Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Sorry, Soccer Stats

by Bruce Kasanoff

Sara cringed visibly as the stats updated on everyone’s phones. One minute before the half ended, Michael had taken just 1,312 steps. The other midfielders all topped 3,000. She’d like to think her son was better positioned, more efficient in his movements, but the truth is he was just lazy, and all the parents knew that.

Standing just behind her, Ben knew what she was thinking. Sara was a nervous mother, and Michael was a tough kid. He saw other people’s faults, but not his own. She hated the fact that each kid now wore a wristband that constantly transmitted position data to the game management system, and that even the ball had sensors embedded in it.

Ben’s son, Tim, was middle of the pack: he kicked about as hard as the others, ran slightly faster, and kept his position a bit better. The stats made him look better than other parents would have assumed. Tim seldom made the big play, but he was steady and reliable.

Ben tapped Sara on the shoulder. “Does Michael look at the stats after a game?”

Sara bit her lip, then shook her head. “He says stats are stupid, they don’t paint the whole picture. He tells me running around needlessly just wears the others out. He’s one of those kids who just can’t conceive that he isn’t God’s gift to Earth.”

Ben nodded sympathetically. “Tim’s older brother was a bit like that. They grow out of it.”

“I should live that long,” said Sara, her eyes revealing she was immediately sorry to have said that.

The half ended, and Frank Cooper walked up to them. Frank had probably memorized the stats. “Johnny kicked that last shot 52 miles per hour. Nearly took the keeper’s head off.”

Michael and Sara smiled weakly, hoping Frank would walk right by them. He seemed oblivious to the fact that the shot sailed right over the net, and that if once in his life his son passed the ball then the team would probably be ahead right now instead of tied.

“Coach is sketching out a new play,” shouted Alice, and most parents picked up tablets to track the halftime plan.

Sara left to get a coffee.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

ALS Entrepreneur

by Bruce Kasanoff

“I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

They tell me that’s the most important line in the soldier’s creed. I live by it.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have ALS, and have been “locked-in” for three years. For nine months, I had no way to communicate with the world. Couldn’t talk. Or write.

My mind is sharp as ever. Spirit strong. I had fallen. My wife left; it was hell.

My brother, Jim, stuck by my side. He got me a BCI, or brain-computer interface. I type by looking at a screen. Letters flash in a repeating pattern. When I see the right one, my brain goes “aha!” and the letter gets added to whatever I’m writing.

One year in, I was emailing, slowly. Each paragraph took about 15 minutes. It was a miracle.

Emailed my accountant and some friends. Tested my ideas, and checked my bank balance; I’ve been lucky, it was better than expected. Hired an assistant, then a programmer, Ted. Decided to start a firm. Guess what we make?

BCIs.

First task was to give me more lifelines. Ted built a navigation interface for me, so I could open files and surf the web using the same sort of “aha!” brain signal. It also lets me play songs, control the lights, call my assistant…

Ted even built me an avatar. Using hot buttons, I can make it smile, cheer, grimace, clap, jump or 97 other actions. It makes in-person interactions a lot more natural. (When someone’s in the room with me, I keep the avatar on one screen and my flashing letters on the other. With people I know well, I can react almost in real time (or, when I get excited, ahead of real time!)

OK. I was back in business. Wrote a mission statement: free everyone else like me.

Gave it to a grant writer, Lisa, and hired a biz dev guy, Mark. Lisa brought in $457,000 the first 12 months. Mark reached out to leading BCI labs around the world, found the smartest technology firms in this area, and – our big break – discovered a billionaire-who-wishes-to-be-anonymous whose sister is locked in.

Mr. B. put $5 million into my firm. That let us take Ted’s programs and make them ready for prime time (add help screens, get rid of the bugs, design pretty interfaces…)

The grants let us start training BCI assistants. Remember, our clients can’t do anything for themselves, at least until we get involved. The money also helped us start finding the people we are trying to free. One of the problems serving our client base is that they don’t (can’t) call their friends and recommend our services. Even when we restore their ability to communicate, their locked-in friends don’t have a means to receive such messages.

So we started building a database of ALS patients worldwide. It seems to be the first. I realized the more names we found, the better we could validate the market size and demonstrate our growth potential. So now five interns work on the project, with one FT manager.

Applied for more grants. Learned how to help get funds for our clients to pay for our services. I will never abandon someone with ALS. Somehow, we find a way to pay the expenses.

(BTW, sorry if my sentences are too clipped; it saves me time.)

Two years in, we had 15 employees. One, a talented kid named Clara, was joking with me, “When do I get to use some of these toys?”

Eureka.

The bigger the market, the more investors pay attention, and the greater the economies of scale. Stuff gets cheaper. Thanks to Clara, I realized we should be selling BCIs to healthy people. After all, the vast majority of people don’t have ALS; they aren’t locked in. If I could convince healthy people to use BCIs, I could drive the cost of our headsets down from thousands of dollars to less than a hundred.

But why would a healthy person use a BCI? They are slow beyond belief. Much faster to type than to watch flashing letters one at a time, etc.

Gathered the team, and we brainstormed.

There are numerous situations in which your brain generates a recognizable change in activity. To name a few, when you:

- realize you have made a mistake
- recognize a face or object
- are fascinated
- grow weary
- become bored

For example, when you realize you just hit the wrong letter on a keyboard, your brain sort of goes “oops.” Your brain waves change. If your typing program knows exactly when you thought “oops,” it can highlight the letter you typed just before your brain went “oops.” Then, it can show you some likely replacements. When you see the right letter, your brain sort of goes “aha!” The program could automatically fix your error.

Congratulations. You just corrected a typo with your thoughts.

A BCI could help you teach Microsoft Word new words. Imagine you type an acronym the program has never seen before. The program highlights the “error,” but then does not detect any indication that you made a mistake. In other words, it “senses” that you are confident this word is correct. So the program eliminates the error message, saving you the time of manually adding the word to your dictionary.

A BCI is the only device we can think of that offers complete and total privacy to its user.

You could sit across from a person at a table, give instructions to your BCI, and the other person would have no idea. You could remain motionless and silent, but your instructions could put actions in motion far outside the room in which you are sitting.

Since BCIs are so crude today – they cannot read your thoughts, not by a long shot – this idea requires a very, VERY, simple interface. Think: two or three signals, tops. Such as “yes” or “no.” Fortunately, yes and no can take you a long way.

We came up with the idea of combining a BCI with a wireless phone. The phone has no controls whatsoever; is looks like a Bluetooth earpiece and is only designed for incoming calls. It is designed for executives to use with their assistants. We call it: EitherOr. Basically, someone calling you on this device can give you the choice of either one option or another, and your brain will think “aha!” when you hear the right choice. The BCI recognizes this response.

On a regular basis, your assistant checks in with you by calling your earpiece. You hear her, but what she hears in return is an automated voice that says either “yes” or “no,” or “the first choice” or “the second,” based on which response your brain triggers. On each call, she follows a similar pattern, asking:

“Do you need my help?” (If “no,” she hangs up.)
“Would you like me to pull you out of the meeting?” (If “yes,” she comes and gets you.)
“Do you need access to important facts, or would you like a colleague to join you? (You answer “first.”)
“Do you need budget estimates or opinions from outside experts?” (You answer “first.”)
“Do you want sales for this quarter or next quarter?” (You answer “first.”)

“Sales for this quarter are projected to be $3.4 million, breaking down as follows. The Northeast will generate $750,000, which is a rise of 7%…”

Someone sitting across the table from you will have no idea what is happening. You are perfectly silent, and moving normally. EitherOr is a secret weapon, or a discrete tool, depending on whether you like wartime analogies or not. I do, given my obsession with never leaving a fallen comrade behind.

Over the past four months, we sold 250,000 units. This Christmas, we are coming out with a toy version that kids can use, and preorders just topped 3.7 million units. We make $20 each, which totals to $74 million in sales.

Tomorrow, my dream will start coming true. We are going to announce that our BCI systems for ALS individuals will now be free. Yes, free. Sales to business executives and kids will completely cover the cost of these higher end units. There’s still much work to do finding locked-in individuals and training the assistants each one needs, but that’s all doable.

The tough part was figuring out what a healthy person could do with a BCI. Doing so set all my comrades free.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

(Note: Brendan Allison helped inspired and inform this story, but bears no responsibility for its flaws.)

Siri, “wired for war,” ends up as huge commercial success

by Bruce Kasanoff

As you probably know, Apple bought Siri, they did not develop the personal assistant in-house. According to Wade Roush, the algorithms that make the (original) app work… are the product of years of defense-sponsored research at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International.

In other words, Siri has its roots as a military application, not a consumer one. Over the next few years, we are likely to see hundreds of consumer and business applications that result from technologies used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. P. W. Singer’s remarkable book, Wired for War, highlights how technology is changing warfare. I despise wars, but read the book when originally published with the recognition that the military drives many innovations, and many of these end up powering commercial applications.

This passage from the book shows how technology even ends up blending warriors into society, creating a stunningly narrow line between war and everyday life:

One of the most familiar unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is the Predator. At 27 feet in length, the ­propeller-­powered drone is just a bit smaller than a Cessna plane. Perhaps its most useful feature is that it can spend up to 24 hours in the air, at heights up to 26,000 feet. Predators are flown by what are called “reach-back” or ­“remote-­split” operations. While the drone flies out of bases in the war zone, the human pilot and sensor operator are 7,500 miles away, flying the planes via satellite from a set of converted ­single-­wide trailers located mostly at Nellis and Creech Air Force bases in Nevada. Such operations have created the novel situation of pilots experiencing the psychological disconnect of being “at war” while still dealing with the pressures of home. In the words of one Predator pilot, “You see Americans killed in front of your eyes and then have to go to a PTA meeting.” Says another, “You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car, drive home, and within 20 minutes you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.”

This passage troubles me to no end. I give a lot of speeches, and a few times have brought family members along to a particularly appealing venue. It was almost impossible to concentrate appropriately on either my family or speaking obligations, and I stopped that practice. I can’t imagine why it makes sense to allow drone pilots to live with their families while they are at war.

But technology breaks down walls. (What time do you stop working? Your spouse and kids might dispute your answer, given how often you text or check email.) Since we’ve poured billions of dollars into developing new technologies to support our troops, these technologies will come home along with our soldiers.

In these wars, American forces have used a broad assortment of drones and robots. Devices that many executives still consider to be “science fiction” have been used for years on the battlefield under far worse conditions than the average shopping mall, one of the many places they are likely to end up next.

HoloDesk shows innovation requires many innovations

by Bruce Kasanoff

HoloDesk comes out of Microsoft Research’s Sensors and Devices Group. What I love about this video is that it shows not just one technological tool, but many – all combined to create a magical effect for the user. And, yes, it’s another cool use for Kinect.

Don’t bother turning up your speakers. There’s no audio, but it’s worthing watching.

Charlie Sheen and Ashton Kutcher clash

by Bruce Kasanoff

Truth be told, this article does not have much to do with the television show Two and a Half Men, except that by mentioning Charlie Sheen along with his replacement – investor and social media pioneer, Ashton Kutcher – I’m increasing the chances that a few thousand people might stumble onto this story while wondering how Kutcher is doing as a replacement for Sheen… and then they’d realize the power of keywords.

Keywords drive everything today. At any given moment, there are about 50 trending topics – a handful of which are hot – and pretty much every blogger and journalist on the planet tries to jump on the wagon and hijack readers by providing a unique spin to the top 50. That’s why you see Dancing with the Stars headlines like:
- Did Chaz Bono Survive?
- Dancing With The Stars: Body Transformations
- J.R. Martinez the Favorite to Win
- New Girl Makes Glee, Dancing With the Stars Look Old

So far, I’m off to a disappointing start with this article, and it’s not just because I’ve failed to provide intimate secrets of Hollywood stars’ sex lives or proven diets that cut pounds while you eat luscious desserts. My intended audience includes marketing professionals, business strategists, and other thoughtful people – but so far all my keywords target couch potatoes who think Kim Kardashian is the smartest entrepreneur ever born.

Here’s the rub. Even business executives don’t get that excited about business, so business keywords tend to all blend together. If I read one more article about CRM, customer experience, customer focus, customer loyalty or customer satisfaction (all these included simply to restore balance to this article), my head may bounce off my keyboard.

Truth is, business leaders need new strategies, not the outdated ones that now fail to provide ROI, revenue growth or increased profits (stop me, I’m doing it again.)

This means truly original ideas don’t show up in search results.

So unless you are one of the 89 writers who still: a.) Work for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Forbes Magazine, and b.) Still get paid to write, you are stuck in the same box as the rest of us, trying to figure out how to share new ideas in between references to Warren Buffett, Michaele Salahi and Journey guitarist, Neal Schon.

Show this rant to your CEO

by Bruce Kasanoff

Long story short, Google employee Steve Yegge posts a rant on their internal network, only it turns out to actually be posted publicly. Even the WSJ noticed.

If you are a CEO, or close to it, you should read the entire post.

If you are not the CEO and want to save your company a ton of time, money and effort… pull him or her out of a meeting and make them read this rant.

The moral of the story: don’t try to predict what customers want. Get others – lots and lots of others – to help you. Get help developing products. Get help developing services. Get help with innovation. Get help from outside your bubble!

Excerpts from the rant; I added links, bold and anything in parens:

The other big realization he (Jeff Bezos at Amazon) had was that he can’t always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler (Apple’s Chief Scientist who went to Amazon and lasted three years) might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn’t use the goddamn website. It’s not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn’t really matter, because nobody’s mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I’ve just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.

I’m not really sure how Bezos came to this realization — the insight that he can’t build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn’t matter, because he gets it. There’s actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It’s called Accessibility, and it’s the most important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you’re sorta thinking, “huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?” then you’re not alone, because I’ve come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn’t been able to get through to you yet. It’s not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure…

…That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way…

…A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product…

…Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: “Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us.” Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.

You can’t predict what people want and deliver it for them… there have been precious few people who have been able to do it reliably, and we don’t have a Steve Jobs here

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn’t need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I’m saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It’s incredibly frigging obvious. Except we’re not doing it. We don’t get Platforms, and we don’t get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

…when we (Google) take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we’re being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever — it doesn’t matter in the end, because it’s foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone…

…The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don’t do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don’t do external ones. This means that the “not getting it” is endemic across the company: the PMs don’t get it, the engineers don’t get it, the product teams don’t get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn’t matter one bit unless we’re treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can’t keep launching products and pretending we’ll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We’ve tried that and it’s not working.

The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don’t know how to wrap this up. I’ve said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I’m sorry if I wasn’t gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we’re actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I’m sorry.

But we’ve gotta start doing this right.

How to make Steve Jobs immortal

by Bruce Kasanoff

Steve Jobs by Jim George

In the spirit of thinking differently, I’d like to suggest that Steve Jobs was not a person, but a way of thinking. As long as others emulate his approach to “thinking,” he will never die.

From what I can piece together from afar, Jobs crossed boundaries that few dare cross. Not because they are difficult or dangerous, but because so many of us prefer to live in comfortable boxes.

Why is it that engineers don’t sometimes stare for hours at a flower, marveling at its beauty? Why don’t accountants write an occasional screenplay? What stops many doctors from treating patients instead of conditions?

I feel uncomfortable in boxes, but have often lacked the discipline to stay in one box long enough to make tangible progress. I know firsthand the challenge isn’t simply to get out of your box, but also to combine varied perspectives and activities into one mashup that makes a difference.

For all of Jobs’ willingness to think differently, he was able to muster a laserlike focus on excellence and execution. There are people who turn to drugs or New Age ideas just to escape responsibility, but a few turn there for inspiration that they bring back to the other side.

This is what so many of us fear: crossing to the other side, and then coming back with something tangible. By other side, I don’t mean death. I mean a Democrat hanging out with Republicans, a Rabbi going to church, an artist studying engineering.

If you stumble upon this piece, you are likely to read it and change nothing. But think about this: we don’t need more Steve Jobs. We just need more people to think, live and work like he did. Don’t think about it. Just do.

What NASA astronaut can teach us about business and technology

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

Do we want to dream big, or not?

NASA astronaut Ron Garan took this photo from the International Space Station. He explains, “It’s China and Korea under Orion’s Belt. The big city lights are Seoul, Beijing, Tainjin, and Gina. The greenish yellow layer is the edge of our atmosphere.

It kills me that we have lost the spirit to reach for the stars, not just at NASA, but across the spectrum of our society.

I don’t believe we can shrink our way out of unemployment and the perennial edge of recession. Thinking smaller will simply ruin a big chunk of the lives of millions or billions of people.

We have more knowledge, better tools, and more potential than ever before. Now is the time to think big.

When a person loses his or her dreams, their life spins downward. Whether you dream of raising children, learning Chinese, being an actor, or moving to Tahiti… your dreams give you the energy to take on mundane daily tasks. You know there is more to life than waking up at 5 a.m. in the dark to go to work, and that’s why you can get out of bed. Dreams sustain us.

Without dreams, our society stands on the border of chaos and social unrest. You can’t tell a nation, or an entire world, to suck it up for the next 10 to 20 years. You’ll get an unmitigated disaster.

We need to dream very, very big… in business… in politics… in our lives.

Talking company – what if your company, not your employees, could talk?

by Bruce Kasanoff

Rumored features of Apple’s new iPhone Assistant started me thinking about the possibility that a company could literally talk to its customers. Yes, the company itself would communicate directly with customers, not employees.

First, let’s take a look at what 9to5Mac has reported about Assistant’s new capabilities:

One of the key elements of Assistant is the conversation view. The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being… Assistant is literally like a personal assistant, but in your phone. The speech interpretation is so accurate that users do not even have to speak very clearly or in a slow and robotic tone, according to a source familiar with the software. Users can simply talk how they would usually talk to another person, and the iPhone with Assistant will do its best to interpret the speech and provide accurate results.

Now imagine if a company fed all its product descriptions, specs, reviews, training materials, marketing offers, support information and inventory levels into a single system a customer could navigate simply by talking.

This is the Holy Grail. With one call, you could find someone who knows all the answers. This “someone” would also be the perfect salesperson, programmed with best practices of the best human sales talent.

It sounds like a fantasy, too far ahead of where voice recognition is today, right? But what if it isn’t that far away? What if talking companies are less than five years away?

How would that change your strategy?

Agile Day NYC: like, be flexible, man

by Bruce Kasanoff

Like, it would be so cool if we could, you know, get companies on the same wavelength as their customers. Can’t you see it, man? The customer pours his heart out, and then we get a bunch of our dudes to scamper around and make a solution. It would be, like, perfect.

A few months ago, I was out in the backyard tie-dying some T-shirts and keeping one eye on my RSS reader when I saw an announcement for Agile Day NYC. Agile is a way to write software faster by not letting programmers sit down (just kidding – sort of.)

Ever since I was a little kid running around hillsides with flowers in my hair, Agile has given me visions of companies that are, like, so cool. Friendly, fast, flexible firms. Hey – that’s 4 Fs! (Freaky.)

So right then and there, I got my name on the Agile Day NYC list and swore a solemn vow to hike into the big city and figure out how to take this software approach and bring it to the masses. By masses, I don’t mean normal people, but – you know – all those business types who live in houses with bathrooms and stuff.

This morning, after 47 hours on the road, I arrived at Pace University to hold hands – figuratively, the couple next to me nearly jumped out of their Birkenstocks when I suggested a group hug – with 200+ programming dudes and dudesses.

My only regret is that Janis Joplin couldn’t be here to sing the opening ballad. Our time has come, man! After ten years of perfecting our craft, we have distilled the very essence of how companies work. Break the work into smaller pieces, man! Take all those boring business documents and turn them into really cool stories, preferably with plots and everything. (Don’t forget the steamy bedroom scenes.) This is how business works, man!

For the life of me, I cannot get my head around why every company in the Free World hasn’t embraced Agile in a giant love fest. The Agile principles are so pure, so right. And they work! But something is holding us back. What could it be, dude? I, like cannot figure out why the Man has not raced to embrace us.

Any thoughts? There really is something worthwhile happening here.