I took this photo in Motorola's Silicon Valley office lobby last fall just prior to a meeting. If you look closely, you can see the logo on my shirt reflected in reverse in this shot. In the event anybody wanted to see if they were committed to Android, this should provide one clue.
August 15, 2011
August 14, 2011
I'd +1 That (Photo)
I'd +1 That (Photo)
August 13, 2011
A Math Geek At An Early Age
A Math Geek At An Early Age
As a kid, my family moved around a lot, as my dad was first getting his medical degree, and then later, getting his residency. This moved us from town to town and state to state, so I was attending new schools every year from Kindergarten through third grade. At each school, I had to be retested and find what would be the appropriate courses I could take - especially when it came to math, where classes were more likely to see kids from different grades mixed.When I started in third grade at a very small elementary school, I remember being assigned to an advanced multiplication class, taught by the principal, which had no more than ten students. On the first or second day, the principal told us what we would eventually learn through taking his class - trying to wow us with complex double digit multiplication.
As he wrote out his problem and his solution, I noticed he had made a mistake. After pausing and rechecking to be sure my answer was right, I raised my hand and said I thought he was wrong, and explained my alternative answer, which was correct. That set up a sequence of events that had me getting tested and retested in each advancing math class, to find where I best fit, until I was stuck with kids from older grades, unhappy with this little pipsqueak who dared to join them.
That afternoon, as I told my mother what had happened, she was mortified that I had talked back to the principal, telling me I should have probably come after class to tell him I thought he was wrong. But being 8 and not having mastered the appropriate courtesy, I did what I thought was right and it thankfully pushed me into a class that was more challenging. It was one of the first times when I tangled with school leadership, but it certainly wasn't the last.
/via My Google+ Profile.
August 12, 2011
Strawberryj.am: Popular Links from Your Twitter Friends
Strawberryj.am: Popular Links from Your Twitter Friends
Everyone knows you can't see every update on every social network all of the time. Many services have emerged to help find you the most interesting shared content from products like Twitter, based on your own interests, those of the community or the world at large. An interesting one is called Strawberry Jam, a project backed by Hettema & Bergsten, which scans links from those you follow on Twitter and finds the content most frequently shared from your own social circle. Going further, Strawberry Jam also compiles saved searches for your explicit interests, hashtags, and even lists. If done well, you can essentially slice and dice the Twitter stream to make sure your friends are providing you the best from the real time Web.
Strawberry Jam, At Work On Finding the Best from My Twitter Stream
Strawberry Jam, found at the quirky URL of http://strawberryj.am/, makes it easier to step out of the Twitter timeline for a few hours, and still not miss anything. Your friends, assuming they do a good job of curating links, will share stuff and bump it to the top. This is the default view of Strawberry Jam, which shows top content from your stream over the last 8, 16 or 24 hours.
If your friends don't care about the same things you do, Strawberry Jam has figured that might be the case. You can search on specific keywords, like Apple, Android, Twitter or whatever you like and similarly find the most shared items on those topics. This even extends to hashtags and interestingly for the few who leverage them, Twitter lists. Just plug in the name of the list and its owner, and that too can be mined for popular links.
Searching for Solid Android Links on Strawberry Jam
Meanwhile, Strawberry Jam doesn't think you should be constantly spending a bunch of time on their site just to get good content. If you like, you can configure the site to send you email summaries each day, at a time you choose, with up to 5 links per category. So if you want to run Strawberry Jam overnight and get the top stories from your friends on just about any subject, it will be in your in box when you wake up.
Like my6sense, Strawberry Jam believes in showing you top links without the noise on Twitter. Obviously their approach puts more emphasis on collaborative filtering from your social graph to infer interest, but the value is similar.
Strawberry Jam is available by invite. You can get in by checking with Holden Page, the service's community manager, and all around good guy. Besides… today's his birthday.
Disclosures: I am VP of Marketing at my6sense, an assumed alternative to Strawberry Jam. Additionally, Holden Page once was an intern at Paladin Advisors Group, and worked for me in 2009.