Jason Francis Kraft

Hilarious. And true.

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:53:06 -0800

http://cgi.ebay.com/SesameVault-Online-Video-Platform_W0QQitemZ160405185640QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item2558e4e468

http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=17020

Lamps

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:33:41 -0800

Lamps

Bookshelf Feb 15 2010

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:36:00 -0800

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

Make-up by Photoshop – Positively Perfection. Should Photoshop...

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:07:00 -0800

Make-up by Photoshop – Positively Perfection.

Should Photoshop extend into real-world make-up, or should Avon release a new line called Photoshop?

Social is technology

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:24:00 -0800

The stereotype of technology innovation is that it gets realized by a private genius who works independently to envision and then implement a breakthrough product. Innovation is thought to be a solitary pursuit owned by the few, diametrically opposed to social pursuits, friends and partners. Steve Wozniak worked alone 16+ hours/day to assemble smaller and smaller circuit boards and innovate the first Apple IIe. He had no wife, no girlfriend, no social life. Steve Jobs made the product look good, formed business alliances, sold it and won customers. But Woz without Jobs or Jobs without Woz, and there would be no Apple.

The Neanderthal vanished from existence ~30,000 years ago succeeded by modern man. The popular notion is that modern man was smarter and more technologically advanced. But evidence suggests Neanderthals had approximately equal inventive capabilities, survival techniques and tools to show for it. The one vital difference: modern man collaborated, shared and socialized to a much greater degree than the insular, private Neanderthal. As soon as a man invented a new technique, everyone in his group knew about it and used it. By contrast, Neanderthal inventions were never fully realized and died with them. The lesson: modern man was more innovative, advanced and conditioned to survive because his culture socialized and shared its important advancements with itself, evolving and iterating through use, learning and collaboration.

Steve Wozniak and Neanderthal Man

The vast proliferation of Internet social platforms, widgets and user activity on them is not just mindless t(T)witter. It’s technology at work.

Software is green

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:51:00 -0800

I’m both jealous and relieved not to be John Ive.

Ive gets to design 3-dimensional, physical products for Apple. A few of his most recognized creations:

With the exception of some home projects, like the tanzu on my previous NYC loft or the headboard on my new Los Gatos bed, I design 2-dimensional items—user interfaces for Web, desktop and Mobile technology services. My work does have an interesting 3rd dimension beyond just ink on substrate: the interactions that guide users through content and produce results. But the frustrating reality is that software is very ephemeral. I’ve worked on Web sites for weeks, months and even years, then exit and return 2 years later to find the business has transformed, my designs deleted save for remnant screenshots I preserved in my portfolio. If I’m lucky, millions of users navigate my work (ideally without it getting in the way of their hunt for content) for a relatively short time, then it vanishes, very little lasting, almost nothing for history.

John Ive’s best products get consumed, loved and then indoctrinated into MoMA. Not even my most notable work, or the work of the most famous interaction designers get elevated to museum status.

Then there is a dirty underbelly to industrial design. An Ive product isn’t just one sculpture to be admired; it gets mass-produced as a non-biodegradable piece of metal, plastic and chemicals. Then, 99.999999% of it gets thrown out, accumulating in landfills or melted down, emitting dangerous environmentally hazardous gases. Chinese children get lead poisoning.

← 2,000,000 discarded G4 cubes, iSubs and iPods

So, I’m relieved that both my good and bad work evaporates like water into the ether, an imaginary cloud of ex-software that clears space for another generation of apps, neither hurts nor kills. Software is green.

There’s only 1 hitch: I need this Ive-designed Powerbook to accomplish my work and even to write this post. For what it’s worth, I keep all of my Apple gear as mementos for my own history, sparing the environment for awhile.

Context is window to genius

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:36:49 -0800

James Cameron’s Avatar invents a new vocabulary of futuristic technology and alien biology. The mixture of imagery, special effects and action is fantastic and convincing. But seamlessly woven into the mesh of that world is something much simpler and even more inspiring: the notion that a change of context can morph simple human to genius.

Avatar’s hero, Jake Sully, is introduced as a 2nd-rate replacement for his brilliant, schooled brother who has recently been killed. Jake is an ex-Marine paralyzed from the waste down. Both physically compromised and mentally weak, he is barely more than a bedazzled mute presented with a seemingly unfortunate assignment: to engage with “combatant aliens” in a hostile world. Without much too lose and no apparent ambitions, he accepts. Upon entering the planetscape of Pandora as a biological alien Avatar, Jake’s motor-coordination and personality instantly emerge. The story doesn’t alter anything notable about the hero’s personality, just his body and environment. Everything down to his speech patterns remain the same. He simply becomes himself to his fullest in the culture he was always meant to exist, the species he was meant to become, the female he was meant to be with. The story is a coming-of-age. A withered man shrunken as tiny as a child gets transplanted to an artificial body that ushers his growth to become real. His character blossoms to its fullest potential within an environment he is perfectly suited to thrive.

Amidst today’s 6 billion living humans, the sinking realization of having never achieved one’s ultimate potential in an oppressive world is practically universal. If Avatar is right, we are all geniuses waiting for the correct sequence of events to align and change our environment finally to become ourselves. Context is the window to our genius.

Typekit is not a standard

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:19:48 -0800

In the case of Typekit I find myself pining for open source.

With the service, founder Jeff Keen created another hosted Javascript API. This one renders hundreds of native fonts as text on any site. Web designers have dreamed of such opportunity outside of Flash, native to the browser for years. Any font, cross-browser, cross-system, pre-loaded from the web page, easy to design, easy to manage and SEO.

What’s wrong with it? For one, it’s centralized. Every site using the Typekit javascript widget is dependent on its infrastructure. For two, it’s a company with a product for profit, not a standard. Because fonts are central to any Web designer’s toolbox, a framework for displaying them should be standardized. Designer’s have already paid to license the fonts they use to design with. With Typekit, Keen wants them to pay again and depend on his service.

Imagine HTML sold as a product. Control of the core markup for rendering every Web page in existence would put too much power in the hands of the company that sold it. And that’s the problem with Typekit. We can’t go there.

My prediction is Typekit may be toyed with by designers until a suitable alternative rises from the HTML 5 standard.

The Web is a sandbox

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:04:50 -0800

Early-stage bugs aside, the strategy and experience executed thus far by Boxee is impressive and promising. To paraphrase Boxee founder, Avner Rosen, they intend to be the FireFox of Internet video. A way to help users find and interact with video. But tethered to the Web and computer, that doesn’t quite achieve the lean-back TV-watching user experience. Enter “Boxee Box.”

Avner’s original strategy when approaching Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson was a hardware play. Fred said, “dead.” Avner returned with a ubiquitous Web-only software prototype. Fred said better, now get users. Rosen returned again with 10,000 users and an impressive growth curve and finally secured funding. Then, Boxee’s app ramped up features and users even faster.

With the release of Boxee Box we can now see Boxee’s focus to build the ideal hardware/software product, a more open, versatile Apple TV, was never thwarted. They followed the necessary evolutionary steps to get there first using the Web for what it’s become: a sandbox for product prototyping and a launch pad for serious companies.

Boxee commissioned the hardware design from Astrol Studios (Xbox 360 and Nike watches), and electronic engineering from D-Link.

Open source is religion

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:49:51 -0800

Does Darwin’s theory of evolution conflict with the myth of Christianity? Of course it does. But to get you to attend church, a priest will reconcile the two based on “faith.” Likewise, survival of the fittest in capitalism conflicts with the benevolent force of open source development.

The faith placed in the ideals of open source creates a moral fabric to motivate developers. I cannot question its success in many cases, especially in these early days of computer evolution or a start-up company.

In an earlier era religion garnered most the will and material donations of the state. Entire civilizations were conquered in the name of God to carry home riches. The wealthiest entities on Earth were the churches, lined with gold from wars abroad.

Today religion is still with us and churches remain exempt from taxation. But in the modern world corporations have taken the power. Business rules the earth. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco.

Faith-based principles eventually fade in importance as science, technology and markets take over. For those who still believe, the corporations continue to capitalize on faith with token open source programs and donations.

Start-ups often capture the imagination of open source development, both to leverage “free” IP and to “build the dream.” Without substantial funding from incumbent powers, it’s the only way to poke holes in the crowded and protected industrial complex. But those early open source companies cannot succeed as independent, operating entities without migrating to a commercial path or securing faith tokens from major corporations. FireFox, the open source browser, survives on Google donations. Open source blogging software WordPress.org spawned the paid alternative WordPress.com.

Like religion, it’s an inexorable fate for open source. But it will always have an important place in conception and early development.

Revive Push, email

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:34:00 -0800

With a wealth of chatter on industry blogs about the problem of email morass and need for information reduction (e.g., Fred Wilson, A VC ), it’s a problem I’m exploring as a product. New services like Hunch and WolframAlpha suggest more intelligent, computational search is a growing market.

The original killer app and yet still primitive Internet channel is email, because it’s an established, trusted usecase that connects users to search without needing to go out and search, rather integrate relevant information into their daily workflow, pushed directly to them. In fact, e-mail is a form of “Push” – a delivery concept that was predicted by Wired 10+ years ago and never came to dominate the Web. But virtually every site in the world now has an e-mail sub and/or mailinglist option that, in essence, pushes news and transaction requests to users. The growth of these subs has created an amazing wealth of niche information broadcast daily in email… and also way too much clutter in our in-boxes. Referring again to Seth Godin’s recent post: “Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.”

Revive Push as intelligent search via email. MeMail.

Tinker

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:19:48 -0800

As Taleb’s “The Black Swan” notes, “The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.”

Brilliant you think you are, but you cannot engineer success. Neither could Larry and Sergei.

The message is to silence the ego, drop the genius complex and get to work.

Having tested Aardvark for a few weeks now, I find the answers...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:05:00 -0800

Having tested Aardvark for a few weeks now, I find the answers are not usually high quality because the social network connections are too remote to provide specific and trusted answers. The IM interaction, however, is addictive. I feel compelled to answer users even more than ask questions. It’s a simple, fast distraction with another regular human that you can regulate (modify settings for frequency of questions) or ignore without recourse.

At the heart of it are 2 principles:

the “good samaritan” urge to help someone in need
the anonymity to pass on helping others without being fingered as a negligent netizen

I’m reverse-engineering my own Aardvarkian habits and feelings for the last month, so this is not just theory, but real behavior that their prototype proves in practice. But do my answers help Aardvark users? (example Q&A.)

I’m not sure Aardvark will succeed as more than a novelty unless they can narrow the social circles to provide more contextual specificity. Even leveraging users’ Facebook network out-of-the-box is not focused enough for questions which tend to be local, e.g., “can you recommend a good mid-century modern antique shop in SF?” Response from Aardvark after 10 minutes: “No response yet from people who know about **mid-century modern and San Francisco”

Taking their idea a few steps further, leveraging similar and more honed interactions on top of mailing list communities could be a nice blend of UX and hyper-local social, trusted content.

Internet video is broken

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:58:20 -0800

The economics of Internet video is broken. Independent estimates suggest that after 5 years of operation YouTube still loses $.5 billion /yr after the balance of relatively meager revs and massive infrastructure/bandwidth costs. Google execs have made many comments that “it’s not working, and they are exploring ideas.” But Google has already pursued and abandoned “paid content” once offered via Google video (pre-YT acquisition). Their eyes are trained away from it now, but they may not realize that they failed due to market timing and bad execution. Consumers were understandably not willing to commit money and hassle with a CC transaction for every purchase of clip content from unknown sources with no previews at a time copyrighted content was suddenly becoming available on YT for free. Today there is a new emphasis on content protection and monetization.

Hulu’s content and revenue looks promising on the surface, but they still are in debt. They are 100% ad-based and a perfect example of “shovel ware” – that is, shoveling an offline model online; they simply replicate the network TV model on the Web. Note the evolution of offline Network TV: The 3 networks controlled it until Cable came along in the ’80s and convinced consumers to spend for exclusive content and quality. Today the avg consumer spends $700/yr for paid content via Cable. I predict a similar pattern for the Internet (paid content), but designed for the Internet, on demand, pay only for what you consume, right down to the minute, and promoted by user affiliates who share in the wealth.

To build content, pursue the content providers first. They are petrified of the Internet doing to them what it did to the music industry; they are willing to try paid content solutions above free ones. They will understand that, in order to be successful, their content needs to be held away from free sources. That leaves 4 main competitors for online paid video content: Cable distributors, NetFlix, Amazon and iTunes. They all require monetary commitment from consumers.

Social vs. Self

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:57:00 -0800

Two prevailing methods of search and discovery are social vs. self. Sometimes you want to know what others are reading to serve as a guide to discovery and to stay abreast of popular trends. Other times you are purely interested in discovering good articles, regardless of social trends. Self-discovery is the seed of trends, and those who tend to read that way are more likely to be the trendsetters. But just as important to trends are the people who spread them.

Serendipitous reading is the drive for self-discovery. Very few, when asked, would say they want to read only what others (even their best friends) have deemed popular. No one wants automated personalization to blind them to self-discovery. So, personalization automated by social or self history is a slippery-slope, except when presented strictly as an option.

Google’s recent efforts to personalize search based on history and preferences is troubling. By default, we want the same, unadulterated search results the rest of the world gets. Search Wiki ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html ) would be useful if presented as an option (like a secondary tab or search filter), but the feature makes you log out of your Google account to see unmanipulated results!

Digg personalizes news by industry category from user-generated posts and displays it on the Web. Your Digg account does this today based the “industry” preferences you set, but then why don’t you get even all of your favorite publisher/blogger articles on, for instance, architecture and design on your personal Digg page? Digg’s personalization isn’t specific enough and the content is user-generated based on article (instead of publisher) and not complete. All the niche articles offered in email blasts daily are, for the most part, nowhere to be found on my Digg homepage.

Topical news from publishers and bloggers get blasted via email. You’ve spent months and years self-discovering (often through social recommendations) these pubs and deliberately signed up to receive email news updates from them. In essence, you’ve already self-designed your content preferences. But now there are too many, a lot of overlap and duplication. For example, you may see the same article covering a new home manufacturing technique on CleanTech and MocoLoco modern design blog.

Allow users to funnel the emails through a new service (do this by simply adding a FeedBurner link or email sub to their profile page) which will clean them up and organize, remove duplicates and categorize into a single, “intelligent digest.” The more feeds and lists users generate, the more content the service gleans and can present on a Web portal. You can then explore top-line blogs, categories and articles deeper. It presumes the publishers would vie for user attention on this service which could be the basis for a revenue stream.

The interface is the hook

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:55:55 -0800

There are many services to filter and personalize news on the Web or in desktop RSS apps/plugins. But what about news delivered in email? Many people use email as their push mechanism for discovery of content from topical publishers who offer opt-in lists to be alerted when new features are posted.

One pain point I perceive is the duplication and clutter from 100s of overlapping publisher emails, categories and posts. The hook is to use email as the channel and an intelligent digest as the solution.

Very small, seemingly insignificant interface implementations are the entire value prop of many start-ups. Consider how Posterous built it’s service on 1 simple premise: use email to post anything. Email was their interface hook to blogging and microblogging already offered by dozens of incumbant platforms like Movable Type, WordPress and Twitter. But it’s just stupid easy to populate a blog by email, noone was thinking of it, so they did it and became known for it. Simple as that, a tiny interface hook can gain traction as the springboard for a company.

Web products are like onions

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:55:00 -0800

With a bushel of new Web products introduced every month, it’s a huge challenge to attract attention to yours. Today Web products are like onions—overabundant and offensive unless prepared and served with care.

The best “approach vector” (to borrow the phrase from a friend) is to start with a very simple, succinct expression that:

Addresses a pain point
Introduces an enticing value prop

Each expression (in order: logo, tagline, statement, case studies), should flow to the next by piquing curiosity to solve a problem and create a new opportunity.

Allow your audience to peel back the layers of your onion, skin-by-skin, so they never get overwhelmed in tears. They should enjoy the fine, even subtle experience of eating a well-prepared dish that came from a bushel of raw onions.

There are too many Web products

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:52:38 -0800

A few years back it took a suitably long time to build and launch a Web product. Founders needed a formal business plan, months to secure funding, employees, an office, formal market analysis, top-down planning, waterfall development, marketing, sales… All these difficult, expensive, time-consuming steps made it prohibitively difficult for average Joe to pursue a Web start-up. A Web-generation of companies came to the rescue.

Consider where we are today. Tools and platforms now allow average Joe to build and release a product in days or weeks with no funding, just an idea and some spare time. The new Agiledevelopment mantra encourages sprint cycles for iterative development which has extended to entire products and companies. With templated term sheets and overnight incorporation, a company can sprint from inception to accepting users and payment in days. Founders can self-market with global reach on Twitter and Facebook. Cloud hosting services like Amazon make it inexpensive to build a small infrastructure footprint in minutes and scale dynamically in real-time when traffic demands it and business can afford it. What is the result?

Thousands of new companies and products get launched annually (every month?) in the U.S. alone. Most fail, or at least don’t succeed as hoped. But as they fight to survive and thrive, it makes for an awful lot of clutter. Consumers are pummeled with choices for new forms of service, information and entertainment. Businesses are taxed to consider new options for saving or making money with new services. The Web marketplace is flooded and spilling over.

What’s needed now is less. But this is not realistic advice; no one will heed it. There will only be more. The process is accelerating with no end in sight as new Web companies march onto the scene. Like the lotteries and casinos, the allure of success for founders is too great.

The ironic solution is to create more products—ones that help us reduce the clutter. We need a new breed of carefully planned services that distill, evaluate, computationally classify, categorize and prioritize for us.

Because less is more.

Bombs are green

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:51:43 -0800

Nature continually destroys itself to cleanse the old and rebuild anew.

Lightening storms in California ignite forest fires that burn 100 yr-old trees entrenched in mounds of brush, then grow back new, vibrant variations of vegetation. Volcanoes burst in Hawaii smothering ancient sea life with lava sediment, and old life is replaced with fertile fields for a next generation of underwater evolution. It seems unfortunate. Many beautiful, complex lifeforms with great potential are suddenly destroyed. It’s not fair or correct; it just is. After 4.5 billion years of Earth development, this Machiavellian process appears to work quite well.

Humans are a part of nature, or at least mimic it. Military forces bomb enemy territory leveling towns and killing “enemy” ranks and innocent civilians. This devastation is immoral, yet it paves the way for a new start. The near complete destruction of Germany by coalition forces in WW2 silenced the Nazis, killed thousands of civilians and realized several generations of peace and profit to follow.

It’s a frightening thought, but human military destruction resembles the forces of nature. It cleans up. Bombs are green.

Unregulated growth creates paralysis

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:49:31 -0800

After 10+ years as an Internet product designer, it often amazes me how few conventions for product design and development have been established. There is not 1 nor even 10 accepted ways of building and launching a product. In fact, there are many, many more tools, processes and paths today than there were in 1999. Multiple methods, types, flavors, languages, some but not all interchangeable. Each guy will promote and defend his recipe as brilliant and the “only way,” then speak to him 3 weeks later when he’s changed his mind and his tools.

No x step process for discovery and definition
No “best” hosting partner, scalable infrastructure, database design or type. Not even a paradigm. RDMS, SimpleDB? Managed, Co-lo, cloud? Cloud control?
No “best” programming language. Java, Perl, PHP, RoR, Python?
No front-end library of choice. Flash ActionScript, YUI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, MooTools?

The choices have become unfathomably overwhelming for 1 simple reason: new generations develop new service companies with new technologies and business models to sell them. The tools to execute on an idea are supposedly far advanced, more cost effective and faster than before, but what of needing to spend weeks or months evaluating each and every toolset? Takes time. And according to each, if you make the right choice of toolset, your company will fast-track ahead of the competition. Make the wrong choice, and you’re dead.

It begs the question: is free-market capitalism the best environment to build, launch and succeed with a start-up? Is there a place for regulation and constraints?

Because uncontrolled growth creates debilitating paralysis.