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Talks Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

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Discuss this talk: Do schools kill creativity? ( Sir Ken Robinson )

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Ken Williams – January 31 2009
Further to my earlier entry: I am a teacher, a schooling professional. I ‘educate’ at every opportunity but I don’t need to be a professional teacher to do it, and it happens in and out of the schooling framework, though the schooling framework is a huge impediment to it. Most telling in Sir Robinson’s presentation is his description of the ‘strip-mining’ ou”

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Wow

: “”

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Yahoo Plans to Launch a Mail App Platform – GigaOM

This is something I have been advocating for a while with an email software provider. Selling email software is a commodity business, the carriers don’t make a cent from email and they either need a new paradigm or give the business away to GYM

Yahoo Plans to Launch a Mail App Platform – GigaOM:

Yahoo Plans to Launch a Mail App Platform
Om Malik | Monday, December 8, 2008 | 10:04 AM PT | 16 comments
Yahoo, the beleaguered web giant, is planning to launch a new program that essentially turns its email offering into a platform on which to run applications, much in the same way Facebook does, according to some of my sources. Yahoo is keeping a tight lid on its plans, but I’ve managed to gather some interesting details.

The program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client (Evite is one of the services that is said to be building a nano-app for this new Yahoo Mail-as-a-platform). Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

Last fall, I pointed out that the only way for Yahoo or Google to challenge the social networking incumbents like Facebook was to leverage their email infrastructure. Using email to build social experiences was first figured out by startups such as Xobni and my personal favorite, Xoopit. With relationship buckets pre-defined by the address book, which contains everything from web-based addresses to geo-local data (physical address) to mobile numbers, email clients are already rich with the very data set that Facebook is so desperately trying to build — and hoard.

In November 2007, a senior executive at Yahoo told The New York Times about the company’s plans to use email as the starting point of a social experience, dubbing it “Inbox 2.0.” “There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0,” said Brad Garlinghouse, who was at the time running Yahoo’s communications business. He went on to add, “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you.”

Garlinghouse, well known for writing the so-called “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” has since left the company, but Yahoo has been building on the Inbox 2.0 idea, most recently launching such a profile effort as part of its Yahoo Open strategy. The launch of the Mail-as-a-platform would help the company fully realize its Inbox 2.0 vision.

With its more than 200 million email subscribers, Yahoo has an unique opportunity with this platform. In particular, it plays to Yahoo’s strength in making complex technologies simple for a mass market audience, a trick Google is still struggling to master.

Of course, its success will depends on a number of things, such as developers feeling comfortable enough with Yahoo’s migraine-inducing policies and inspired enough to come up with applications that are useful — and don’t involve vampire bites and throwing virtual snowballs.

Yahoo also has to overcome its own culture of consensus (or confusion). If it does, this could be the start of a long climb back for a company that is currently viewed as a laggard.

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Axis Of Oversteer: You have got to be kidding me…

Axis Of Oversteer: You have got to be kidding me…: “

HOME CONTACT FORUM TRACK VIDEOS ABOUT
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 04, 2008

You have got to be kidding me…
This clip always amazes me. I think it’s from the annual Isle of Man TT festival of madness…

back

EMAIL THIS • DIGG THIS! • SHARE ON FACEBOOK • STUMBLE IT! (1 REVIEWS)

POSTED BY AC AT 12:35 AM  

LABELS: KART

9 READER COMMENTS:

Umai Kakudo said…
Wow. I didn’t know they raced Karts during the TT.

That is awesometown. Damn nutters!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 04, 2008 2:12:00 AM
Anonymous said…
Those karts are insane, to put it into perspective:

The kart I drive does a sprint from 0-60 in about 4.2 maybe 4.4 seconds (26 horsepower in the engine)

A shifter kart with 35-40 horsepower will hit 60 in 3.5 or 3.3 seconds

A 250cc Kart (the ones posted in this video) can have anywhere from 50 to 100 HORSEPOWER with ZERO TO ONE HUNDRED mlie per hour times of 4.5 or 5.0 seconds.

60 comes up in under 2 if my memory serves me right, with a top speed of over 160-170 miles per hour if t”

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Meme-based architectures for mobiles…

now this got me thinking……

more to come later as I digest it. The idea of services living outside the device is a good one. Falls under “the cloud” becoming “aware”…

Meme-based architectures for mobiles…: “Wireless Wanders

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Wandering Wirelessly
Meme-based architectures for mobiles…
Paul Golding – Monday, October 20, 2008
The idea spreads…

Last night I watched Seth Godin giving a TED talk. He talked about the importance of spreading ideas. It got me thinking about mobiles and when was the last time that I came across an interesting idea by using my mobile. I don’t really recall. 

How useful are mobiles for spreading ideas?

You’re going to tell me about texting and text marketing and swarming and all that stuff. Of course, I understand that mobiles can be put to good use as part of viral campaigns, but of themselves, they are not very good idea-spreading machines. Mobiles are incredibly inert. Most of the time they just sit there, waiting for a call or message to arrive. This has bugged me for some time. Battery-life aside, it seems obvious to exploit more fully and continually “

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Tech Job Market….

sucks right now

Am having to reset my expectations re immediately finding great work here. Have been caught in the perfect storm of economic downturn, election and thanksgiving/christmas. Startups have been told by their VC’s to freeze everything until the future is clearer, and bigger companies are laying off in expectation of the recession. Not the best time to lob into town looking for a cool job. I’ve had 3 or 4 companies tell me they’d be keen to hire me in Q1 which is nice, but I don’t want to wait around. I’m starting to view this Qtr as a write off, and focus on Q1.

The only worse thing would be to take a sucky job.

I’ve also been taking to opportunity to deeply reflect what I want to do. There is a need to specialize here, as the industry is so large. I have really enjoyed the ability to be a generalist in APAC, using both my sales and tech skills regularly to the best of my ability. There are technical and mgmt roles here that just don’t exist in APAC. There is the VC market which can back great startup ideas (well, not right now) and there is a fantastic study opportunity with Stanford & Berkeley right here.

Obviously in the short term I’m most keen to take what I know & do well, (selling mobile services to carriers) and jump into the local industry, but the longer term is far more interesting….

William Gibson

So we met William Gibson yesterday at Self Edge, a cool jeans/clothes shop in The Mission. They sell really cultish Japanese denim, obsessively made, as only the Japanese can. Mr Gibson was down in SF for the day as they have launched a co-branded range which he has endorsed… read Pattern Recognition and you’ll understand.

He signed a copy of All Tomorrows Parties for Luca, and when I suggested that he write a childrens book, he said he’d been thinking about it! Luca could read it now and find out what things will be like in High School. He was happy to see Luca as “most of his fans aren’t that happy”

He was a very interesting man to talk to, I was a bit starstruckm but Silk was great, she just asked all the naive questions and he seemed happy to chat about “non-cyberpunk” topics (There were a few fans from cyberpunk central casting, including a guy who lives in a shipping container making robots). We spoke for about 30 minutes 1-on-1 and he seemed interested in how the world is changing to a post-US society. He has waited until after the US election before getting deeply into his next book, as he just couldn’t tell how the world was going to change depending on who won. Definitely a man I could talk to for many days…. I love that here in San Francisco we could do this, it would be impossible in Sydney!

WIlliam Gibson

going to go & meet one of my most favorite authors tomorrow

http://www.selfedge.com/2008/11/william-gibson-party-at-self-edge.php

I can’t wait. Bill’s writing more than anyone else has captured how it has felt to be working on the cutting edge of cyberspace in Asia for the last 15 years. The weirdness, alienation, comfort in the global tech, beauty & jet lag all confusing the virtual and the real. He nails it.

1995 & Mobile Web Browsers

In 1995, I founded an ISP in Sydney called Live Internetworking. Myself and my co-founder launched it, got it profitable, signed up a few thousand dial up customers and a couple of hundred corporates before selling it for a small profit. It taught me more than I ever suspected about business, especially the meanings of “undercapitalised” and “sales”. We weren’t strong enough in either attribute to compete against the coming incumbent telco competition. Anyway…. one thing we had to deal with was helping people who had no idea why they would want to be online, get their PC connected to the Internet. This was back in the day of Windows 3.1, 14.4 modems, and no TCP/IP stacks let alone browsers, email clients etc.

In fact, it’s a very similar situation to where the Mobile Industry is today. People buy phones like they used to buy PC’s, based primarily on hardware specs, price and to run a single non-Internet application (Word/Excel on the PC, Voice on the phone). “Multi-media” PC’s with CD-ROM’s were the current “big thing” just like Multi-Media Phones today. Back then, no-one bought a PC in order to get online.

I’ve been helping a Mobile Browser startup figure out their go to market strategy, and they are facing a critical decision re distributing their software. Do they Invest time & effort into the Service Providers, or do they go for a Direct Consumer download approach? We all know that one day, the direct download approach will be the way to go. To get there we all need “Internet phones” which are only just hitting the market today (iPhone etc) and will take 2-3 years to get into the hands and contracts of most people. It took a similar number of years for the PC explosion in Internet growth to hit in 1997-1998.

But what to do in these interim years?

If history is any guide, it will be deals with the Service Providers that get the initial distribution (remember the Netscape & AOL CD’s we were all spammed with in the 90′s) followed very closely by the “Terminal” companies (MSFT pre-loading IE on every PC) before there’s a critical mass of Internet connected devices and educated users to go and download the browser they want (Firefox).

The interesting question is where are we today and which strategy is appropriate for the next 6-12 months? Personally, apart from Safari/Chrome/Webkit/IE which all have rich parents to support them to maturity, I think that the Direct to Consumer approach will be the right one, especially if the user experience is good enough (I think it is). However I think it will take 2-3 years to reach broad distribution, as there are not enough users out there with Internet Phones today, and people only buy new phones when their 2yr contracts expire. In 1995 Netscape relied on the Service Provider CD’s to get installed, their direct to consumer download strategy only gained traction once people already had a usable browser on their PC and they had used the net enough to value downloading an upgrade.

My thinking is that for shorter term results, Service Provider partners are needed. It’s just much harder today as the Mobile operators are bigger, more regulated & more powerful than the scrappy ISP industry was, and they’ve also learnt from history.

Comments?

Life Changes

Well, we’re here in San Francisco. Arrived last week and spent several days dealing with jet lag and settling in. First impressions (seems strange saying that after coming here regularly for 12 years) are that the Mobile Internet industry here is HOT, there are (as hoped) heaps more specialised work opportunities and that no one seems to know anything special about how to make the industry work. 

All that makes me positive that I’ll be able to find somewhere really interesting to make a contribution. My biggest challenge I feel is going to be figuring out what I want to do, as the opportunities here aren’t just limited to Sales or Services, as they are in the Field, and there are many more early stage companies here to talk to. Businesses usually get to several million in revenue before looking to expand from the US into Asia.

So my game plan for the next few weeks is to meet as many people as I can, keep an open mind about what I am looking for work wise (definitely something with a startup, contributing to the commercial/product side of the mobile internet) and settle into this great city.

Silk & I are really enjoying living in San Francisco, in The Mission near Dolores Park. It feels a lot like Sydney, there are heaps of great restaurants, little shops, organic grocers etc. We have a nice 3Br apartment, and there’s more to do than hours to do it right now!