Derek Scruggs

One of the cool things to see at South by Southwest is all the DIY podcasters interviewing people out in the halls. The one and only Chris Pirillo surprised me by sticking a microphone in my face and the result is here.

Cross-posted from Enthusiast Group

I’m not sure exactly what needs to be said, but I think it’s important that this story be passed around: The Biggest Wish of Asia’s Tallest Woman.

More pictures here and another here.

Via Shanghaist

Scott Adams has been blogging for a month or so and it’s generally brilliant. A representative sample:

I should note that I’m a vegetarian, but only for selfish reasons. Saving critters from pain is an excellent goal if it’s practical. But I can’t reconcile that goal with what would happen if humans stopped killing animals. The alternative is to wait until the bears – for example – are about to copulate and then swoop in and place the condom on the boy bear without him noticing. Otherwise it seems to me that we’d have too damned many bears. If that happened you’d be all “Where’s that remote control for the TV?” and your spouse would be all “A bear is sitting on it” and you’d be all “Again?!!” And you know how much you hate it when people say “I’m all” instead of “I said.” That has to be at least as bad as killing animals. That’s my only point.

The Dilbert Blog

Someone just pointed me to a very cool demo of what looks like the future of touchscreen interaction. Make sure you watch the video.

Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the “poking’ actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces.

It reminds me a lot of the 3D interfaces Tom Cruise’s character used in Minority Report (an excellent movie, BTW). The screen is a 36″ x 27″ drafting table. I would love for my computer setup at home to be like this. The only downside is it’s harder to keep the screen clean.

South by Southwest rocked. I met a ton of interesting, creative people and came away with a lot of ideas. I definitely will be there next year and may even propose an idea for a panel.

Hands down, the best session I saw was How to Create Passionate Users, which was mostly presented by Kathy Sierra. Their blog kicks ass too. The best part is that she also lives in Boulder. Like, maybe a mile away from me, so I’ll be taking them out to lunch very soon. I can’t believe I didn’t know that, because I know a lot of folks around here. They have a book coming out later this year that I predict will become a huge best seller.

Some of the recurring themes that came out in the panels:

• Smaller is better. Start small and only deliver what’s necessary today.
• Complexity is evil. In his keynote Jason Fried advocated doing away with functional specs. (Of course, that’s potentially in conflict with Joel Spolsky, one of the panelists in another session, but I suspect they have more in common than different.)
• User communities rule. Threadless ships 60,000 t-shirts a month thanks to its 300,000 member community. (This reminds me of one of the predictions of “one to one marketing” several years ago: we’re approaching an age where business no longer create products and then find customers to buy them. Rather, now they’re finding customer first and then creating the products those customers ask for.)
• Great products will win, regardless of the marketplace. Basecamp is certainly not the first online project management tool, and it’s not the most full-featured, but it’s hugely popular.
• Venture capital bad, bootstrapping good. Oftentimes the people on the panels still had day jobs and were running their businesses part time. Contrast this with the late nineties, when you couldn’t get on a panel at the typical trade show unless you had $5 million in VC behind you. The only VC backed company I remember being on a panel was Six Apart, represented by Mena Trott, but I’m sure there were probably a few others. (Of course, Google and Yahoo did panels too, but those are mature, public companies.)
• Expect to fail often. Be happy that most of the time you get to do it in obscurity. (This led to one of my ideas for a panel discussion – My Biggest Failures or something like that, in which we get some of the biggest celebrities in the industry to tell all about the stupidest mistakes they’ve made on the path to geek superstardom.)
• Find a partner. This theme wasn’t stressed quite as much, but several times panelists commented about the importance of finding someone or multiple people to complement your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. I’m definitely thankful that we did that in my current venture. (This leads to the another session idea: Speed Dating for Designers and Developers.)

Other random thoughts:

• I park like an idiot is a brilliant business idea.
• Red vs. Blue is a hoot.
• It’s generally a very bad idea to have a blogger interview another blogger about blogging.
• Matt Mullenweg is mature beyond his years. He had some very insightful comments about how and why open source works. He’s also not so cool that he can’t be bothered to hand out t-shirts at the meetup.
• Austin is a cool place, but I’m turning into a Boulder snob. Too much traffic, humidity and heat for my taste.
• I finally get microformats and will start playing around with them. Starting here.
• Aussies are the funnest people to hang out with.
• Though hanging out with passionate people in general is the best. It was really nice to be at a show where nobody was there just because they were paid to be there, and where in fact many people sacrificed vacation days for the opportunity.
• Though deadly dull to talk about, copyright issues are very important and I’m thankful for the work Creative Commons is doing.

SXSW is very well run. They seemed to have figured out that special sauce of traditional top-down management to make things run smoothly, yet allowing enough freedom for good ideas and activities to bubble up from the bottom. As an example of the latter, they have a completely open community blog that anyone can post announcements to. Kudos to them for pulling off a great show at a really cheap price.

One lesson I learned early in my entrepreneurial adventures is the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. And I’m fine with that. I am generally a cheerleader for capitalism, free markets, risk taking, and the failures that often accompany them. But capitalism is not perfect, and one of the things that sometimes bothers me about capitalism is, well, the capital part of it. From Forbes:

Billionaire Michael Dell’s msd Capital and Pegasus Capital bought Monsanto’s Equal business, Merisant Worldwide, for $600 million in 2000 by putting up $160 million in cash and borrowing the rest on Merisant’s assets. Three years later the new owners had Merisant borrow $206 million in new debt and pay the proceeds to themselves; months later they did it again, this time for $75 million. The two moves gave them a 76% profit on their initial investment, while letting them continue to hold 100% ownership.

In addition to egregious abuses like these, price fixing in capital markets has always rankled me. Why is it that – with so many investment banks competing for deals, so much more info now available to investors, more stock exchanges now than ever, and so many alternative financing options – investment bankers always still manage to charge 7% of the gross? Not a very efficient market, eh?

I trust the editors at the Wall Street Journal will offer a clever explanation soon.

This is disturbing:

Today, out of curiousity, I wanted to find out the average of a first child in the United States.
I typed in www.google.com, entered the search term “average of first child united states,” and guess what the first search result I got was?

“Family Planning in China: Though its cultivated land is less than the United States and India, China ranks the first in the world in terms of … In 1970, women’s average age at first marriage was 20.2 years, while in 1993 it was 22.67 years, up 2.47 years. …”

Followed in close second by: “Human Rights Record of the United …Since 1972, more than 80 people have been shot dead every day on average in the United States, including about 12 … The United States ranks first in the world in wantonly infringing upon the sovereignty of, and human rights in, …”

Both were from xinhuanet. I thought these were pretty damn strange results for such an innocent little search on google.com.
So, I used a proxy server, and came up with completely different results, which seemed to make more sense considering what I was searching for: “16 surprising facts about birth in the United States … “I had my first child, a boy at age 29. I had my second child, a girl at age 37. …”

“US Census Press Releases: Estimated number of mothers of all ages in the United States. … Average age of women when they give birth for the first time [PDF] — a record high. …”

My conclusion:

China is already redirecting google.com to their bizarre alternative netherworld of google.cn. And even for something as innocent as the average age of a first birth in the United States, you’re clearly getting very very skewed results…

Via The Peking Duck

Even though I’m on the Naturally Boulder Task Force, I must admit that I adore instant mashed potatoes.

Next weekend I’m going to my first South by Southwest Interactive and I’m pretty psyched. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it and have been impressed with the steady stream of announcements and community blog postings about all the cool things there will be to do.

Last night I read about this neat contest designed to get people to interact. Basically, they’re picking a random person every day and, if you find and take a picture of that person, you win an iPod Nano. But you don’t know who that person is until after the contest, so the only way to increase your odds of winning is by taking lots of pictures, uploading them to Flickr, and tagging them appropriately.

PS If you’re also going and you have a blog, I encourage you to contact me to get on the SXSW blogroll, which you can see in the right sidebar of my blog. Most of the people listed are running it on their blogs, as is the SXSW Community Blog. (Here’s the code for putting it on your site.)

So I’m reading this article about how melting ice in Antarctica is raising the sea levels. Pretty scary stuff, but I got distracted from fretting about global warming when I read how they measure it:

The study, published in the journal Science, results from a new way of investigating Antarctica’s ice sheet by measuring changes in the gravitational pull of the continent – which corresponds to the total mass of its ice sheet – on a pair of orbiting satellites.

Emphasis added. They’re measuring changes in gravitational pull? Wow! We’ve come a long way since Galileo (allegedly) dropped stuff of the leaning tower of Pisa.

A couple months ago I was lucky enough to have dinner with one of the CU researchers whose team contributed to the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005. (He was senior enough to have gone to Sweden for the ceremony.) He said that within 50 years or so the technology would be so advanced that a satellite would be able to determine whether someone or something is in a cave – like, for example, a bunch of jihadis hiding in caves in Afghanistan – by measuring changes in gravitational mass between orbits. Yowza!