me?"
Given that, how is it that some of us come through the grist mill of life basically happy and contented, while others get chewed up, ending up as disconsolate, broken spirits?
In other words, is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and
psychological adaptation—for a good life?
'What Makes Us Happy?' by Joshua Wolf Shenk (in the June issue of The Atlantic) is a thought-provoking article that tries to answer this question based on the conclusions of a multi-decade Harvard study, as summarized here:
For 72 years, researchers at
Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who
entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and
divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to
the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in
history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound
insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind
of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.
Here is excerpt that captures one fundamental element to being happy; namely that perspective is everything:
"Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, 'Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.' The other boy runs to him and says, 'Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!'"
So what makes us happy? Relationships (esp. with siblings), living a productive life, maintaining a healthy perspective, and beyond that, it's murky.
Read the full article HERE. It's pretty illuminating.
Imagine being able to deploy a remotely controllable squadron of unmanned planes (drones) that can view the activity on the ground from 10,000 feet or higher with incredible clarity, day or night.
These planes are able to remain aloft and stationary for up to 24 hours at a time, and at that height, are virtually invisible and make no noise.
Not merely eyes in the sky, these drones can fire laser-controlled 500 pound bombs, all directed from a central command center thousands of miles away.
You can see how such an approach would change the game, militarily speaking.
But while it all sounds like science fiction, would it surprise you to know that next year is actually going to be the first time that we (the United States Air Force) are buying more of these unmanned planes (known an Predator and Reaper) than manned ones? Blew my mind.
Surreal, but real. Watch the video below from ‘Drones: America's New Air Force’ (on Sunday’s '60 Minutes'), and see for yourself.
Excerpt: From 10,000 feet above, the Predator was able to zoom in and send back a very precise image of Logan and the 60 Minutes team standing on the grounds of Creech Air Force Base. The Predator couldn't be heard or seen by the team, even though they knew the exact whereabouts of the drone. The Predator's camera even followed the 60 Minutes team as they drove off the base's flight line. It's this ability that makes it difficult for enemy fighters to escape.
“The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”
I know, I know. Proprietary is Evil. Open is Good.
But, not so fast, my friend. I am here to tell you that there are only three reasons to embrace open standards.
Thus, if the definition of the situation regarding the standard that you are contemplating embracing does not fit within one (or all) of these three buckets, do yourself a favor, and choose a different path:
Indisputable Market Momentum: Front-line products or services supporting the standard are shipping (or imminently will be). Don’t get fooled by pledges that products will support the standard in the future, or a company hedging its bets by supporting the standard on a third-tier, obscure offering. This is all about tangible, meaningful proof.
Clear Technical Leverage: Does the standard solve a real problem that eases your development cycle TODAY? Too often, a standard promises to solve a meaty problem down the road, but in practice, does nothing for developers today. Be vigilant and discriminating in assessing if there’s a “there” there in the present.
Brand Awareness by the End Customer: While the media will often tout a given standards-based approach as a game-changer, customers rarely care, unless the product solves a specific, well-understood problem for them. Thus, this is a two-part question. One, does the customer REALLY care? Two, do you know who the actual decision maker to buy your product is (technical buyers and non-technical buyers often have very different criteria)?
Duh, sounds obvious, right?
Yet, I am amazed how often the rank-and-file diss a particular approach as proprietary, as if being differentiated and having a fig leaf of defensibility is something to apologize for.
Or worse, they tout a so-called standard when it is neither widely embraced in real shipping products nor offers compelling technical leverage or explicit marketing advantages.
When confronted with such folk, approach them as you would the door-to-door salesman who's pushing an unwanted trinket, and simply say, "Thanks. Not interested at the present time."
Now this is a series. The Rockets and Lakers have contrasting enough styles that whoever’s style prevails, wins the series.
No shortage of drama, either. Dating back to Utah, the officials had allowed first the Jazz, and then, the Rockets, to manhandle the Lakers, and they weren’t calling that stuff a foul.
Calling the game that way shows a prevailing bias to a particular style of play, and it aint the Lakers (style of play).
Regardless, the Lakers had to answer the physicality of the Rockets. Otherwise, they didn’t deserve to become champs.
If Houston won, they would have been up 2-0, going home for the next two games and playing in front of their fervent fans.
Beyond knowing what that would have meant for the Lakers, for Houston it would have meant that they are THAT good – i.e., good enough to be champions.
Yao is a warrior. Artest is excellent. He has played big. Their players are very tough and play together with fervor, commitment and heart.
An Incredible Game: Smash Mouth Basketball
Case in point, after an brilliant First Quarter by the Lakers, in the Second Quarter, the Rockets took the Lakers out to the tool shed and whipped them. It took a Kobe three for the game to be tied at Half.
During the Halftime Show, Kenny Smith nailed it, saying that the game had championship implications.
Which style would prevail in the Second Half?
The Lakers, like true champs, answered the bell, and (re) took the game.
Playing Three Card Monte
At the same time, the way they answered – with Fisher taking down Scola, and Kobe locking down into Artest, basically said, “bring it on.”
But it was more than that.
It was so blatant that it sent an emblematic, heart-felt message to a Party of Four (FOUR!!): Stu Jackson, the Rockets, Jordan Farmar and Rick Adelman.
To Stu Jackson, NBA Officiating czar, the message is simple. Know your place. Does the league really want Cleveland versus Houston? (Yeah, yeah, the league isn't about that, just like it isn't about relevance, money and ratings.)
To the Rockets, it sends a clear message that the Lakers aren’t intimidated. Tonight, they showed they could be plenty tough.
After the game, I think Jackson equated it to the team finding its purpose.
In that sense, Fisher was a masterstroke, pretty poetic. For one, it created the perfect situation for Farmar to come in. He didn’t need to look over his shoulder because Fisher was gone.
And in the closing rotation, which I loved (energy, defense), both he and Shannon Brown were able to share the floor, so he could focus on playing ball, and he did great.
That rotation (Kobe, Pau, Farmar, Brown, Walton, I think) throws a true speed and disruption look that the Rockets will have some trouble with, and with some burn, the rotation will become better finishers (Odom or Ariza can plug in pretty well, I think).
Minimally, it will force Houston to mix up some personnel at a time of Phil Jackson’s choosing; namely, when he needs a tempo reset to break Houston’s flow, and establish LA’s own.
No less, it adds another dimension to the Lakers, something that Phil Jackson has struggled to find since the role players haven’t, for the most part, answered when called in either of the first two series before tonight.
Welcome to Round Three of Jackson v. Adelman
But, here’s the thing. None of this is the REAL drama. That would be the happy fact that this is "Round Three of Phil Jackson versus Rick Adelman," and Laker fans happily remember how the last go around went.
Round One. The Adelman-led Portland Trail Blazers face off for the 1992 NBA Championship against Michael Jordan and the Phil Jackson-coached Chicago Bulls. The Bulls, of course, win the crown.
Round Two. In 2002, the Rick Adelman-led Sacramento Kings were about to go up 3-1, heading back to Sacramento.
Yep, that’s the game where Horry made that falling away three pointer to steal the game (after the Lakers had been down by as many as 24 earlier in the game), make it 2-2, and the Lakers prevailed in a colossal seven games.
The Lakers won their third championship under Phil Jackson, and the Kings never made it over the hump. Tonight signifies Round Three has begun for Adelman.
The Zen Master Arrives
If you doubt that Jackson is the Zen Master, consider this. The net effect of what played out tonight was that Fisher left, Farmar entered, Artest got kicked out, Von Wafer had words with his coach, and was sent to the showers early. All in the same game.
And the Lakers tempo prevailed; they won. I think this game perhaps re-awakened some bad memories for Adelman.
Also, let's not forget Artest's history of self-immolation, so some element of psychological voodoo is clearly at work on the part of Jackson and the Lakers.
That’s where Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley have it wrong.
This isn’t analogous to a playground-ish type of sport. The Lakers weren't being thugs. This is the NBA Playoffs, and the game is played on multiple levels, something PJ clearly relishes.
His mantra: refs, call it the same both ways. In well-matched series, it comes down to the stars stepping up. It comes down to a need, a collective will, not backing down from the challenge, who wants it most. It comes down to who answers the call.
It’s matchups, adjustinments, having a point of attack, and a lock down efficiency on defense, which the closing unit had tonight in spades. It's about having a clear purpose, and keeping the competition off-balance.
Somewhere in the distance, Game Three looms. I love this game.
A recent report (by mobile app/game ad network, Greystripe) confirms what a lot of iPhone/iPod touch owners already know; namely, that the lifespan of a typical iPhone App is short, real short. In fact, the average iPhone App is used a mere 20 times before it is sent out to pasture.
In restaurant-speak, Apple has cornered the market on “fast food” (and by inference, short order cooks), but has yet to find the model that drives fine chefs to create white tablecloth, extended dining experiences.
My sense of same led me to assert in my analysis of Apple’s Quarterly Earnings Call last week (using a different metaphor) that “Apple needs to segment its approach between how it works with ‘99 Cents Only’ types of developers versus how it works with ‘Nordstroms’ type of developers.”
