Category Archives: Business

Business, life

Changing Education – From The Best Sir Ken Robinson

From his first talk (that I’ve watched) at TED, it was clear he is one of the great thinkers today that devote his mind to education and how we could/should fix it.

This video is another profe to his deep and strong ideas, plus you can enjoy the animation on the way.

 

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Business

Never feel sorry for yourself

Here are few notes I’ve wrote down after I saw this powerful talk of Charlie Munger.

  • Never feel sorry for yourself
  • Never feel envy.
  • Good waves and Bad waves – so what?

If you don’t know who is Charlie Munger – well, he is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway AND the one person that Buffett suggest you save if both of them are on a sinking ship!

BTW, his full talk, is very interesting but I took one thing that was above the ‘ordinary’ – “…On philanthropy: Generally speaking, I believe Costco (Nasdaq: COST) does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it’s a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, and I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat. That may be a prejudice of mine which isn’t quite fair. But I’ve seen so much good in the world by people who really created better systems, and I’ve seen so much folly and stupidity on the part of our major philanthropic groups, including the World Bank, that I really have more confidence in building up the more capitalistic ventures like Costco.”

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Business, webdev

How To Build Your Next Mobile App? (Cleverly)

Why the current app stores are broken? Well, Apple was the first to recognize that the real our of their wonderful hardware (=iPhone) and great software (=iOS and all its components) is outside the company. It’s in the developers (how is counting them now?) that build amazing eco system on top of their app store. It’s not only ‘Angrey Bird’ but huge amount of apps (Netflix, Evernote, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook etc’) that give you a device that can do so much more then ‘just’ mobile phone.

Quite late, lots of other big forces join the party:

  • Chrome OS & Mozilla App Store with their HTML5 concept. You can see more and more HTML5 apps that give you the look & feel of a native app. The ability to have: local storage, drag&drop, audio, video etc’ in your hands is great.
    280 North was the first company that put it as a mission to bring the web app to a level of desktop (=native) apps. Their cappuccino framework is showing the power of javascript with modern browsers and real strong web developers behind it.
    Well, their projects show that the gap is closing fast. Moreover, you can see today, web apps like Gmail that give you more and more. Even on the mobile web-kit.
  • Android (Yes – the ‘java’ the Oracle is now taking them to court on) – it’s very similar to Objective C of Apple.
    The concept is that you get great tools to build apps.
    The main problem is that you need to be locked (just like in the iPhone world) to Android with your code.
  • Palm (Now HP) with phoneGap and the ability to ‘write once’ deploy anywhere. PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs. Their goal is to give web developers (that know JS, CSS and HTML) the tools to ‘transform’ their apps to be native on different platforms. I haven’t play with it (yet) – but I’ll do it soon.

Here is a good explanation from Mozilla lab (=Pascal Finette) on why the current app stores are broken:

Enjoy and keep building mobile apps. One main point to keep in mind is the size that today seems to be all belong to Apple. I guess that in the near future, when will see Google iPads with Chrome OS, things will be different. Any way, it should be a world where like: Pandora apps, your apps are working every where: laptop, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, TV etc’

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Business, life

Why the Future of Business is Sharing?

New tool set for web developersI’ve read “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing” and it’s good reading (specailly, if you have 3h flight).

It outlines how the internet is driving radical new business models for companies with products. In essence, the latest location-based and smart phone apps allow us to access (expensive) products without having to own them. Think about the fact that, on average, you only drive your car one hour per day. What about those expensive tools you have sitting in your garage or handbags sitting in the closet. Written by serial entrepreneur Lisa Gansky, she co-founded Ofoto (sold to Kodak) and GNN (sold to AOL), Gansky is the first to name this important new trend in business. She points out that Huizenga used the same principle of purchasing a product and then renting it multiple times.

Want some more examples? here are just few:

  • Netflix – let you rent a library of DVDs that will cost you few millions to own.
  • Hilton/Hyyat and other hotels. They all let you do ‘time share’ and in their most basic business – they kind of ‘renting’ their properties piece by piece.
  • ZipCar – let you share cars and use them only when you DO need it. Very cool start up that I am hoping to see in more and more places.
  • Crushpad – wine-making services. I guess there are lots of avid wine fans that want to create their owe ‘grape juice’.
  • North Portland Tool Library – Why pay for a great tool and use it only twice (on a good case)? rent them…

I’m sure there are other examples for these type of business that can run today, significantly better, due to the usage of the internet and mobile apps.

The fact that people are aware to quality and wants it make these business even more interesting because they give the crowds an option to use and enjoy something that is not in their reach in any other way. We will see in the future lots of models like this… Specially, in places like India, Brazil and China.

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Business, life

Agile – Getting Things Done and How TODO Stuff

Taking the right turns in your project

Taking the right turns in your project

Some good points from the last 3 years:

  • Describe the project in:
    A. The shortest way you can.
    B. The clearer way you are able.
  • Assign accountabilities – this is critical for the success so put time and effort behind this task. Ask yourself if the people you are putting accountable could deliver what you wish them in the quality/time you want it to be.
  • Document your fears – this list is something you want to check from time to time during the sprints (or short mile stones you put yourself).
  • Find shortcuts/edges – the only way to move like a ‘speed boat’ is to find these little ‘shortcuts’ that give you good tail wind.
  • Describe where you want to be in an ideal world when the project ends.  Then you should:
    A. Quantify `good enough’ – and make it clear when to ship it in that stage (you can/should always improve it in the next versions).
    B. Make it less – in lots of cases less is more and you want to remove stuff! It’s hard – but it will make your project better.
  • Thrash early – IF it seems you are moving (fast) in the wrong direction. This one is easy to say and very hard to do… so be AWARE.
  • Put ‘fire’ in all the people that contributing to the project. This wind tail will make the difference in the end of hard coding night.
  • Try to have fun along the way. It’s very important to enjoy the ride (if you can).
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Business, JavaScript, webdev

Chrome Extentions – IMHO, Very Cool Technology

Last week we had our 2nd FedEx day here at High Gear Media HQ (yes – we like to think big like Google, Yahoo and Atlassian). So we gave our developers lots of good pitza (tradition is tradition!) and some choose to hack on a new iPad application that we are going to ship soon. Some others, choose to check out the new Chrome App Store (or in its current status – chrome extension).

It was an excellent 24h and I hope we will have the video soon on youTube.

Here is the first chrome extension that took me less then one hour! It’s very cool that Google choose to take all the skills that any web developer will have (HTML, CSS, JS) and build their concept around it. When you take the new goodies that HTML5 is giving you (check this html5rocks for all the amazing capabilities) and you think that this new app store will be the way to users to install applications on their chrome OS ‘iPads’ – you start to see the huge potential.

Here is the 2nd extension that let you set your own car and get news/recall alerts on it. Cool, no?

We have some more ideas and with local storage, Geo location and other great HTML5 features we will ship some more extensions to the table. Our new APIs let us build these applications very quickly. I hope that we will be able to open most of them to the public so others could build on top of them. For now, if you feel like hacking on the best automitive API that is out there… try:

Something like: http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?tags=sport – to get all the ‘sport’ information that we produce. Or http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?tags=prius if you own one.
Of course you can change the ‘prius’ with any make-model that you own and still get all the content for that. If you are into ‘Green’ and want to check what is the new progress with specific model you can use: http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?tags=camry,green

All these will bring you feeds (ATOM) that you can consume easily. Enjoy.

What is FedEx day?

This is our version of Google 20% time to work on ‘cool/new’ stuff.

The Goal
We are coming to the office early on FedEx day and ship something over one day of work, hence Fedex Day – “We deliver”.

The Rules

  • From 8.30 to 9 we brainstorm everyone’s ideas of what could be done, and developers sign up for tasks.
    This can be around a ‘theme’ or a bigger idea/project we want to push.
  • Developers can either work alone or in pairs.
  • The development task must be something “out of the ordinary”. This is hard to define – but basically the spirit is that you can’t do something you would normally do. It’s a chance to attack all those “I wonder if XYZ would work… “, “It would be nice if we could… ” small development tasks that always get pushed off in the heat of battle.
  • The development task must be deliverable in one day. This doesn’t mean it has to be finished, polished and shipped (although it’s awesome if we can get there), but it can’t be an “open engine”. It must do something and work to some extent. It must show enough promise that we should continue working on it, or can it.
  • Pizzas/Drinks are ordered in, support is handled in advance and all other assigned tasks are obviated for the day so that developers have nothing to do but code.
  • At about 5.30, we’ll meet up for a “show off” meeting where developers get to show off what they’ve done, combined with chocolate cake and beer.
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Business, life

Israel, R&D, Innovation and startup nation

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Business, life

Do Bankers Cheat More Than Politicians? (yes! 2 to 1)

Dan Ariely research and books are excellent! I’ve just finishing his second book “The Upside of Irrationality”.
Here is a short example to the wonderful world he is clearing for us:

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Business, webdev

New Data Stack Workshop: Building A Scalable Internet Datacenter

Here are few notes I took during yesterday conference in Stanford. The organizer (=Accel) did a very good job in bring some of the leading minds in the new emerging field of ‘Scalable’ and ‘Cloud’. Right… all of the speakers were ‘Accel companies’ – but they are the one who pushing the technology forward – so we cool with that.

The first company was NorthScale (and their chief architect is the same guy that we helped a year ago – with some real world data from high gear media servers). They have a very impressive open source project – Membase What is Membase you ask? Well, “Membase is an open-source (distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput.”

In a nutshell:

  • Membase it’s like memcached but better.
  • Simple – get/set works with memcache client.
  • Fast – ram, ssd and disk layer.
  • Predictable latency.
  • Availability – All nodes are created equal.
  • Replication between data centers.

The second company was Cloudera – The bring to the table a full stack of Analytical Data Platform (ADP).

  • It’s not only a map/reduce solution but the full stack of ‘watching the wheels moving’ and understanding where you want to steer them.
  • BI is science for profit.
  • View of the world / answer question to make money
  • Pose hypothesis and validate them.
  • A/b testing – feeding the business with real world hypothesis and their verifications.
  • HDFS and map/reduce
  • Jim gray – ‘fourth paradigm’
  • HBase – base on google bigTable.
  • Hive – SQL intercede for Hadoop.
    What is Hadoop? Hadoop is the popular open-source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for deep analysis and transformation of very large data sets
  • A good paper from Google: “The unreasonable effectiveness of Data’
  • Beautiful data – buy the book.

Last (for me) was Facebook. Here the story is very simple… scaling from 4-5M in 2006 up to 400M now is putting some challenges on the development team.

  • Scaling to 400M (efficiency is taking a hit at the beginning)
  • Need all the data all the time.
  • You / 100 friends / 100 objects-friends = 10’s of possible objects.
  • Web Server / memcached / MySQL – and make sure you can replicate boxes in each layer without any changes to your code.
  • Testing – Testing and some more unit testing, A/B Testing, System testing… you got the point.
  • Push a new version every week. Don’t let your software ‘get old and stick’.
  • Monitor EVERYTHING and when there is a problem always do what every you can in order to understand the root cause. Yes – even after you fixed it and everything is working now.
  • No single point of failure (sometimes – your software will be the single point of failure).

Overall, it was very productive 3h that will make us try few new opensource projects. Good times.

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Business, life

How much are these Apples?


Great video that show you how to world has change and a lot of people are evaluating everything just by the ‘packaging’ and the ‘fancy’ descriptions.
What a real life examples? go to Draegers and then just go to Trader Joe’s – for the SAME cheese you will pay in Draegers… much much more.

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