I had a bit of an “ah-hah” moment this past Thursday evening at the Phoenix Ableton Usergroup (a free monthly group I organize for musicians who use this piece of software). Here’s the gist of what changed in my thinking: prior to Thursday if you would have asked me “what makes a great integrated development environment?” I would have said:

The toolset allows you to manifest what’s in your head with the least friction and most fidelity.

Post Thursday night, here’s my new opinion:

A tool whose design is so inevitable, irreverent, spartan or unique that the tool itself inspires creative ideas that weren’t there before its use.

A friend of mine Brandon conducted an experiment called awhile back called “month of music” where he forced himself to author a new piece of original music every day for a month using new and different instruments. He found that the introduction of new and unfamiliar tools generated musical ideas which hadn’t existed before.

Ableton is a piece of music recording software that has (for the past four months since I began using it) continued to blow my mind at each turn with untold possibilities. It’s admittedly one of the most daunting interfaces I’ve ever had to learn and reminiscent of 3D Studio Max in its complexity. But it’s one of those rare software programs that comes along, shatters the traditional paradigm and opens up a world of possibility that sends your mind reeling with ideas. For me it’s been a “Don’t know what you don’t know” advancement – the equivalent of taking off a pair of dirty sunglasses you didn’t even realize you were wearing.

If you’re a musician and have plateaued with your musical inspiration via your current multi-track DAW recording software, check out Ableton Live. The learning curve is going to feel like standing at the base of El Capitan looking up so you’ll ideally want a trainer, a user group or a bunch of time to dedicate to watching the various Youtube video tutorials out there. But once you can get over the “suck threshold” with it, it’s amazing.

I’ll write more on Ableton specifically as I become more advanced with it but think about whatever tools you’re using now and how you might shake loose some new creative inspiration by going out of your way to do things using a decidedly unfamiliar instrument.

There’s a little startup I have a special affinity for having been in the room for its inception at the LA Startup Weekend event, standing feet away when now investor Ashton Kutcher was first pitched. I had a chance run-in with the guys weeks later in a cigar smoking circle outside their RV at SXSW right after they landed $1M in seed funding. And I then got private beta access to their app at SXSW to try and solve a last-minute challenge we had in running our launch party for Scratch Audio.

The best way to understand what Zaarly does is to go to Zombocom and substitute “Zaarlycom!” They’re basically a hyper-local, real-time want ads site with no limitation on what you can ask for. Here’s why this is so cool:

There is no market cap for this company. Like eBay and Craig’s List, Zaarly stands to create an enormous ecosystem that will enable countless people to earn a living (and a few smart ones to become extraordinarily wealthy) by finding ways to expand the market and make it more efficient.

eBay and Paypal are so entrenched because they became core pillars in enabling others to make money. Zaarly will do the same only it will sit at meta level above each of these specialized devices essentially being this master clearinghouse of desire. In the process of making a ton of people rich, they are also going to provide a powerful secret weapon for those who understand how to wield it. Basically it’s like having your own personal “genie in a bottle” that you can pay to solve any issue for a price you name. Provided you know the value of solving the issue, you can at all times troll for a solution at a pricepoint which is profitable to you.

• Need to get 300 mimes in El Paso by Friday? There’s a price for that.
• Need to create and distribute 100,000 wristbands with your company logo to every fraternity member in the US? There’s a price for that.
• Need midget geologists to sneak into a cave in mexico and perform ground-penetrating radar analysis, have it interpreted and translated into Swahili and display the results in skywriting over Chicago? There’s a… you get the point.

Sharp college kids are going to find ways to make money on the spread between asks on Zaarly and the infinite fountain of ways they can fulfill the requests. CS students will invent scrapers that check eBay, Oodle, Craigslist, etc in realtime for items sought by Zaarly’rs and they’ll broker the transactions and capitalize on the arbitrage. Entire businesses that were heretofore not feasible will be enabled by the existence of this tool. Zaarly is one of those simple business ideas like Groupon that people a few years from now in hindsight are going to kick themselves for not having thought of.

One of their other investors Naval Ravikant is a guy whose writing and speaking I’ve followed for awhile now. Knowing how he thinks and his affinity for econ, game theory and market efficiencies, he has to be giddy over the possibilities on this one. I was admittedly lukewarm on this at Startup Weekend but now that I’ve had the chance to ruminate on the implications for all the side businesses this is going to spawn, it’s genius. Every pawn shop, scrappy college kid and CL/eBay lifer is going to be all over this app. I can’t wait to see how things unfold.

The icing that actually tipped me to write this post was hustle they’ve shown in organically generating buzz the way Noah Kagan would advocate. A guy on their team (having no idea that I knew them already) reached out to me having found me via a tech-focused meetup I run in Phoenix. This is how you create a “root system” of buzz: focus on the pressure points and have one conversation at a time.

The UI for their app is gorgeous. The business potential is limited by imagination only. The team is legit guys. Their marketing plan is enlightened. And if/when this works its success will be a shining trophy and an amazing advert for the Startup Weekend event itself. I am long on both Zaarly and Startup Weekend.

Sign up for their beta – I understand they’re targeting a launch for early-mid May. This is definitely going to be something to investigate when it comes out.
Full Disclosure: I have zero financial ties w/ these guys. I just think they rule.

I drove 800mi round-trip from Phoenix to LA this weekend to help my cousin get real about launching the food truck business he’s been talking about. While I was in LA I learned via a random tweet that my trip coincided with LA Startup Weekend so I dropped in Saturday afternoon and ended up spending most of the day there on Sunday. This was the fourth SW I’ve attended now (the others being an early one in SF and two others in Phoenix) so I have a little perspective on these events. Here’s a quick braindump of my thoughts:

Contributing factors to why it worked so well

The venue for this event was Co-Loft which is a co-work space similar to Gangplank or Co+hoots here in Phoenix. Avesta (@avestar), Cameron (@CameronKashani) & Chris (@chrisdumler) have done a great job creating a fertile environment for supporting startups. I would not at all be surprised to see them take their formula outside LA and franchise on what they’ve done.
The logistics were perfectly handled. With the exception of occasional wi-fi flakiness (which is to be expected when you have 100+ people on the same network) there really wasn’t one glitch the entire weekend. Strangers stepped up and just did whatever needed to be done whether it was cleaning up or setting up. To me seeing that level of volunteering and frictionless participation is a statement of how healthy their community is.
The music was legit. At any given point the air was filled with sounds of Glitch Mob and Darude. At one point they had the Rocky theme song pumping full blast which was hilarious and at the same time genuinely inspiring when you stepped back and looked at all the creation that was going on. You simply cannot underestimate the value of good tunes to support an event. The other thing was the art on the walls. This was one of the pieces made by Cam (words by Og Mandino) and it hugely resonates for anyone is a free-range chicken:

The energy was electric and it never hurts to have a celebrity at the party. Rather than describe it, see for yourself:

The companies that were presented Sunday evening were definitely amongst the best I’ve seen at any of these events. Two or three could very well make it. Zaarly won it but my two favorites were CorkHub and Eventify. GrubKlub is something I would probably do – I’ve always thought someone should make a “meals with likeminded strangers” site. The guy from Hottiespottr needs to be doing stand-up. Crowdstunt is actually a really interesting experiment (put their app on your iPhone and be a pixel in a big mosaic image at a football game). I really enjoyed chatting with the guys behind that one. Which brings me to the primary driver here…

The people

were top-notch and welcoming. Keep an eye on Santa Monica it’s heating up and I would say for a non-Bay Area locale it rivals the startup scene of somewhere like Boulder. Shout-outs to these people I was fortunate enough to meet:
Patrick Vlaskovits is co-author of the eBook at custdev.com and arguably one of the pillars in the whole Lean Startup / Customer Development movement. I had opportunity to have lunch with Patrick on Saturday and got to chat with him more at the event on Sunday. Paleo and Custdev are two of the most life-changing things I’ve learned in the past year and the trip was worth it for these conversations alone. Being introduced to a high-level music contact by Paul as “a custdev warrior” was pretty surreal.
Tyler Koblasa is the founder of Mingly (a company ironically whose genesis was as a former Startup Weekend project). They make a Rapportive-like add-on for gmail that gives you CRM capabilities and helps you unify contacts across different buckets and get back in touch with people to cultivate stagnant relationships. We talked in depth about project management, working with remote teams and the food industry and education. It was pretty cool to discover that Tyler had been using our stuff (JumpBox) for the past 2yrs.
Emerson Taymor was one of the guys behind Crowdstunt and we got to discussing ideas on how they could adapt their thing to make it more viral.
Chris Dumler instructed me on the finer points of Yerba Mate and Matcha teas and convinced me to buy one of these gravity-feed tea strainers for looseleaf tea. Chris also hooked me up with an invite for Namesake, which is something to watch fo. It’s essentially “Quora meets IRC” and when I saw who was in there talking it felt like discovering this secret rave where all the cool kids are hanging out.
Nick Seguin of Kauffman Foundation is one of the dudes directly responsible for getting the grants for Venture Hacks and Startup Weekend. Government would never have the foresight to fund these efforts so it’s great to see non-profits like Kauffman step up.
Imo Udom is improving the job interview process for companies and applicants with Ovia. It’s basically a way for doing aync, proctored virtual job interviews with nothing more than a webcam and a browser. If you’re trying to cut costs on your hiring processes get in touch w/ Imo – they’re onto something big with this.

anyways, there were a ton of people I wanted to mention so just by name only Nicole of Music Boxe, Ryan of CorkHub, Vasily of Mingly, Fernando and Sheryl of the eventify team. You guys all have a place to crash next time you’re in Phoenix.

One takeaway I had from the weekend: I would love to see us establish an “underground railroad” for startups amongst the cities. We’ve talked about this in the past and whether it’s something as unstructured as an email list amongst ambassadors who are the hub for each city or something more formal like a tag or prefix to use on airbnb listings, it would be so powerful to set up sister city relationships amongst the incubators and co-work spaces. Anyone from the LA startup scene is absolutely welcome to come out and I’ll personally chauffeur you around AZDisruptors, Co+Hoots and Gangplank and introduce you to the peeps in our tech scene.

Here’s some pics from flickr as well as some of my own:

And lastly, for anyone who happens to be going to the tribal unification / diaspora that is SXSW, I invite you to be my guest at the launch party we’re hosting opening day of the music portion for a new music collaboration startup we’re unveiling. You’ll hear more about it if you follow the SXSW announcements. Contact me and I’ll get you on the list if you’re out there.

Let me explain this convoluted title. Ignite Phoenix #9 was this past Saturday and it frigging ruled. I just happened to run into the entire Ignite organizing crew at a coffee shop in Scottsdale that actually came about via a talk at the first ever Ignite. Oh and there happened to be one of the Ignite presenters here that I got to randomly chatting with so it was basically a lot of ignition going on.

Anyways the event on Saturday was flawless in every respect (mad props to the organizing committee for continuing to improve on something that was already amazing – I’ve been to 8/9 and they’ve gotten progressively better). My only ounce of negative feedback for Jeff and team was that one of the talks was clearly just a pitch for this lady’s barter business. And hey I get it: you get a captive audience of 800 people and the temptation is to pitch your biz and advance your cause. I understand, but it makes the audience roll their eyes and basically ends up being a buzzkill.

So anyways, here’s a suggestion I want to propose: we need the equivalent of a super-budget, anonymous jury system to shame people out of trying this at future events. And now here’s an even wackier proposal for what that might look like:

What if every member of the audience got a snapple cap upon coming through the door and the moderator explained the protocol that if presenters pull shenanigans and start Amwaying the crowd, the audience is to “cap their ass” with a collective gong of popping their Snapple caps to make that annoying clicking sound?

If you know you’re going to be publicly shamed on stage when you willingly violate the presentation guidelines and slang your own stuff, you’ll either a) steer clear of this practice or b) violate it and provide some serious amusement for the audience. Either way- WIN!

Anyways, I leave this suggestion in Jeff’s capable hands and will pledge to buy a few cases of Snapple to arm the audience if they decide to adopt it. Even if they just gave the front row this duty I think it would work (but it’d be way more impressive to see 800 people capping a presenter that did this). If you’re down with this idea or have feedback on how to improve it, chime in with a comment.

Wow. This thing is great on so many levels. With the exception of one conspicuously-missing feature, I’d say Apple has a game-changing device on their hands.

The void that this product fills

On the continuum of multimedia-based, time-wasting activities there is a gap. If traditional television sits at the extreme of the passive / linear / spoon-fed type of media consumption, surfing the web and reading blogs is at the opposite end requiring too much effort and brain involvement for times when you just want to decompress. I just finished setting up an Apple TV box this evening and I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now and this thing falls squarely in the middle of that continuum as an easy way to consume digital multimedia without having to sit in front of a computer screen.

The Apple TV allows you to sync your iTunes via wireless and watch/listen via your entertainment system. It can aggregate media from multiple computers, display photos and album art in the background and has an interface for surfing youtube content (provided it’s connected to the Internet). There was an Apple TV at a birthday party I was at last weekend and it was a blast passing the remote around and be able to pull up an old SNL episode or Mr. T singing about his mom. In the same way that the Nintendo Wii transforms a typically anti-social activity of gaming into a social experience, the Apple TV makes for a fun way of exploring digital content.

Setup happiness

The setup was almost as painless and intuitive as configuring a JumpBox. Running the wires for the component video took the longest time of any step. Once we got the wiring right the on-screen setup of the Apple TV from that point was a snap and took all of about 30sec to connect to the hotspot and start syncing to my iTunes. We did have to disable mac address filtering for it to connect. You pair it like you would a bluetooth device by entering in a combo on the iTunes of the computer which you wish to sync and it does its thing. About an hour later it had successfully synced some 2000 songs, a handful of video podcasts and a movie. You’ll want to pull down the album artwork for your iTunes library if you don’t already have it because it makes flipping through your music feel like flipping through a CD collection.

Usability

The visual interface is clean and what you’d expect from Apple. The remote is the same one that comes with the MacBook laptop and has only a few buttons- it makes the universal remote on the coffee table look like a monster. You navigate a tree of options based on Music, Movies, TV shows, Podcasts, Youtube and device settings. The only thing that’s awkward is typing in characters for a Youtube search via an on-screen keyboard.

Valuable real estate for Apple

I don’t know the numbers on prevalence of Apple TV’s at this point- I would guess it’s just a sliver of the market. But this device represents the “last mile of track” for Apple in a digital entertainment railway into the living room. I can see how owning the iTunes player, the iTunes store and the Apple TV device gives them a wildly-valuable distribution channel for digital media assets.

My perception of the Apple TV before using it was “this could be neat but it seems like a technology solution chasing a problem.” My feelings after having used it is that it makes you forget that you’re using the Internet – it’s more like a Tivo experience than an Internet surfing experience. The interface, transitions and usability that went into it make you want to explore and play with it. By taking a situational vs. feature-centric approach, they zeroed in on the scenarios that people want to use this for and nailed it. There’s only a few minor deficiencies at this point – but like the iPhone, this is a strong first showing for a product.

Enhancements I’d like to see

Conclusion

This is cool device. I had tinkered with the Democracy player and Joost on my laptop awhile back thinking “wow, power to the people. I’m going to start watching non-mainstream content more” but then I never did because at the end of the day, sometimes you just want to plop on the couch and hit the remote. The Apple TV moves that unique, independent content into the living room where it can compete in watch-ability with movies and TV. I wouldn’t say drop what you’re doing and race out to get one but this definitely a neat addition to a media center and sure to further erode the receding coastline of the TV networks.

Dear wrinkle-resistant shirt technology – I <3 you. I'm letting go of all my traditional button-down ex's. I've told off my ironing board and thanks to you I can now spend an extra five minutes sleeping in every morning.

I have no idea how you do what you do but I'm thankful.
A Valentine Haiku just for you:

Creases are ugly.

But I despise ironing.

With you… irked no more.

This is a free-form brain dump of some thoughts I have after reading Wisdom of Crowds and having been an active contributor to Cambrian House for about a month now. I just now caught up on most of the Primordial Soup podcast episodes (which is excellent btw) and reviewed the current top ten ideas in Idea Warz on the CH site. The idea of CH itself is very similar to what we were after with Grid7 Labs and having first-hand experience trying to do what they’re doing, I feel I have qualifications and context to make these assertions.

Wisdom of Crowds

First off, if you haven’t read James Suroweicki’s book yet, you should. It’s an extremely interesting proposition: the idea that you can collect many independent judgements from a group of diverse members, tally it all up and get a highly-accurate prediction of what the truth really is. What’s neat about WOC is that it can apply to anything- from jelly bean counting to sports games to complex business decisions. We had proposed the development of an app that would enable corporations to conduct decision markets internally and with their customers as a great candidate for a Grid7 Labs project. Inkling Markets beat us to the punch though and it seems they’ve done a partnership with Cambrian House to handle the decision markets under the hood for CH that are used in determining which ideas end up getting built. This all makes perfect sense given the similarity of the Y Combinator concept to CH and knowing Paul Graham’s affinity for incubating early-stage tech businesses. We wish both companies the best in this effort as the developer co-op concept is something we tried ourselves with difficulty.

Getting back to WOC though- the example used at the beginning of the book is a carnival environment where a group of 500 or so attendees is asked to submit guesses as to the weight of an ox. The mean average of all guesses ends up being 1lb. off from the true weight of the ox supporting the theory that many independent judgements from diverse people yield a very accurate prediction. James goes on to cite numerous other examples of situations where this phenomenon has been tested and proven. For instance, the disappearance of a navy sub where the potential resting location of the sub could have been anywhere in a thousand-mile radius in the Atlantic. They conduct a focus group with a bunch of different navy people and submarine-related people in various roles and have them posit guesses as to where the sub went down. The aggregation of these guesses ends up being within a hundred yards of the actual location of the sub yet again supporting the premise of WOC. There are a ton of other examples in the book but here’s the core principle:

In order for the WOC phenomenon to work, there must be four pre-conditions fulfilled for the environment in which the guessing occurs:

1. Independence – that the judgements be made in a way that doesn’t influence each other
2. Diversity – that the participants making the judgements be composed of the most diverse possible group
3. Decentralization – that the participants be able to draw upon knowledge that is obtained locally and not funneled through a central source
4. Aggregation – that there be a mechanism to capture and gauge all the judgements made

The Flaws with CH

Herein lies the problem with the existing implementation of Cambrian House:

The current system breaks three of the four necessary pre-conditions.

Let me preface the following by saying, I love CH. I love the spirit of this concept of crowdsourced software (deep down i’m really a modern-day hippy- i’ve had a peace sign around my neck for the past 15yrs). And I really like the execution so far on how they’ve told the story and managed to ignite the community behind their drive. The whole Viking / Napoleon Dynamite theme is genius and keeps things fun and engaging when they could easily drift towards sterility and blahness. I want to see them succeed because this is a difficult problem they’re tackling and we struggled with making it work ourselves in the Grid7 Labs cooperative. So this is not a slam at all but rather a collection of constructive suggestions that will hopefully make their system tighter.

Problem #1: The current Idea Warz implementation allows the rater to see the score once he/she has rated an idea. Bad! There needs to be a “quiet period” where new ideas are rated without divulging their status. It’s too easy to give a thumbs up/down and then immediately change your vote once you see the score. This breaks the first pre-condition of independence because it allows the hivemind / groupthink / herd mentality to skew the results.

Solution: They need to conceal the rating and maybe even the comments for at least the first week that an idea is submitted.

Problem #2: The current participants are homogeneous and consist of the slashdot / digg crowd. It’s not surprising that the early adopters of this thing are highly-technical people. But in order for it to truly work it needs to attract a more diverse group that bring other skills to the fray. I’ve submitted eleven ideas so far, all of which came from the Grid7 Labs project and were the distillation of many hours of brainstorming and working through business models and technical ideas within the Labs team. In the first three days of submitting these ideas, eight of them kited up to the top-twenty out of a total of 2,500 ideas. I was excited about that but then a strange thing started to occur- all eleven ideas were getting great comments but their ratings took a dump. They are all now hovering around the -10 rating (+ scores are better). This is a bit disturbing and after reading the top five ideas just now, here is my hypothesis of what’s occurring here:

In order for an idea to gain traction in CH right now, the pitch needs to be tailored to a slashdotty audience.

Anyone who has made a successful pitch will tell you that the content of the pitch itself is not nearly as important as the level of connection you establish with the pitchee. We learned this through an experiment at our second FastTrac class when we went around the room and had to recite the elevator pitch of another entrepreneur from our class. It was a powerful lesson that your pitch is only as effective as the impression it makes on the listener. The contrapositive to this negative example was the experience that happened only a few days after we launched the JumpBox entity in which we were contacted by someone who had caught wind of what we were building through a friend of a friend and was interested enough to track us down and ask us when he could purchase it (and all this only one week after deciding that we were going to build it).

I imagine the typical CH participant right now as someone who sleeps with his gameboy controller and checks Digg twelve times every hour for the latest AJAX tutorial or YouTube video. There are a ton of intelligent, insightful people in there but unfortunately the masses right now seem to be composed of mostly the slashdot crowd and are basing judgements on ideas solely on the technical “wow factor” rather than the business-viability factor. Having your ideas (essentially your babies) torn apart by this crowd feels a bit like I imagine it would feel to come home and find your pet slaughtered by a roving pack of jackals that then wanders to the next neighborhood in search of fresh meat.

Solution: CH needs to spend some of that VC money to promote this concept amongst the business schools and MBA programs. It’s neat that their community is a global one (good news on the geographic and ethnic diversity axes) the industry axis is hosed and way too skewed towards tech nerds. They need more people thinking about and contributing to the business model aspects and worrying less about the technology. This will undoubtedly be a concern of theirs and surely be addressed some time soon. It would be fairly trivial to run a facebook ad campaign and reach some of the talented students of the various MBA programs to get this diversity in motion sooner rather than later.

Problem #3: And I don’t know how you solve this one but the nature of participants’ interaction with the system is such that it will always be filtered through the CH lens. It can’t be any other way or else the idea becomes loose in the wild and it’s impossible to apply useful metrics to the feedback that gets generated. It’s conceivable that they could use the structured blogging plugins and something like MC Ping to create a specific microcontent definition for a CH idea and then allow people to post them via their own blogs and elicit feedback there and aggregate it on CH via the MCPing notification service, but it seems like they have bigger fish to fry right now with the need for getting projects in the queueu and people contributing to those. They do need to stress the business model aspects of the ideas more. It was suggested in the podcast that they create a separate field for “how this idea makes money” in the idea submission process – this could also be incorporated in the MCD.

Solution: There is no silver bullet for this one unfortunately. They could do the above suggestion with the SB plugin but at the cost of losing the reins on the data and not being able to have the tight metrics on how the ideas are being interacted with. My recommendation on this is to run with the current setup but stay cognizant of the fact that the CH interface itself (as unbiased as it may be) is still a lens that adds distortion to the true picture. They need to try and minimize this distortion as much as possible at all times.

What I like about their current setup

For the handful of things that go wrong and that I’m choosing to pick on, I know from experience that this is difficult stuff and that there is a million other things that are going right under the hood in order for them to establish the momentum they’ve built so far. So once again, I applaud CH for telling the story well and creating a surprisingly-good mechanism for aggregating the feedback and using it to determine the winning project ideas.

They’re on the ball with the various collaboration mechanisms in place- Norseforge appears to be built with the same GForge technology that is used to create SourceForge. We explored using this ourselves for G7 but ended up going with a simple Trac/SVN setup using a private Google Groups and traditional IM for real-time exchange. They have an IRC channel setup which is also something we toyed with but never ended up doing. We’re now planning to run an internal Jabber server rather than a private IRC channel but both achieve the same function of having chat that accrues in a central archive. The style of their marketing, blog, podcast, public site and backoffice is pure genius: it’s just the right tone- a ongoing fun yet legit cooperative game showing consistent progress each week and celebrating the small wins. They use fresh and concise writing style and seem to value the same transparency that we did in how things are conducted- they have to in order for it to succeed. They’re setting up an independent “tribal counsel” composed of both members and CH people to solve the inevitable IP disputes that will arise once a project hits and becomes valuable given that it emerged from a stew of ideas submitted and touched by many people along the way. My overall impression is that they’re hearts are in the right place and they’re using agile processes to make things “light yet sufficient” and roll with the punches as they come.

Anyways, this post ended up being longer than I had hoped so I’ll discuss the Inkling Markets stuff at another time. The bottomline here: CH has a good thing going. I have a bunch more ideas to submit and I plan to apply what I’ve learned in the next round of submissions and tailor the pitch more to the slashdot crowd. They have interesting and challenging problems to solve but so far they’re doing the right things, they have money and there is no fundamental, show-stopper flaw that I can see in their model. They will undoubtedly meet the same challenges we encoutered in relying upon labor that is not on the hook to actually deliver but only motivated by promise. My involvement in CH is hobbyist status at this point given the fact that JumpBox dominates 110% my schedule right now but I could see after the JumpBox liquidity event becoming more involved in CH. It’s even possible that the Grid7 Labs team itself becomes dedicated to executing CH projects as a long-term play for recurring revenue and recruiting talent. It’s very consistent with the goals of Grid7 and would essentially mean that our people get to contribute without actually having to host the infrastructure ourselves. Apparently they’re announcing a new Idea Warz voting system this week. I would love to see them work with Luke to incorporate some of the theory from Innovation Games into the next iteration of Idea Warz. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how the CH system evolves to address some of its current flaws.

I’ve had serious lower-back pain lately and after the first night of good sleep in a week, this is my major realization regarding the treatment of this type of problem:

While the injury itself that’s behind the problem may be muscular or skeletal in nature, the systems affected are inter-related and one issue cannot be fixed without correcting the other.

Even if you sit properly in your chair, you’re still sitting in a chair all day if you have a desk job and as Greg says, “our bodies aren’t designed to hold that position for an extended period of time.”

Greg and Michael are the same two guys that fixed my rotator cuff injury back in the Spring. I’ve done three acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for this problem this past week with only mild relief each time, however as I’ve now learned, we weren’t addressing the muscular side of the equation. Yesterday we added therapeutic massage to the regimen and not even 24 hours later I feel 95% improved. Apparently there are two sets of opposing muscle groups that battle over the lower spine and both were having spasms playing tug of war with my sacrum. Moving the bones back into place provided temporary relief but the muscles were undoing the work. By alleviating the muscle strain, the back adjustment seems to have held and my situation is much improved. And yes, that’s me posing in the diagram ;-)

I cannot recommend the services of these two individuals highly enough. When your daily existence becomes eclipsed by a health problem, there is simply no price that can be assigned to the prospect of becoming free of the pain. For me the back problem this past week had become more than an uncomfortable nuisance and was starting to seriously damage my productivity and morale at the office (my co-workers would tell you that I’ve been hobbling around like an old man and I’ve been irritable and unable to deeply concentrate). Thanks to Michael and Greg I should be back in the saddle now.

The question I have is “from where do these problems originate?” I had a major car accident in ’93 that left me with a crushed L5 vertebrae so that’s probably the ultimate culprit but still there is no single event recently that should have triggered the resurgence of problems. My back has been mostly fine ever since the accident with the occasional intermittent, dull pain from long road trips and uncomfortable seating. Being acutely aware of my risk for back issues, I make sure to sit properly in the most ergonomic chair you can buy. The massage guy told me that apparently that’s not enough though, and that sitting uninterrupted for long periods without taking the occasional break to get up and stretch will cause the muscles to strain, which in turn pull the bones out of alignment, which means you don’t sleep well, which thwarts the healing process and creates more muscle strain, etc. Good sleep is so essential to the recovery that once the negative spiral is initiated, it needs an intervention to stop it. The spiral can be avoided entirely by drinking a lot of water and stretching throughout the day.

If you are experiencing prohibitive pain from repetitive strain injury or another work-related stress and are in the Phoenix area, I highly recommend the services of the guys from the CFAM as a measure of intervention.  And for that matter, whatever ails you I recommend you contact the CFAM – here’s a testimonial from a good friend I sent there for her long-term sinus problem and she’s finally found relief. Heck, if you’re outside of Phoenix and your problem is troublesome enough, I recommend you fly here and meet with them. Phoenix is beautiful in the winter!

*One disclaimer here- it should be noted that I did do their web site. I believe the service they do is extremely valuable but I derive no direct monetary benefit from referrals generated via the advice here.

“Everything you will ever want is presently owned or controlled by someone else.” Think about it. I just did a second pass through Roger Dawson’s audio series called The Secrets of Power Negotiating and took notes this time in mind map format and made them available for download. This series is an excellent overview of how to improve your negotiation skills. It begins by pointing out that no matter what your job is, you are negotiating for things every day. Roger teaches the twenty tactics, or “gambits” involved in effective negotiations and also how to adapt to the different personality styles and how the different types of power influence us. If techniques like The Fait Accompli and Flinching seem too shady and “used-car-salesman” for you to use yourself, you should at least be aware of their presence. Being familiar with the mechanics of negotiations means you can identify when these tactics are being employed against you and easily disarm them.

I had many take-aways from this series, the first of which was that he copied my header for his cover design. I mean c’mon Roger, I’ve had the purple lightning bolt thing for years now… ;-) But seriously, it was helpful to learn the Bracketing technique, how to disarm a resort to higher authority and how the value of services diminishes rapidly once those services have been rendered and therefore why you should lock down the details up front. Also useful was the trade-off maneuver for getting instant, reciprocal goal concessions to bring negotiations to a close, the Nibbling strategy and the counter maneuvers for the good-guy/bad-guy technique.

For $14, the series is worth the bonus disc alone in which he teaches you how to negotiate your next automobile purchase. For me I disliked the idea that I was at a disadvantage being unaware of these tactics that others could use to manipulate me. Hopefully posting this outline for public consumption is kosher (I’m surprised they don’t have a better synopsis in the Amazon review). In reality, the value of the notes by themselves is marginal since 90% of the effectiveness of using these techniques is in their delivery and you need to hear Roger’s voice to get it right. I highly recommend this series to anyone who needs to negotiate something – okay basically everybody with a pulse… You can download the mindmap below or view the HTML version if you don’t already have Freemind installed. And if you’re not mindmapping, here’s why you should be.

Here’s a screenshot of the main branches, each one representing an audio chapter in the series:

Happy negotiating!

-sean

They are very versatile devices and while I’m fairly sure they could launch rockets with a little modification, they cannot be submarines. I learned this the hard way this weekend when mine decided to take a dive. It was the most expensive swim I’ve ever had but the silver lining of this cloud was the process for restoring the data the next day on the replacement device. I gotta hand it to Palm- it could not have gone any smoother. Every setting, application and piece of data (calendar item, contact, memo and todo) was fortunately backed up to my mac and upon syncing (s-Y-n-c’ing) the new treo for the first time, it functioned precisely like the old one. A few years ago this event would have meant a catastrophic data loss and hours of re-entering the numbers that I had a paper backup for. Today it was literally the time necessary to activate the phone and sync it once. Kudos to the folks at Palm for a sweet restoration process!