To live unconventionally
Imagine a conversation with your doctor that goes like this:
“What do you do for work?” the doctor asked me at the beginning of the interview.
“Well, I’m trying to start my own social movement.”
(There was a long pause, but he didn’t ask anything else about that. Instead, he looked at the next item on the list.)
“Do you take any medications?”
“Not usually, but when I need to, I buy them in Africa.”
(Another pause.)
“Do you exercise regularly?”
“Yes, I just ran a marathon on a cruise ship last week!”
Such a person should surely be interesting.
That’s how I first read about Chris Guillebeau (via Cal Newport).
So when Chris mentioned on his blog that he has a manifesto coming up soon, I was eagerly waiting. He calls it a “A Brief Guide to World Domination: How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World”.
Well, surely, there have been many people who have made tall claims over the years, why this should be any different? Because this guy walks the talk. What else can you say about someone who has visited 83 countries so far and he’s only 30 years of age. His goal is to visit the remaining 115 countries by April 7, 2013. How’s that for a goal?
What I liked about the manifesto is that it reminds me of a rule that I’ve been following off late: “Enough fundas, Back to fundamentals.” The manifesto does not tell you anything earth-shattering but makes you think about the simple basics of your life.
If you choose the path of being “just like everybody else”, then you’re already set because that is what majority of the world does.
If you choose the path of “non-conformity”, then be prepared to face all the problems but at the end of it all, you’ll get to live the life that you want (assuming that’s what you want).
If you want to truly go for BHA goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), then you need to take care of yourself and contribute to others as well. The latter is not simply charity, but there are several ways. After all, the greatest joy a passionate programmer or artist can get is when he/she sees someone using/admiring what they created and they are getting benefitted from it. And so on.
All this reminds me of this quote by John Davis:
You all laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.
That’s what I say to myself when people stare at me in the mornings when I’m running with a fuel belt around my waist. Hey, it may look funny, but I need that water while I’m running so that I don’t end up dehydrating (which is bad, speaking from experience). So I may look unconventional, but I need that water, and that’s how I want to do running.
So what else have I done unconventionally?
Super Crunchers
Today, I re-read a book called Super
Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted
So what is supercrunching?
Now something is changing. Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. The story of hedge funds is really the story of a new breed of number crunchers - call them Super Crunchers - who have analyzed large datasets to discover empirical correlations between seemingly unrelated things. Want to hedge a large purchase of euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock.
What is Super Crunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions. Super Crunching predictions usually bring together some combination of size, speed and scale. The sizes of datasets are really big - both in the number of observations and in the number of variables. The speed of the analysis is increasing. We often witness the real-time crunching of numbers as the data come hot off the press. And the scale of the impact is sometimes truly huge. This isn’t a bunch of egghead academics cranking out provocative journal articles. Super Crunching is done by or for decision makers who are looking for a better way to do things.
This is best explained by the chess example:
We tend to think that the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to the Deep Blue computer because of IBM’s smarter software. That software is really a gigantic database that ranks the power of different positions. The speed of the computer is important, but in large part it was the computer’s ability to access a database of 700,000 grandmaster chess games that was decisive. Kasparov’s intuitions lost out to data-based decision making.
(emphasis mine)
The book starts off with the example of Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economics professor as well as founder and editor of the Journal of Wine Economics who wanted to apply supercrunching techniques to predict whether a wine from a particular year would be a good wine or not. He ended up with the following equation:
Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall
You can imagine the commotion that followed. The wine experts brushed off this theory and that numbers can predict the wine quality better than they can. After all, “Just as it’s more accurate to see the movie, shouldn’t it be more accurate to actually taste the wine?”
And yet, the equation did indeed make better predictions, especially with the prediction that 1989 and 1990 wines would be bestsellers.
The Need to Fight
Long ago, a wise friend I used to know once told me that humans have many kinds of needs - physiological, emotional, etc. Along with these, there is also the need to fight.
I’ve been thinking over and over on how true this is. Or whether it is just baloney.
The need to fight. And I’m not talking physically. There is something that you’re always fighting against - whether your focus is challenges at work, or road rage, or even fighting with your loved ones.
A basic human need is to fight. That’s why we have wars and battles all the time. Especially in the mind. I know many people who coded best when they were angry. Maybe our genes and body are built for action, for the rush of the battle.
Maybe that’s why the milestones in a startup feels more “earned” than when working in a big company where the same situations are so shielded.
Maybe that’s why you get things done only when you have a deadline.
Maybe that’s why people do sports, trekking, adventures, long distance biking, etc.
Maybe that’s why people with rags-to-riches stories are more happier than kids of rich people.
Maybe that’s why people feel fired up after a debate or a race, irrespective of whether they win or lose.
Because you’re trying to fight the odds.
And if people don’t have the fight in them, or don’t fight for anything, that’s when they seem so boring, so bored and so lifeless.
Maybe that was part of the message in the Fight Club.
P.S. Has there been any organized pillow fights in India?
The Sunfeast 10K run
I did the Sunfeast 10K Open Run today. I finished in 1 hr 10 min 26 sec. Finally, a timing I am happy about.
Best of all, it was a good run. I didn’t have any of my usual performance anxiety symptoms, mostly because I made sure that I didn’t plan or think about the run. I’d just get up late, hurry and reach the place, just wait to run and hope everything goes well.
I’m thankful that it worked out exactly to a T and it was a good run. A really feel-good steady-pace run.
I needed an extra boost in the end to bear the searing sun and that was provided by “Get Up! Go Insane!”. Thanks Fatboy Slim!
There were people running for their charities, people running for fun, people running in costumes, and even people running out of curiosity. I was running to fight against my off-late tendency to give up easily.
On a different note, I must appreciate how well-organized the entire event was. After the run, they gave everyone bun and biscuits. It may not mean much in a normal situation, but after a run, it’s really important and I was thankful they had thought to this level of detail.
After I came out of the Kanteerava stadium (the start and end point of the run), I bumped into an old school mate after a really long time. He looked at me and asked:
Him: Oh so you came for the run?
Me: Yeah
Him: So you completed?
Me: Yeah…
Him: (has the ‘not bad’ look) So how long did you take?
Me: 70 min.
Him: Oh. (face expression changes) I took 90 min. Okay. cya later.
So next time, don’t underestimate that fat people can’t run.
Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it.
– Oprah Winfrey
Always remember Carpe Diem
One of the hard lessons that I have learned this year is “Always remember Carpe Diem“. The corollary is that “If you don’t execute on your idea quick, someone else definitely will.”
For example, long back Vikram had this idea that there should be a company which takes care of odd chores such as electrical maintenance or plumbing, basically handyman work. Yesterday, I saw www.handiman.in on the back of an auto rickshaw. I came home and checked it out and it does exactly that. It’s a very useful service and seems reasonably affordable, at least for IT people. I’m sure lot of people in Bangalore will go for it.
Today, Mrinal pointed to www.indimeme.com, a TechMeme for the Indian blogosphere.
I started kicking myself.
I’ve had this idea for months but I couldn’t really move on it because I don’t have the knowledge yet, for example, about clustering algorithms. However, I did brainstorm it with a couple of friends and thought we’ll work it out. But a single person beat us to it.
There is a range of reasons why such a website is a good idea, probably the same reasons why TechMeme is indispensable too:
- Allows people to see what are the latest topics that Indian bloggers are talking about.
- Allows people to see the discussions across blogs, not just one blog
and its comments.
- Encourages the above type of discussion.
- The portal can become the gateway of the Indian blogosphere.
- For the website creator’s point of view, it can bring in a lot of visitors. And subsequently, advertisers.
- An indispensable website means the creator of the website is indispensable too. Just like Gabe Rivera is everything behind the scenes of TechMeme. (Let’s face it, we’re all replaceable in our workplaces.)
And so on.
Anyway, the only downside I’ve noticed about IndiMeme.com is that the clustering results aren’t good yet, but the thing is it is already out there. It has been executed. It needs refinement. And I’m sure it’ll get there.
I don’t know whether I should add this idea to my already-long personal ‘deadpool’. Sigh.
When I started thinking about this idea, I came across one paper called Mining blog stories using community-based and temporal clustering which explained how this is a special type of clustering that takes time into account. They call it:
“[the] Content-Community-Time model that can leverage the content of entries, their timestamps, and the community structure of the blogs, to automatically discover stories. Doing so also allows us to discover hot stories.”
I was thinking whether the same idea can be applied to an RSS aggregator and then I found that was done too as well.
I guess there are simply no low-hanging fruit left in this accelerated world.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Happy Birthday to ion
One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod charger. The launch was just one blog post. That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our online store. We celebrated.
But hold on, let’s rewind the story a bit.
As people might have heard in our recent running talk, it all started when Vikram, Niara and myself started training together for the 2006 Bangalore Marathon.
During one of our runs, Vikram told us that he had created his own charger circuit and came up with this wacky idea of manufacturing and selling them. I never took it seriously but Niara did. She convinced Vikram to take the idea forward. Nearly six months later, the idea had taken wings.
The prototype looked nothing like something we could sell.
Later, I was planning to attend the first proto.in. Vikram and Niara joined in and we went together. I was totally floored by the energy of the people there and the fire in the eyes of these startup guys. I told those two that they should talk to this guy called Arif Vakil of “Vakil Housing” fame and how he was looking to fund interesting ideas. Immediately, Vikram swung into action, approached Vakil and started explaining the idea. Surprisingly, he showed interest!
Luckily, Vikram had brought his prototype and went to fetch it from his bag. Then Vikram started searching for his iPod when Arif said “Let’s try with my iPod”. Wow. That moment. Imagine if your VC is a would-be customer and the product solves a problem that he himself faces. Nothing like it.
We connected Arif’s iPod to the charger and the charger to a power socket. The blue LED came on. The iPod was showing the charging symbol. We all had smiles on our faces. Arif was impressed and went on to even ask us where we live and so on. That means he really was interested.
After that incident, it was time to head back. Vikram was on an all-time high. That was when we were all convinced that we were on to something. And throughout the bus journey from Chennai to Bangalore, those two convinced me to join ion. I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, it was a Saturdays-only part-time thing. Yeah, Vikram and me had discussed about such things endlessly. But still, I wasn’t sure.
I thought about it the next day and thought “Why not?” I don’t lose much if it bombs and it was a good excuse for us three to keep meeting up.
For various reasons, we didn’t approach Vakil for funding and put in the initial investment ourselves. And we went from shopping for running shoes to shopping for resistors and capacitors and modifying Drupal code.
Then there was the countless decision-making sessions like coming up with poster ideas and then the stories about how we decided the logo for ion, how we landed in trouble with the cops, and finally the launch of ion.
We sent an email to friends asking them to forward to their company internal groups and anybody who would be interested. We also gave posters to put up on their company notice boards. That was pretty much our ‘marketing strategy’. The idea was that we marketed it as an iPod charger and our target audience was the techie crowd.
We marketed it as an iPod charger even though it will work with anything that can be charged with USB right from mobile phones to battery chargers. We use the term iPod charger because that’s what people have most demand for. The second part about targeting techies was because they will be the ones who will look to finding a solution that is cheaper than the official charger which costs 2000 rupees but still is reliable. Ours was one-fifth that price.
The most humbling experience for me was trying to sell ion outside the Aerosmith concert. That was such a good example of a wrong person (me) in the right place doing the job not suited for him. But yet Niara and me did it for ion.
Then came the amazing customer feedback and our highest point - getting featured in a half-page article in Economic Times:
And yes, Arif congratulated us.
But you want to know what’s the craziest part? We made just 200 pieces of ion. Yes, that’s it. 200 ions. Crazy. And see how far it went.
After that ET article happened, we ran out of stock. That was six months ago. Many people have asked me why we’re not selling more ions. So I thought I’ll tell the hidden part of the story today - We never intended ion to live longer than those 200 pieces. It was just a business experiment for us, nothing more. Why? To learn what it takes to convert an idea to a reliable quality product and take it to market.
We never called ourselves a startup back then. That has happened only in hindsight. In fact, I was in it because I thought I could help since I had some experience in maintaining my own websites and maybe I can learn a thing or two in running an ecommerce store.
After we managed to the finish selling the batch of 200 pieces and made decent profit, Vikram moved to USA, Niara moved on to other things in life and so did I.
But the response hasn’t stopped. Even last Thursday (Apr 17), we got emails from four different people in a single day asking when we’ll be back in stock. Crazy, I tell you.
I have had so many personal failures and failed projects in the past few years that it seemed stupid to kill a successful project of ours. So Vikram and myself have been working on reviving ion. We hope to be back with a batch of second generation ions in the next month.
The experiment continues.
Why You Should Run
One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.
A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.
So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.
Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.
| DownloadBarcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.
In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.
We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.
Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:
Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.
– Jessica Propst
Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:
The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).
Last day at Adobe
As Jeff Atwood said recently in his entry on Choosing Your Own Adventure:
I’ve spent the last six months staring at this page trying to figure out what to do. With some trepidation, I’m now turning to page 10. Thursday will be my last day at Vertigo. I will sorely miss the camaraderie and the many close personal friends I’ve made at Vertigo. Vertigo remains a fantastic place to work.
Sometimes choosing your own adventure means closing one door to open another. And I have to close the door on Vertigo, however reluctantly, to fully and wholeheartedly explore the alternatives. It would be unfair to Vertigo and to myself to do anything less. I’m not sure what exactly lies on page 10. I won’t lie to you. It’s scary to trade the security of a safe, salaried job for the unknowns. But the way I look at it, if it’s not a little scary, then it’s not the right choice. Failure is always an option.
Just s/Vertigo/Adobe/g and that’s my situation.
It was not an easy decision to make. Especially considering the people I work with. In fact, I squarely blame my Flex teammates Sreenivas, Sameer, Raghu, Harish, Harpreet, Kaashif, Anirudh, Sujit, Annam, Ram, Jyoti and so many others for making this such a difficult decision.
There are two incidents that have stuck in my mind for the past few days. One is the recent internal tech summit we had at Noida where Adobeans got to showcase each others’ technologies and ideas. Second, the (internal) showcase applications that our team created using our data visualization platform. I was simply blown away. The enthusiasm, the energy and the ideas was so addictive.
It seems strange that I should leave all this behind. It seems stranger that I have no clue where I’ll be six months from now. But yeah, I have some ideas.
As Ray Bradbury said:
If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “She’s going to hurt me.” Or, “I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore …” Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Thought for the Day
The world is a comedy for those who think; a tragedy for those who feel.
– Horace Walpole
Aware Songs
Is it just me or are there really so many “aware” songs out there in the past few years… And so many good ones at that too.
From self-aware songs:
- Meant To Live by Switchfoot
- One Thing by Finger Eleven
- Welcome To My Life by Simple Plan
- Harder To Breathe by Maroon 5
- Float On by Modest Mouse
To world-aware songs:
- This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race by Fall Out Boy
- We Believe by Good Charlotte
- Heard The World by O.A.R.
- Waiting On The World To Change by John Mayer
- If Everyone Cared by Nickelback
- High School Never Ends by Bowling For Soup
And saving my newest favorite for last:
- In Mumbai, Waiting For A Miracle by Raghu Dixit
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. — T.S. Eliot
Why does crowdsourcing work?
Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:
“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”
Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ’system’.
There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:
Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.
And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:
Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.
“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.
More examples are:
- Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next - this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
- Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
- Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
- MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
- Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
- Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
- Wesabe for personal finance.
- CrowdSpirit for electronics.
- Threadless for T-shirts.
- Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
- Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
- We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
- And many many more.
Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).
The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.
The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!
But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?
The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:
I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.
The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.
Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.
I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:
Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.
…
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.
Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?
Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.
Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.
Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?
Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.
