Well, they are not talking specifically about you, but the way these people are talking, it's wonder you are not listening to them.
One of the common traps for startups is that they stop thinking about what didn't get them into the game in the first place. That's right, they fixate on what they are good at doing, and then they lose meaning in the market.
Do this in your own business. Do it now! Rather than make incremental improvements that make your product or service better – set aside time and ask yourself what you would do if you were to start a business competing with your existing business. Don’t ask how you would change some of the things you’re doing – focus on what you would build from the ground up. Would the product or service look the same? Would you want to poach the people working for you now? (if you would not – let them go. Now!) Would you even start the same business?
And when you are done competing against yourself, reflect on the stress, lack of sleep and disorder that permeates your life as you build your startup dream. Consider the great startup roller coaster by Elad Gil, in a blog post hosted on our partner Founder Dating's site. There are things you can do outside of the daily haul of building a team and a product to make your life more meaningful. You can help others in the meantime.
Do your best to maintain key relationships. I had to cancel a pre-planned family trip with my girlfriend in order to work. She was super understanding, but the startup lifestyle can really stress relationships. Try to find ways to connect with loved ones on a regular basis as their support will help get you through tough times – and will help with decompression! Buy your girlfriend flowers or take your boyfriend to Sausalito. Find a way to connect and be with one another.
It's also important to think about the cultural implications of what you are doing, and the technology you are working with to get that mission accomplished. We are not just building gadgets or things to do while working with gadgets.
Take what you heard in Manley Hopkins' poem and abstract that. Think about what the Kinect technology does that eleven companies were using at the Microsoft Accelerator for Kinect yesterday in Seattle. They are pairing human spirit, human action, with programming language and optical / light interaction.
People are using the human body to create a kind of instant programming language, in some case. Take FreakNGenius, for example. They have an application that lets you layer a two dimensional human body experience onto a one dimensional graphic experience, to create animated stories with your body.
As we develop startups, it's important to listen to what other people are saying, not because we are paranoid and we want to know who is targeting our weaknesses. No. We want to listen because the work we do in startups is the work of helping other people, and it makes sense to know where we sit on that impact graph. Where have we moved the needle? What needles still need moving?
There may be a bunch of lazy kids out there who don't get enough exercise, but the future trend is pretty clear, even in a digital age, we are moving into an age of kinetic discovery, communication and relationship building. Creativity will be a standard by which we will have to be measured, because our future is one where decisions will have to be made creatively. It's not just hype. It's a matter of course.
The Kinect program capitalizes on something Microsoft observed after the launch of the device in November 2010. People developed unexpected uses for the Kinect, which was sold as an accessory for the Xbox 360 gaming console.
Microsoft dubbed that the "Kinect Effect," and launched a program for established businesses, as well as startups, to develop commercial Kinect applications.
Microsoft managers expected to get maybe 200 applications for the Accelerator for Kinect program. They ended up with 500 from 60 countries.
It's the first time that Microsoft has done something like its own Accelerator program, and the interaction they have with TechStars should give you insight into how the consumer experience in technology is taking a massive leap from sitting at a desk or sitting in your classroom consuming media through technology, to one that is about making things, influencing people, and creating ideas through kinetic interaction with media and technology.
We are basically talking about a fundamental change into what I think is a more construction-of-reality future. Just look at this 3-D model of Dave Drach's head. It's made using the Kinect and some application coding put together by Manctl, one of the Accelerator teams at Demo Day.
Okay, the rest is about poetry, so be warned.
Have you ever heard or read anything by Gerard Manley Hopkins? Hopkins was a British poet who wrote prolifically during the first world war. The battered concussive impact of artillery; the deluge of death and the slaughter of innocents during war time must have impacted his writing. He writes with a syncopation and intensity that is very much like a blending of machine and spirit. Here is Richard Burton, another poet, reading the Manley Hopkins poem, "The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo." yeah, it's poetry, but if you can spare two minutes, just listen.
Words Can Be Just Like Hammers, Hands and Snare Drums
I'm going to make an illogical leap here. But bear with me.
Most people think that language is superficial; that it has no physical property. True. Language is a sort of invisible thread that explains the world. But so too is scent and sound. You can't see it.
But language is like computer code. it makes physical objects movable in the mindscape of the platform. It puts something abstract within the grasp of human interaction so that it makes SOMETHING happen.
KINECT Is a New Language and Its A Modern Day "Kinetic" Machine Poetry
Take what you heard in Manley Hopkins' poem and abstract that. Think about what the Kinect technology does that eleven companies were using at the Microsoft Accelerator for Kinect yesterday in Seattle. They are pairing human spirit, human action, with programming language and optical / light interaction.
People are using the human body to create a kind of instant programming language, in some case. Take FreakNGenius, for example. They have an application that lets you layer a two dimensional human body experience onto a one dimensional graphic experience, to create animated stories with your body.
Photo courtesy of Sam Rosenbalm, Microsoft
This tool can help kids learn, because, in my mind, it let's kids get up out of their chairs and express things they are thinking through stories. Stories re-frame what we are learning into something we understand. Stories are metaphorical pathways for our own experiences. When we are learning, we like to pair up our experience with the new things we know (I was a teacher, if that sounds fruity).
Let me put this perspective:
I hated parts of the school day. We were molded as students to be receptacles of media in the way that media, at the time, was commonly made or received.
That meant that you sit in a desk and use a calculator to count beans, or faced the front of the class to look at a chalkboard and then transcribe what you were learning.
But my body and mind knew something different was happening. I wasn't "learning" what I was reading on the chalkboard. My body and mind were memorizing, while my other subconscious mind was learning how to be a student. Yet, I resisted. This was not the way I wanted to learn. I didn't like learning this way.
I was a horrible consumer of learning. You have to listen to the teacher talk and then, if you find a discrepancy, you sometimes had to deal with a teacher who didn't want you to question it. You have to be able to spit back out what you have ingested. You have to fill in bubble sheets to prove you have learned what needs to be learned. You do not "make" as much as you "receive." You do not "encounter" knowledge, as much as you are "fed" knowledge.
I always felt a sense of spiritual shackles in the classroom. I liked to move. I liked my language to bounce and to shimmy. I needed to explore and discover through words and numbers, and, even in the classroom (and at home), I had to move in order to understand things.
My two nephews love Kinect. You should see them at my sister's house in St. Louis. They jump up and down and move white water kayaks through torrents with their entire body. Through a virtual landscape they hunt for turkeys and act like ninjas. And you know, it's not just happening in the experience of the game. I pay attention to how they talk to me and their father, and mother.
They use their hands a lot. They lean and pivot. When the youngest one -- five years old -- wants to talk about something, he'll run over to you and slam into you, crawl on your lap, and then flip over on his back to start chatting, all the while holding a truck or a car in his hands. Everything is always moving and hustling.
What Does This Have to Do With Poetry? We Are Energy Made Into Matter and ANY Kind of Language is a Transmission Platform for Mental Energy
There is the known that we know, like filling out TPS reports, doing accounting, and putting together a lunch buffet.
But then there is the Uknown, which we kind of Know, because certain things and activities remind us of it. I am thinking here of: humor, love, friendship, loyalty, morality, longing, pain, solace, and loneliness. Basically, common emotional experiences that remind us of our humanity.
In the age of the book, and pre-book (when troubadors walked the earth), poetry became the transmission of this deep human experience; this sacred, creative and imaginable emotional experience, and it it brought it into the realm of the present.
Matter is a super-condensed form of energy. Moving images and the light show of technology startles us into creativity; it helps us make sense and make things for the world.
To my mind (and I have an MFA in creative arts), it make sense that we react to light and we move to express ourselves, because we are striving to interact with something deeper in our human experience.
It makes sense that things like spreadsheets and tablets appear to be two different and very glaringly opposable things. With the rise of the Kinect, we are approaching an age where we might be able to more often put down the tools of our manual labor, and invent with our minds in a way that is communicable to common human sense.
So, what do you do when you show up to an app building workshop in San Francisco to learn how to build Windows 8 apps? Well, you make an app and it goes into the store.
Microsoft just closed their 30 to Launch in San Francisco on Monday. It was pretty cool. About three dozen app developers gathered in Rocketspace each week to take classes on the building of Windows 8 apps. they got lessons in architecture, form factor, everything. And then they set to building. One of the developers, Paras Wadehra, impressed everyone by building an app that will soon go into the store.
We decided to interview him about four other apps he built, to figure out what went in to getting them into the store. Here's the interview.
Why did you make these apps?
Paras: For me, building Windows Phone apps was a no-brainer. I already had been working with various Microsoft technologies, including .Net, C# and Silverlight. I had previously written apps for Windows Mobile and other competing smartphone platform,s as well. I was able to easily port my skills from desktop/web and other mobile platforms to the Windows Phone platform. My apps cater to the everyday needs of users. Take Dictionary for example, it is an app that I knew many people will use multiple times a day. My Dictionary app was the first Dictionary on Windows Phone platform. And then there is Unit Converter, again a very popular daily use app. For kids (and adults alike) I made SketchPad, which lets you draw free hand on a canvas with a vast palette of colors and then save your sketch in the Pictures Hub. On the games side, I made an app for popular game of Chess - it is a favorite time-pass for many people around the world and speaks to all people across cultures and without any language boundaries. Similarly, all my apps are easy to use and speak to the users directly.
My apps have been very well received by users, with over 300,000 downloads and they have won several awards and accolades from Microsoft and others in the industry.
What industry do they serve?
Paras: My apps cater to people of varying interests and range from Productivity App to Utility App, from a Kids App to a Game, from a Transit App to a News Reader App, and more.
What's it like working on the Windows platform? What can you tell us about how its design affects behavior?
Paras: I believe Windows Phone platform has the coolest form factor from an end user's perspective. It brings fresh air into the stale smartphone market. Microsoft has made working with and developing for Windows Phone a breeze. It is much easier to get your app in the marketplace compared to some competition, yet the application goes through a full quality review ensuring that low-quality or malware-ridden apps do not fill the marketplace. The intrinsic design of Windows Phone platform encourages developers to give more thought to the functionality of the app rather than trying to make it look pretty while it does nothing useful. From experience I can tell that users like apps that work better over apps that look good but do nothing, and Microsoft's platform delivers just that.
Paras Bio:
Paras is an avid Windows Phone enthusiast and champions other developers to get started developing for the platform. He is an experienced speaker and a co-organizer of the Silicon Valley Windows Phone User Group. He works as a Windows Phone developer at his day job along with consulting for a few other companies, while writing more apps in his own spare time. He is also in the process of converting his Windows Phone apps to the Windows 8 platform and won 1st place in the 30 to Launch competition for Windows 8 conducted by Microsoft in San Francisco. He can be found online on Twitter as @ParasWadehra
When it comes down to "smart technology," we're not really looking for devices that wow us. we're looking to get things done. Current UX and UI in some smart devices is just too complicated. Seemingly effortless interface and controls actually end up being walls whenever our cultural habits and information processes slam against them.
Take computers, for instance. For people in their 16-45 range, a computer is pretty easy. You turn it on, click open a browser or a document and get to work.
But seniors are not like that, reckons Imtiaz Majeed, a seventeen year old entrepreneur, who is part of our BizSpark community group on Facebook.
He contacted me out of the blue and wanted to know what BizSpark thought about his idea for a super simple computer. Of course, I took the time and looked into it, and made sure to tell him about the next Microsoft Accelerator class that's coming up in Seattle (you can get into the program with nothing more than idea, by the way).
Here's what Imtiaz is reckoning. He thinks that what stands in the way of elderly computer use is the fact that computers are just not simple enough.
The simple user interface latches on to an existing operating system (Windows, MacOS) and creates an easier environment to navigate and do basic tasks. This reduces the frustration experienced by most Senior citizens. Everything is simplified. One click for email. One click for Facebook. One click to share photos and chat with family. Everything in plain sight with no distractions. Simplified for Seniors.
This reminds me of what a gentleman named Rich described to me at AOL the other day, right before the AngelHack hackathon started. He said that TV is way more confusing than what it needs to be. "Smart TVs are too smart," he said. "My mother only needs one or two buttons to use to operate a TV, why are there dozens of controllers and hundreds of buttons on these things?" His idea was to create some kind of UX or UI for smart television that took away all the guess work, and the wormholes from the Smart TV experience.
Imtiaz is thinking something similar. It's not like he wants to create a completely new computer. He just needs to create some kind of interface that reinforces new habits, but doesn't feel like it is educating the user. It should be so simple that the user forgets he or she is going through a process to use it.
I am not a designer, so apologies if I am treading on toes, but Facebook seems like a super simple layout, and it seems, to me, to offer a very transparent version of the information that makes up our user experience. I don't have to guess at all as to what any of this information means. I don't confuse structure of the layout with my "calls to action." I don't get confused about what I am supposed to do. I know I can view, scan, comment on, LIKE, or ignore. I'm not at all bothered by what is presented to me.
Is Imtiaz talking about a kind of OS that operates like a Facebook interface, or the Twitter interface?
What goes into design like this? And what do we give up if we move from email to other forms of information processing and presentation?
How do you convert something that feels manual and seems machine-embedded and make it as simple as getting out a piece of paper and writing a letter? If you look at email and letter writing, they are just as simple as each other. I think the thing that stands in the way is that design makes it seem like the elderly have something to lose by giving up letter writing and going to email. I know my mother always worries about privacy. She doesn't know which emails to click on, because in the end, they all look the same.
How do you design so that design gets out of the way? Do you work within the template for email, or the template of the computer OS? These are questions about fundamentals, but altering these fundamentals creates new realities for how people and information interact.
