Archive of posts with tag 'Technology'

Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a “fire sale.” This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps along the way in both company identity and fundraising, and some of the shenanigans that can happen as stakeholders start to head for the exits.

Not knowing much about Descartes’ actual business, either the original vision of the product or its actual delivery over the years, I don’t have much specific perspective to offer. But this story is a recurring theme in the world of spatial, earth observation, and analytics startups that have come and gone over the past 10 years or so. These businesses are built on extremely capital-intensive investments in satellites, space-based sensors, and data, which are major hurdles that cause many of them to get sideways in their fundraising structures very early in their business journeys.

The early years of a startup are always extremely volatile, with pivots and adjustments happening along the way as the company navigates the idea maze, looking for product-market fit. I think the heavy capital required up front compels funders to expect too much too soon in the product development process. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem — the PMF search in these kinds of businesses costs many millions. If you’re building a SaaS project management tool, you can wander around looking for fit for years with only a few people and limited seed money. But in satellite startups, the runway you need to do product-market experimentation is enormously expensive. Large enough funding pools also saddle the business with aggressive expectations for customer counts, growth, and revenue. With revenue targets set but no repeatable PMF, many of these startups do whatever they can to find dollars, which often leads to doing what are effectively custom services deals for a single or few customers. That’s necessary to make money of course, and it’s not valueless for product validation. But it’s too narrow to function as true PMF. Stay in this awkward state too long and you end up stuck down the wrong hallways of the idea maze. You’ll never find the fitness you need to build a lasting business. Bill wrote a great post on this recently, about this identity struggle between being a solutions, services, or product company.

The best thinking on the topic of EO and satellite data companies is my friend Joe Morrison’s newsletter, “A Closer Look”. He leads product for Umbra, a startup specializing in SAR. He’s done a lot more thinking than me on this topic and has thoughtful takes on the satellite and geo market in general.

New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.

Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of computers and the things we do with them evolved as a consequence of the expansion of the internet, enabled by interconnection to do new things we didn’t predict.

“Exaptation” is a term of art in evolutionary biology, the phenomenon of an organism using a biological feature for a function other than it was adapted for through natural selection. Dinosaurs evolved feathers for insulation and display, which were eventually exapted for flight. Sea creatures developed air bladders for buoyancy regulation, later exapted into lungs for respiration on land.

In the same way, technologies beget new technologies, even seemingly-unrelated ones. In the case of the internet, early modems literally broadcast information as audio signals over phone lines intended for voice. Computers talked to each other this way for a couple decades before we went digital native. We didn’t build a web of copper and voice communication devices to make computers communicate, but it could be made to work for that purpose. Repurposing the existing already-useful network allowed the internet to gain a foothold without much new capital infrastructure:

The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight.

Just like biological adaptations, technologies also evolve slowly. When we’re developing new technologies, protocols, and standards, we’d benefit from less greenfield thinking and should explore what can be exapted to get new tech off the ground. Enormous energy is spent trying to brute force new standards ground-up when we often would be better off bootstrapping on existing infrastructure.

Biology has a lot to teach us about the evolution of technology, if we look in the right places.

Identity management on the internet has been broken for years. We all have 800 distinct logins to different services, registered to different emails with different passwords. Plus your personal data exists in a morass of data silos, each housing a different slice of your personal information, each under a different ToS, subject to differing privacy regulations, and ultimately not owned by you. You sign up for a user account on a service in order for it to identify you uniquely, providing functionality tailored to you. Service providers getting custody of your personal data is a side-effect that’s become an accepted social norm.

In this piece, Jon Stokes references core power indicators in public finance like capital ratios or assets under management that help tell us when an institution is getting too big:

As a society, we realized a long time ago that if we let banking go entirely unregulated, then we end up with these mammoth, rickety entities that lurch from crisis to crisis and drag us all down with them. So when we set about putting regulatory limits on banks, we used a few simple, difficult-to-game numbers that we could use as proxies for size and systemic risk.

The “users table” works as an analogous metric in tech: the larger the users table gets (the more users a product has), the more centralized and aggregated their control and influence. Network effects, user lock-in, and power over privacy policies expand quadratically with the scope of the user base.

As Stokes points out, web3 tech built on Ethereum will gradually wrest back control of the users table with a global, decentralized replacement controlled by no-one-in-particular, wherein users retain ownership of their own identity:

Here’s what’s coming: the public blockchain amounts to a single, massive users table for the entire Internet, and the next wave of distributed applications will be built on top of it.

Dapps on Ethereum are so satisfying to use. The flow to get started is so smooth — a couple of clicks and you’re in. There’s no sign up page, no way for services to contact you (presumably unless they build something to do so and you opt-in to giving your information). Most of my dapp usage has been in DeFi, where you visit a new site, connect your wallet, and seconds later you can make financial transactions. It’s wild.

The global users table decentralizes the authentication and identity layers. You control your identity and your credentials, and grant access to applications if you choose.

Take the example of a defi application like Convex. When I visit the app, I first grant the service access to interact with my wallet. Once I’m signed in, I can stake tokens I own, or claim rewards from staking pools I’ve participated in proportional to my share of the pool. All of the data that represents my balances, staking positions, and earned rewards lives in the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, not in Convex’s own databases. Services like this will always need to maintain their own application databases for aspects of their products. But the critical change with the global users table is that the user interaction layer exists on-chain and not in a silo’d database, with custody completely in the hands of the person with the keys to the wallet.

If more services use the dapp model and build on the public, on-chain global users table, what will the norms become around extending that table with additional metadata? With some systems like ENS (the Ethereum Name Service, decentralized DNS), subdomains and other addresses associated with an ENS address are properties written on the blockchain directly. This makes sense for something like name services, where they’re public by design. But other use cases will still require app developers to keep their own attributes associated with your account that don’t make sense on the public, immutable blockchain. I may want GitHub to know my email address for receiving notifications from the app, but I may not want that address publicly attributed to my ETH address.

Web3 is so new that we haven’t figured out yet how all this shakes out. The most exciting aspect is how it overturns the custody dynamics of user data. Even though this new world moves the users table out of the hands of individual companies, everyone will benefit (users and companies) over the long-term. Here’s Stokes again:

If you want to build a set of network effects that benefit your company specifically, it won’t be enough to simply cultivate a large users table or email list — no, you’ll have to offer something on-chain that others are also incentivized to use, so that the thing you’re uniquely offering spreads and becomes a kind of currency.

Incentives for app developers will realign in a way that produces more compelling products and a better experience for users.

🗯 Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History

Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z’s new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects:

Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at least lead to positive spillover effects: The telecom bubble in the ’90s created cheap fiber, and when the world was ready for YouTube, that fiber made it more viable. Even the housing bubble had some upside: It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made it great training data for “iBuying” algorithms — the rare case where the bubble is low-tech but the consequences are higher-tech. But, even so, there’s always the question of price: how can you tell when it’s worth the hype?

💡 A Project of One’s Own

There’s something special that happens when you allow your kids to treat hobbies like serious endeavors instead of playtime or games. Paul Graham’s latest:

Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through school. And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from working on projects of one’s own. It’s usually neither a project, nor one’s own. So as school gets more serious, working on projects of one’s own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread off to the side.

It’s a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.

My interests in history and tech trace straight back to my time in high school building computers to play Civilization II. Personal projects have long term benefit if nurtured.

✅ The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy

On the heels of finishing Schelling’s collection of essays on game theory, I read this piece from Vitalik Buterin on legitimacy, a force that underpins any successful coordination game, of which the world of cryptocurrencies and DAOs are prime examples.

In almost any environment with coordination games that exists for long enough, there inevitably emerge some mechanisms that can choose which decision to take. These mechanisms are powered by an established culture that everyone pays attention to these mechanisms and (usually) does what they say. Each person reasons that because everyone else follows these mechanisms, if they do something different they will only create conflict and suffer, or at least be left in a lonely forked ecosystem all by themselves. If a mechanism successfully has the ability to make these choices, then that mechanism has legitimacy.

I just got a new Mac Mini with the M1 Apple silicon.

The experience so far is stunning performance compared to my previous 16” MacBook Pro. I was using an i9 with 16GB RAM, and this Mini blows it out of the water on responsiveness (and every other category).

A little reading on user experiences with the M1 had me interested in upgrading to any machine with the latest SoC. One of my main drivers was the noise and heat generated by the MBP, which is just in constant turbo mode with whatever my usage behavior is. It never stops running full tilt basically, so I needed to get away from that. My office is in the corner of the house and doesn’t get great HVAC coverage with the door closed, so between that and the west-facing windows, the heat-radiating laptop can’t have helped.

With the M1 Mini and a nice USB-C dock with a built-in fan that it sits on top of, I haven’t heard a sound from the machine at all. 11/10 so far. It’s wild that such an affordable, portable desktop machine has owned everything pre-M1 in performance.

Morgan Mahlock wrote recently about the promise of Stripe Press, Stripe’s book publishing outfit:

Within the legacy publishing industry, Stripe’s young publishing press is refreshing - it is Sutherland’s electric cover art on a dusty, tired bookshelf. An Authoritative Look at Book Publishing Startups in the United States by Thad McIlroy states, “Book publishing has never been a technology-adept industry; indeed it is historically technology-averse. This is a challenge for the (minority of) startups targeting existing publishing companies.” Stripe Press is different because it was born from a technology company. It is a strategic asset because it allows Stripe to shape and share influential knowledge with its interconnected ecosystem of entrepreneurs, businesses, authors, and technologists.

Her post gives a good summary of why Stripe Press is exciting for the book publishing industry. The catalog only sits today at 10 titles, but I believe 4 those were released this year. The pace has been increasing, but they keep elevating the quality bar.

They’re not only attracting original works like Nadia Eghbal’s excellent Working in Public (2020), but also breathing new life into notable books from the past. Both Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public (published in 2014, one of my favorites this year) and Donald Braben’s Scientific Freedom (2007), to name two examples, saw relatively small initial publishing runs. The editorial staff over at Stripe is doing amazing work to bring these books back into wider circulation using a spotless curatorial eye for the noteworthy and influential.

Stripe Press is, of course, producing excellent books for us to read, and giving authors writing about technology a channel for getting their work out there. But it’s also a marketing channel for Stripe.

Content marketing, my favorite of the marketings

I have a soft spot for quality content. The best content marketing doesn’t feel anything like marketing. Its value is so deep you don’t even think about what you’re giving in return to its creator.

The tech companies of the last 20 years didn’t invent content marketing, though our scene talks about it more than any other. Even Ben Franklin used a content marketing play when he published Poor Richard’s Almanack as a way to promote his printing business.

The scene is now full of companies that embrace the multichannel returns they can drive through quality, helpful content. A few favorites of mine:

• Zapier’s technology guides
• 1Password’s combo of business and security practices
• Buffer’s podcast on social media
• Basecamp’s Ryan Singer writing Shape Up, on processes for product teams
• SaaStr’s bottomless resources on Quora (if there was a “SaaS MBA,” you can get one from following @jasonlk)
• Stripe’s fantastic guides for startups

Not only does Stripe do a stellar job at the traditional CM channels — blog, help guides, developer documentation, email — they went farther than anyone and became a book publisher¹.

What differentiates Stripe as a publishing house from the HarperCollinses or Hachettes is that it’s not their core business, but a component that drives other parts of the business. Direct sales revenue is only 1 channel of value they’re deriving from putting this catalog in print. Stripe sees their Press group as a content marketing strategy, especially to raise global interest in technology, pushing their mission to “raise the GDP of the internet.” At the most tactical level, the Press catalog increases interest in tech, creates more founders, who then start companies that become Stripe customers.

Stripe flywheels

I linked a while back to Max Olson’s excellent post Advantage Flywheels, which presents a great framework for analyzing the causal loops that power businesses. Irrespective of Press, Stripe’s built a fantastic advantage with feedback loops combining in powerful ways. Using Max’s same architecture of flywheel archetypes, I took a stab at drawing out what Stripe’s machinery looks like, with its products in blue:

At its core, Stripe serves developers who build applications which expand in usage and generate financial transactions.

Spinning off from those central inputs and outputs are several flywheels that create momentum that feeds back into the core business. Radar does fraud detection, which improves with masses of transaction data. Billing and Sigma are tools that improve finance management and reporting. Atlas helps founders incorporate and get started, thereby generating more customers for Payments, Issuing, and more. That’s where I see book publishing fitting into the machine: as a mechanism to expand the TAM for internet businesses.

Press is unique in this regard for a tech content strategy. Normally something like a blog, video channel, or newsletter would be tied more directly to the “more developers” nexus, but for Stripe, book publishing is playing a longer game. Even though this feedback loop has a long time delay (publishing a book won’t make a new founder overnight), I believe it’s a powerful one. The best strategies serve more than one function; Press is a brand builder, a recruiting tool, a direct revenue driver (from book sales), and most importantly, a way to increase the number of people interested in technology over the long term. Founder Patrick Collison himself described this exact strategy in response to a Hacker News thread:

The vast majority of Stripe employees (and there are now more than 1,000) work on our core functionality today. But we see our core business as building tools and infrastructure that help grow the online economy. (“Increase the GDP of the internet.”) When we think about that problem, we see that one of the main limits on Stripe’s growth is the number of successful startups in the world. If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so. (And, hopefully, doing so will create a ton of spillover value for others as well.)

Stripe’s long been known for it’s writing culture, so I suppose it’s also not surprising that a company of readers and writers would want to make books.

When you pop the hood on a strong business like Stripe, you’re always likely to find interesting systems dynamics — multiple outputs feeding other inputs. It’s fascinating that an old, traditional business like publishing could be done in a novel way like this. They’re positioned to bring in new innovations for authors (and readers) that they haven’t scratched the surface on yet; it’s still just paper books. If there’s room for innovation in writing books, Stripe will find it.

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and what they can do, and it is subject to official and market pressures.

Comparisons to YouTube or Twitter are closer than to BTC or Signal, for sure. But even with Substack being a centralized platform, the risks are lower in the text or email medium; there’s high portability to move to other platforms at will. If you can move your content and your subscriber list, you can bring your audience. The primary advantages Substack has are that are hard to replicate (today) on your own hosted system are the publishing tools and monetization layer (though not impossible). Trying to disintermediate YouTube yourself would be hard, and transporting your Twitter network isn’t possible. SMTP, hypertext, and DNS are still open.

👨🏽‍💻 Choose Boring Technology

I love everything about this perspective:

The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.

It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this.

💡 Building DIY LED strips for fun

Matt Haughey went nuts on a custom lighting setup for his home office. I ran across this searching for some wirelessly controllable LEDs for my office bookshelf. Mine won’t be this crazy, but I wish I had the patience to do something like this.

This is the second episode of the “Torch of Progress” series that the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program is putting on, hosted by Jason Crawford. Tyler Cowen is unbelievably prolific in projects he’s got going on, so it’s great to see him making the time for things like this.

Read more here from last year on the progress studies movement.

Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.

Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.

Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.

I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who worked on UNIX at Bell:

Software is different from hardware. When you build hardware and send it out, you may have to fix it because it breaks, but you don’t demand, for example, that your radio suddenly turn into a television. And you don’t demand that a piece of hardware suddenly do a completely different function, but people do that with software all of the time. There’s a continual demand for changes, enhancements, new features that people find necessary once they get used to a system.

Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to “read later” service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I’d fallen into only using it for the latter, which then made me go back to Pinboard since the single function of bookmark tagging is its specialty. I’m still using Pinboard heavily to archive interesting things, but I’ve found a new use for Instapaper with Readwise’s integration.

Readwise’s main feature is to sync all of the highlighted passages from your Kindle (via your Amazon account) and sent you a daily digest of 5 highlights from previous reads, with the goal of increasing retention of things you read. For any high-volume reader, you’re well-familiar with the problem of forgetting most of what you read, certainly any details beyond the basic gist of a book.

I didn’t know how much I wanted a tool for this until I started using it.

With its Instapaper integration, it’ll sync articles and their highlights into your Readwise archive, which then can be included in your daily reminder digests. Over the years I’ve toyed with tools like Evernote or Google Keep for clipping quotes or passages from web content, but none of them stuck for me or were that useful. The information going into an archive solves only part of the problem. What you want is a way to remember and reference those bits you clip from the web.

A related feature Readwise supports that I’ve used a few times now is archiving Twitter threads. Replying on a thread with @readwiseio save thread will store those posts in your Readwise account and include them in your daily highlight reviews alongside Kindle and article content. It works best for threads of things that are time-insensitive like ones on history, advice, business strategy, etc.

The Instapaper support has filled a gap in making bookmarking of articles more useful when you can play back interesting things you read that are worth remembering.

The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:

From this Wired article:

PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was the first time that computers were small enough for hundreds to be in the same building, and the network had to be fast to drive the printer.

Metcalfe circulated his plan in a memo titled “Alto Ethernet.” It contained a rough schematic drawing and suggested using coaxial cable for the connections and using data packets like Hawaii’s AlohaNet or the Defense Department’s Arpanet. The system was up and running Nov. 11, 1973.

It’s amazing how simple many foundational technologies start out: a simple comms medium meant to connect their computers to a shared printer. Now the same tech is the backbone of almost every local network.

The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more trips to the store, expensive hardcovers and paperbacks, and importantly, no more paper taking up shelf space. As much as I love the Kindle, I have a growing list of gripes about the experience. Like with John Gruber’s recent post on the iPad, criticism comes from a place of love for the platform, and a disappointment with how little innovation there’s been over 13 years.

I still prefer the paperback format for pure experience, but the practicality of Kindle nearly always wins out. With Readwise I’ve gotten so used to heavily highlighting in my books, and it’s too much work to annotate in paper format when I’ve then got to transfer them somewhere else to ever see those notes again.

I’d used the Kindle iOS app since the beginning, but didn’t buy a Kindle device until 2015 (the Paperwhite, third-generation). I use both the app and the device every single day, so over time I’ve built up a back log of feature requests and documented shortcomings. There’s great opportunity for Amazon to make some amazing improvements.

But first, let’s start with the things Amazon’s done right.

What Amazon has gotten right

• Whispersync — After acquiring Audible in 2008 (audiobooks) and Goodreads in 2013 (social network for readers), they’ve added some integration between the platforms. Whispersync started as their cloud service for syncing progress between devices for ebooks. A few years ago they extended this to sync progress between the text and audio versions, if you own both. For times when I’ve read books that I have on both platforms, this is a fantastic feature. Works pretty reliably, and is a neat technology.
• X-Ray — I first saw this on Prime Video. The best description of X-Ray is that it’s like the old “Pop-Up Video” show on VH1, which would show “did you know?” style annotations on top of music videos. In video it allows you to see, in real-time, which actors are on screen and quickly look up their filmographies and whatnot. X-Ray for Kindle is similar: it breaks down common terms and keywords, themes, and subjects, with ways to navigate to those parts of the book.
• One-tap purchasing — This is always a delightful process. Search for a book (or see one recommended) and in one tap it’s downloading. I’ve bought dozens of books on a whim this way.
• Highlighting & annotation — I’ve been an avid book highlighter for years. Readwise now raises the value of annotations 10x. In the Kindle iOS app, the share sheet on a highlighted passage also lets you save a slick shareable screenshot of your highlight on social media.
• Audible narration — This is more technically cool than practical. If you own audio and text versions, you can download the audio inside of the Kindle mobile app. When playing the narration, it moves the text along with it. I’ve never used this in practice, but it’s impressive.

Plenty of things to love. But now time for my personal recommendations.

Requests for the Kindle platform

• Tighter social integration from Goodreads — Both the Kindle device and mobile apps now have connection to your account on Goodreads. They can see your “to-read” list, can mark things as read or currently reading, and can sync progress. But they haven’t done much of anything with the social aspects of Goodreads. I’d like to do things like enable seeing highlights my friends made in a book, and maybe an ability to put comments on those highlights just directed to specific friends. It could spark conversation around book topics you might not know had mutual resonance between you and a friend. Goodreads in general hasn’t gotten a lot of love since Amazon made the acquisition, but it’s integration with the live reading experience is one of the biggest places to expand into. It’d make the service more purposeful and engaging.
• Progress adjustments — When reading books on multiple platforms, it’s possible for your “furthest read” progress to get out of whack (for example, if you flip ahead to look at a footnote, more on those in a second). Then the waterline for where you’ve reached in the book gets baked and is impossible to adjust. It’d be nice to have a quick interface to enter the desired furthest read point that resyncs everywhere.
• Better footnotes — If you’ve read many nonfiction books (or a heavy footnoter like DFW), you’ve been annoyed by the inconsistency in how footnotes are formatted in books. Most of the time, tapping a footnote zooms you to the end of the book. They’ve recently added contextual back buttons to return where you were from the footnote, but if you flip around pages near the footnote, it’s possible to end up resetting your furthest progress point to 98%, where the footnotes are at the end. Some books (feels like a minority) have more functional overlay footnotes. When you tap those links a small popover appears at the bottom with the footnote text without leaving the page. This is even an improvement over most paper books. The former problem with footnotes at the end of the ebook is actively much worse than page-flipping in paper formats.
• More consistent formatting — This one may be largely out of Amazon’s control; I don’t know much about the process of authoring ePub/mobi files. But Amazon could certainly help more to provide an “IDE” for authors and publishers to use best practices for the platform when converting their works into ebook format. It seems like after 13 years there’d be much less of this inconsistency than I see from book to book. Footnotes are screwy, progress measurement is all over the place. Some books mark the 100% point at the end of the main text, some at the full end of the file (after the index/glossary). Page numbers are also an inconsistent mess.
• Deep linked references — The one that I’m the most interested in. Imagine this: you tap a citation link that displays a popover on the screen, then tapping a particular citation could deep link into an interactive “clip” from the source material’s ebook format, also showing links to add that source to your wishlist, or even buy for your library. It could even let you highlight from books you don’t yet own, and create a separate shelf of books on your device of referenced works you might be interested in reading in full. Over the years they’ve added both dictionary and Wikipedia lookup on selected text. I see this as a similar way to bridge into related, adjacent content. Would benefit readers and, if well executed, Amazon and publishers by more widely referring users to other works.
• Semantic web of references — If citations and references were deeply linked, you could also build a reference graph. If I’m reading Tom Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, I could pull up a tab that shows all works referenced within, and also all works that reference it. Go both ways with it. Picking through bibliographies is frequently how new things get added to my reading list. This would give readers an exposed graph of related works or authors they may find interesting.
• Book lending — This is probably a long shot, but it’d be neat to be able to temporarily “lend” access to a book to, say, a friend on Goodreads, with a “return” date you could customize that revokes access and returns to you. Perhaps you could cap the limit to 60 days or something. It could give the social reading experience more of that feeling of sharing knowledge and reading experiences with friends. It could also show your highlights and annotations, like someone reading a highlighted hardcover book you lend them.
• Reading metrics — When did I start a book? When did I finish? How many days did it take to read? How many pages did I read each day? Data nerds like me would eat this up. Probably not of mass market interest, understandably. You could add gamification here, but I’d be reticent about that since the purity of reading doesn’t need any more distractions out there to keep you from deep immersion in something. Twitter and Instagram are already doing a great job at stealing users’ attention away from books.

Have any active Kindle users out there formulated their own lists like this? I’d love to hear others’ ideas. Maybe with enough of a conversation about them, Amazon could respond positively.

As I’ve been reading more into the history of technology¹, specifically computers and the Internet, I’ll go on side trails through Wikipedia or the wider ‘net back to many of the source papers that were the seeds of certain innovations.

I’ve read about the IBM 700 series of mainframes, Vannevar Bush’s seminal piece on a “memex” device (precursor idea to hypertext), and Claude Shannon’s original work on information theory.

The latest gold mine I’ve found is on YouTube. I created a “Tech History” playlist where I’ve been logging clips and documentaries on various bits of computer history. Click the icon top-right to see all the videos in the list.

🥩 The Internet of Beefs

Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:

The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.

Almost none of these battles matter individually. Most mook-on-mook contests are witnessed, for the most part, only by a few friends and algorithms, and merit no overt notice in either Vox or Quillette. Beyond a local uptick in cortisol levels, individual episodes of mook-on-mook violence are of no consequence.

🎭 The Curse of Culture

I have a working draft post on this topic for sometime in the future. This is one of my favorites from the Stratechery archives — on corporate cultures and how they impact company strategy:

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.

📚 Book Review: Secular Cycles

The Slate Star Codex review of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which seeks to understand patterns in technological and social development, and underlying causes for expansion and stagnation periods.

I’m currently reading the fantastic book The Dream Machine, a history of the creation of personal computers, and a biography of this man, JCR Licklider. This is a talk from an ACM conference in 1986 where he discusses his work on interactive computing. A wonderful little bit of history here.

AWS’s re:Invent conference just wrapped last week. Since we’re so deep into AWS technologies, I keep an eye out each year on the trends visible in Amazon’s product launches. They move at breathtaking speed to fill out their offering suite and keep their current momentum as the leader in the cloud space. They’re really nailing the bundling & scale economics that the likes of Microsoft and Oracle were so successful at in years past. When going upmarket, having a product for every problem outweighs the need for having the highest quality in any individual product line. Enterprises often value the ability to buy everythign they need from a single vendor higher than the quality of the products (what Ben Thompson has referred to as the “one throat to choke” phenomenon).

Here are a handful of the announcements I found most interesting, in no particular order:

AWS Outposts

AWS has finally relented to the customer base that’s been reluctant to move to the cloud for the past decade. With the scale they have now they’ve been able to productize a managed service that puts an “AWS in-a-box” type of modular system into a customer’s datacenter, ideally giving the best of all worlds of security, compliance, and exposure to the AWS services and APIs. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of adoption this gets.

SageMaker Studio

SageMaker is their service for creating, training, and deploying ML models. It’s really an umbrella brand name for about a dozen sub-products for various pieces of the ML workflow. Studio intended to be a full “IDE”-style interface for working with everything you’ve built in SM. Clear indication that this is one of their big strategic plays going forward: lowering the barrier to doing ML and having customers new to the space learning with and expanding from the AWS platform from the start.

Rekognition Custom Labels

Rekognition is AWS’s computer vision service, with endpoints for analyzing video and image data for objects, sentiment, content moderation, and search. One of the barriers for image classification tasks has been the ability to tailor the models to recognize other domain-specific content (like “what kind of part is this?” from a list of parts the customer builds). It now lets you upload your own custom labeled image datasets for training custom Rekognition models.

Amazon Builders Library

This isn’t really a service or expansion on one like the others in the list. This is more a knowledge base of content from Amazon engineers on how they internally build and operate software at scale.

⚾️ How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season

Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:

He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.

🗺 Mapping Remote Roads with OpenStreetMap, RapiD, and QGIS

An annotated version of Mike Migurski’s workshop on RapiD and Disaster Maps from the NetHope Summit. Facebook’s work on this stuff looks primed to change the way everyone is doing OpenStreetMap contribution.

📱 U.S. opens national security investigation into TikTok

I’ve never used TikTok, but it’s been a fascination tech story to follow its insane growth over the last 8-12 months. With the current geopolitical climate and the fact that it’s owned by Chinese owner ByteDance, it seemed like this CFIUS investigation was inevitable.

I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11” model instead of the previous generation 12.9” one that I’ve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a week’s worth of usage:

The iPad

So far the smaller form factor takes a little bit of getting used to, but the weight and size is a huge improvement in portability. When this iPad is the only thing in my bag, it almost feels empty it’s so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like I’m about to drop it. One of the downsides of the 12.9” size is that using it sans-keyboard as a reading device (especially in portrait mode) is unwieldy. The 11” size can be comfortably used in one hand for reading. You also still get all of the iPadOS multitasking features for split screen productivity apps, which was one of the biggest drivers for originally going with the Pro model.

Keyboard Folio & Pencil

I got the Smart Keyboard Folio and the new Pencil to go with it, and both are pretty major improvements over those two products from a generation ago. The smaller size keyboard is taking a little adjustment, but it’s not too bad. I love the feel of the keys on Apple’s iPad keyboards, and this one is an incremental improvement in tactile feeling from the last generation. The new version of the Pencil seems to have less latency in sketching, which makes writing and drawing feel more natural than it did — even though the Pencil even since version 1 has been leaps and bounds better than any other stylus hardware ever made. With the magnetic docking inductive charging, it’s also nice to have a Pencil that’s always at 100% full charge, ready to go. Too often I’d get out the old one after a period of not using it only to find it dead. It’s a quick charge, but taking up the Lightning port to charge it was always annoying.

Since I made the switch, I’ve been doing a lot more work on the iPad versus the MacBook Pro. Even with multitasking, the “modal” nature of app usage on an iPad seems to keep my mind more focused and less alt-tabbing between various windows. While not impossible to do, it’s hard to end up in the trap of 50 open browser tabs on an iPad than a full laptop. There’s also the fact that I don’t have a heating element on the lap while using it, like the superheated aluminum case on a MBP when Chrome, Slack, and other memory-heavy apps are churning hard.

So far, so good. This week with some travel abroad I’ll give it a shot as the primary device and see how it feels.

Since I’ve been following the progress studies movement and Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress blog, it was cool to see video of his talk on the history of steel from a San Francisco meetup a few weeks ago.

I’ve been looking for a smooth way to dictate notes and thoughts while hands-free from my phone, particularly while running or driving.

When I run I typically wear one AirPod and have my phone inaccessible in a waistband pouch on my back. Since I’m usually listening to audiobooks while running, I don’t have an easy way to log thoughts or perform the audio equivalent of highlighting things.

I never use Siri at all but for a couple of easy, reliable Shortcuts for dictation. I thought this was a perfect candidate to explore the “Hey Siri” activation support with custom commands from the Shortcuts app (formerly Workflow).

This shortcut from MacStories provides a simple base for appending to a note in the Notes app. This is good, but for my use case I need to be able to do this completely hands-off. Using Shortcuts to capture and send workflow data around typically requires access to the app, forcing the device to be unlocked for it to work. This still could be convenient enough for, say, dictations in the car where the phone is in its mount or nearby, but in my waist pouch it’s totally inaccessible. I don’t want to have to mess with anything at all while I’m in motion running, so I needed something else.

So I logged into Zapier to see what I could do with its webhook trigger. If you send data to Zapier, they make it easy to connect to hundreds of different web services using custom multi-step workflows. Mine was going to be simple: dictate note → append text to a Google Doc.

I created a document called “Scratchpad” in my G Suite account to house any speech dictations. All I want is a temporary placeholder where I can record thoughts to get back to later. Each new dictated note appends a new line with the content. I use a workflow like this to add tasks in Todoist, but I needed something looser and more flexible.

Create the Zap

On the Zapier side, I created a zap with a webhook trigger first. This gives you a URL to copy and bring over into the Shortcuts app.

Create the Shortcut

Create a new Shortcut with these three steps:

• Dictate text — to capture the speech-to-text data
• URL — to set the base URL for the Zapier webhook (copied from your zap)
• Get Contents of URL — this is what assembles the data into a POST request to the webhook endpoint

The only things you need to do here are paste in the zap URL, set it to the POST method, and edit the “Request Body” property. I added a note property and inserted the value of Dictated Text which will pass in that transcription from your dictation.

Setup the Zap

Once that’s done, creating the zap on the Zapier side is only two steps: a webhook trigger:

And an “Append to Document” action event with Google Docs:

I’ve been using this for a couple of days for ad-hoc comments while listening to books. It’s been a convenient way so far to quickly jot things down like I do when I’m reading paperbacks or Kindle. The only downside is that Siri mis-hears things a lot compared to the Google Assistant, which we use a good bit around the house. The dictation is usually passable, since it’s informal and usually close enough that when I review the notes, I recall what I was trying to say and can correct it. If I ever end up with a backlog of notes in there without being reviewed, the error rate on dictation will probably leave me stumped.

We’ve been exploring options for adding a CMS to our Jekyll-powered website for Fulcrum over the last couple of weeks, looking for ways to add more content editor-friendly capabilities without having to overhaul everything under the hood, or move to a full hosted CMS like Wordpress. The product and design teams responsible for the technical development of the website all prefer the simplicity and flexibility of static site generators, but understand the relative opacity of learning git, command lines, and the vagaries of something like Jekyll for team members just writing content.

One of the options we’ve been looking at is Netlify CMS, along with their deployment and hosting platform as a GitHub Pages replacement. Their CMS is open source, and it’s attractive because of how simple it is to wire up to your static site with a single YAML file. Essentially all you need to do is define your content types in the configuration, then the CMS generates all of the editing UI for creating new or editing existing markdown files.

To kick the tires, I set it up locally for this site, and also ended up migrating the hosting for the entire site over to Netlify. The transition was totally seamless; now I’ve got my site running with the latest and greatest Jekyll and other libraries, added a CMS for when I want to quickly make edits or posts without involving a git workflow, and Netlify’s CDN is blazing fast. I love that none of the rest of my workflow using a git repo, markdown, or Jekyll has to change — all pushes to master trigger automated tests and deploys on Netlify.

There are some other things there I’m going to experiment with, especially the option for post-processing operations like minifying CSS and Javascript, as well as lossless image compression, both in service of page speed performance improvements.

I recently learned that you can pair your AirPods with the Apple TV, which I’ve been using for the last couple of weeks. With two kids sleeping nearby plus noise from the nearby kitchen, it’s impossible to get the volume loud enough to make out dialog in most shows. Because of this we always have the captions on for everything. But this new discovery solves this problem, plus it makes it easy to get up and walk away for a minute without having to pause anything.

This guide shows how to connect to them. Holding down the ⏯ button on the Apple Remote pulls up an output source selector, like what you get with AirPlay dialog menus. My AirPods showed up in there the first time with no Bluetooth pairing required — probably some iCloud account magic happening to bypass that handshake process. After they’re paired, you can use the volume control on either the Siri Remote or even the volume controls on your iPhone inside of the Remote app. Very slick experience.

iOS 13 has support for pairing multiple sets of AirPods to a single device. If this comes to tvOS, it’ll be fantastic for both of us to be able to watch without noise issues.

Another fun one from the Primitive Technology channel. I previously linked to his videos a few months back. This time he builds a stacked brick wall around a new thatched hut out of clay bricks. The patience and craftsmanship required to build the things he does is truly admirable.

I think we’d all be mentally healthier if we spent more time disconnecting and creating things. If only I had the Queensland jungle in my backyard!

For a long time I’ve used the full 1Password desktop app and its browser plugin that installs alongside for support inside of Chrome. But recently I set up the 1Password X browser extension they first released a couple of years ago, and I’m converted. Since access to accounts is most useful in a web browser context, implementing it as an extension makes sense. I don’t know much about the tech backend or advantages of building a Chrome extension versus a “thick-client” browser plugin, but it seems like it’s certainly a benefit to conform to the browser’s best practice for building add-ons; and extensions are the way to go in Chrome. One of their big motivations here was deepening the cross-platform support since you can install Chrome (and Firefox) on so many OS platforms, including Linux.

The full features of the 1Password desktop app are available from within the extension — access to multiple vaults and all your accounts, editing and organizing your accounts, and creating new ones. In addition to the same handy integration for filling 2FA codes and their helpful password generator for new sites, X adds a built-in form filling utility, similar to the “autofill” capability that browsers have had for a long time, but with access to your 1Password account if you’ve got it unlocked. The feature even supports an inline generator and account creation wizard for when you’re signing up for new services, which in my experience is one of the biggest barriers to getting new users to understand and use 1Password: they don’t add new accounts they sign up for into their vault. Helping users make sure things are always added (and updated!) in their vault is one of the key steps to reaching the “wow” moment as a user. Once you’ve got a few dozen (or in my case hundreds) of entries set up and well-organized in your vault, it’s magical to never have to worry about losing access to accounts.

The one thing that’ll take getting used to is that you can’t unlock the vault with the Touch ID sensor on my MacBook Pro anymore using the X extension. It’s been surprising to me how much I must’ve relied on this, as well as the Cmd-\ shortcut to autofill. You never realize how baked-in a behavior is until you upset the routine! This should just be a muscle memory thing to get used to.

One of the things I admire about 1Password is that it’s clear their product team are all constant users of their own product. Every time I think of something that’d be slick, it seems they’ve already thought of it, or if not they eventually build it. And not only that, they’ll even go the extra mile and tie in keyboard shortcuts and all the other accoutrements that demonstrate that they themselves are power users of their product.

My appreciation for their effort doesn’t stop at the technology or product. From a business standpoint, I admire what they’ve been able to do with their pivot from desktop app to SaaS with their Business and Family plan offerings. Many app developers have made moves over the last few years toward subscription pricing, sometimes with mixed results. I’ve always been a fan of SaaS models for services I rely on — without continuous funding, how will they make their excellent product even better? It’s not just about changing the billing model from perpetual to recurring either; they’ve actually converted to a hosted service that offers something distinctly different than what a desktop app can do.

A few months ago I joined the advisory board of the Suncoast Developers Guild, a code school and developer community here in St. Pete. Our company has been involved with this group since back when they first launched the Iron Yard campus back in 2014.

We’ve had a successful experience connecting with the local community through this channel, supporting students looking to shift careers into work on software and recruiting them into our team. Currently 5 people from our dev and product teams came out of those cohorts of front-end or full stack development grads.

Through my role as an advisor there, we’re working on a few things that we’re hoping expand the footprint of the Guild and bring more companies into the fold. I’ve long been an advocate for “non-traditional” education paths and hands-on experience over formal education, but many companies are still stuck in the world of looking for those 4-year degrees — they don’t know how to recruit, vet, and measure skillsets without a GPA and letters alongside it (BS / MS).

I wrote this post a number of years ago targeted at people new to or thinking about jobs in the programming world. I’m not a developer myself, but work with them everyday and have spent plenty of time in the community to know how to identify and hire the right skills I look for in creators. Going back and reading this this morning, I still would agree with everything I wrote. Supporting the SDG is part of my effort to have skin in the game on this perspective. Helping match the right core passions and mental tools to the companies than need them is what it’s about, regardless of the path one takes to get there.

I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.

In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.

This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.

Hard to believe Jobs was this prescient at age 26, when computers were still considered to be hobbyist toys.

One of the big events in tech last week was that Verizon offloaded Tumblr to Automattic, Matt Mullenweg’s company most known for Wordpress.

I had my main blog/website on Tumblr back when it first launched in 2007, which I used for a number of years before migrating it over to this current self-managed iteration on GitHub back around 2011¹. At the time I loved Tumblr’s middleground between the long-form-friendly full Wordpress blog and the short-form nature of Twitter. Tumblr’s “tumblelog” concept easily supported either mode depending on what you wanted to post. Their post editor was fantastic (and still is, in my opinion), especially good back in the days before Medium when WYSIWIG editors we’re all pretty terrible. It was the place I learned to use Markdown in everyday writing, which I still use everywhere today, even in my own personal note text files.

Though I haven’t been a user of Tumblr in years, I have some negative and positive feelings about it. The negative is, of course, that Verizon is treating it like a fire sale “write down”, with the previously $1.1bn acquisition in 2013 degrading down to now selling it off to Automattic for a rumored price of “less than $3m”. It’s astonishing that something could lose that much value in the marketplace in such a short period of time.

The upside here is that there’s no better owner and future shepherd of the product than its new one. Automattic has been one of the best community-oriented companies for 15 years, with a publishing platform that powers a quarter of the internet. It’s sad to see it lose so much of it’s former self, but maybe it’ll see a revitalization under new ownership.

Wearables have become such a big market these days that there’s a wide variety of options to pick from if you want to monitor activity metrics. From the basic Fitbit step counters to more ruggedized outdoor watches to full-blown smartwatches, there’s a device for everyone.

I’ve been a devoted user of Garmin’s activity tracking watches for years now, starting out with the Forerunner 220. A couple of years ago I upgraded to the fēnix 5 model, one of their highest-end watches.

I used the 220 model for about 3 years for run tracking. It was always reliable for me — water/sweat resistant, long enough battery life, and provided accurate GPS data. Because I also wanted to monitor heart rate during activities, I also used to use the chest strap HR monitor to feed that data to the watch. It worked reliably for a long while, but I think the contacts got corroded and the data started to get wonky after a time. I’d see huge surges in HR for no reason that would suddenly drop back down to normal.

I’ve now been using the fēnix for a couple of years and have loved it, one of the better devices I’ve ever owned. After a good experience with Garmin’s Forerunner series, I felt confident enough that I’d get benefit out of one of the higher end models. Let’s walk through some of its best features.

Multisport Activity Tracking

One of the things I didn’t like about the Forerunner was that it only supported recording run activities. The fēnix supports over a dozen activity types, indoor and outdoor, like cycling, climbing, swimming, and more. With the Forerunner it would still log GPX tracks that could be exported and treated however you want, but when synced to Garmin Connect or Strava, it would consider every activity a “run”. With fēnix when you select a different activity type, it gets picked up accurately in both sync services and treated differently for metrics reporting.

There are some differences between activity types in terms of instant feedback on the watch display. For example, between runs and rides, you can have different “lap” lengths to notify you of progress along an activity. So the advanced features like HR zones, pacing, and other things differ in how they’re fed back to you while you’re active.

I’m interested in incorporating swimming into my workout routine and to see how that would work with the watch.

HR Monitor

Having the HR monitor built into the device has some great advantages: mostly that it’s always on, and always available. I like that I get passive tracking of heart rate all the time to be able to see the resting heart rate during the day and during sleep (more on sleep tracking in a moment). I don’t have a good sense for the accuracy of the measurement with the on-wrist infrared sensor, but it seems generally consistent with what I used to see with the chest strap. To me it’s mostly important to have relative consistency between activities, and that I can see it in real time during activities. When I’m running I usually switch the watch display to view HR, which tracks amazingly closely with how I feel during a run. I can see a measurement of when I’m on the limit, so I typically use that readout to pace myself.

Battery Life

This is one of the best features about the fēnix, to me. Garmin reports 2 weeks of passive usage, 24 hours of active usage, which tracks pretty closely with my experience. What I tell people is that it lasts so long that I usually don’t remember exactly when I last charged it. This is the main reason that the Apple Watch has never interested me. I like the idea of richer apps on a wristwatch (especially with the phoneless-but-still-connected capability of the Series 3), but having to charge something every night is a nonstarter to me.

Sleep Tracking

Given that I wear the watch all the time, the sleep tracking is an easy side benefit. Ever since reading Why We Sleep recently, I’m more interested in prioritizing long enough sleep cycles (which with children simply means going to bed early). The watch reports not only sleep time, but also sleep stages somehow, through some combination of heart rate monitoring and movement tracking it buckets your sleep time into deep, light, and REM sleep stages. I don’t need hyper-accurate reporting, so this is a slick feature to get for free with an exercise tracker.

I’ve heard about the Oura ring as well for more detailed sleep tracking, but it’s a bit pricey for something I don’t have a big problem with right now. If I want to get more sleep, the simple solution is to prioritize it (which I don’t do well).

Smartwatch Capability

Through Bluetooth pairing, the fēnix also supports integration with push notifications from the phone. This can be convenient sometimes, but I’ve honestly never used it that much. Probably the most utility for me is quick access to turn-by-turn directions while in the car or on my bike. Quick readout of SMS and instant messages is convenient, too.

Strava Integration

You can set up Garmin Connect to sync with a number of services, including Strava, which is the only one I use for activity tracking. The main feature it has tied to Strava that I like is that with Segments in Strava, any segments you add to your favorites transfer to the watch for live progress tracking. It’s a feature they call Live Segments, and it’s cool because it’ll give you live feedback on your performance against your previous efforts and the KOMs from your friends. I love the ability to challenge myself on my own personal records on common routes.

The syncing works pretty flawlessly both with Garmin Connect and Strava. Never had a problem making sure my data is always up to date.

Any Downsides?

It’s been a rock-solid device for me, overall, with no major drawbacks.

The custom charging connector is probably the only downside, and not too acute because of the long battery life and rarity of needing to charge. It’d be much smarter for Garmin to use USB-C or micro-USB, but I don’t know what would motivate a custom interface. Given that the connector plugs in perpendicular to the watch back, it’s possible that there’s not enough thickness to fit the receptacle for a USB-type connector. Regardless, the need for a special cable to charge is an annoyance. I have keep one at home and a spare at the office so I can charge anywhere.

Overall it’s a very solid device, and I’d consider buying other Garmin devices down the road.

Yesterday was Neuralink’s unveiling of what they’ve been working on. Their team of engineers, neurosurgeons, and computer science experts are working on a “neural lace” brain-computer interface.

Elon Musk announced the launch of a company to work on this problem back in 2016. Seeing this amount of progress, it’s clear now that the science fiction story of a cybernetic implant looks like a possible near future reality. The idea itself conjures images of Neuromancer’s console cowboys and Effinger’s “moddies”, neural augmentations that enable things like plugging into the matrix and personality modification.

The near-term intent that Neuralink is after is to use the lace as an assistive technology for those with motor impairments and other medical conditions. But there are moonshot goals to “increase the bandwidth” between computers and the human mind.

The whole idea gives new meaning to the famous Steve Jobs quote:

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

If Neuralink is successful, instead of being limited by the bandwidth of the inputs — keyboard, mouse, touchscreen — and outputs — pixels and sound waves — we’ll have a two-way massive digital pipeline in between. A supersonic jet for the mind.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I’ve known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We’ve even experienced some of its highlighted phenomena first hand in our own product development efforts in bringing Geodexy, allinspections, and Fulcrum to market.

Moore’s “Technology Adoption Life Cycle” is the axis of the book:

In principle, the advice laid out rings very logical, nothing out of left field that goes against any conventional wisdom. It helps to create a concrete framework for thinking about the “psychographic” profile of each customer type, in order from left to right on the curve:

1. Innovators
2. Visionaries
3. Pragmatists
4. Conservatives
5. Laggards

It’s primarily addressed to high-tech companies, most of which in the “startup” camp are somewhere left of the chasm. The challenge, as demonstrated in the book, is to figure out what parts of your strategy, product, company org chart, and go-to-market need to change to make the jump across the chasm to expansion into the mainstream on the other side.

There are important differences between each stage in the market cycle. As a product transitions between stages, there are evolutions that need to take place for a company to successfully mature through the lifecycle to capture further depths of the addressable market. Moore’s model, however, distinguishes the gap between steps 2 and 3 as dramatically wider in terms of the driving motivations of customers, and ultimately the disconnect of what a product maker is selling from what the customer believes they are buying.

The danger of the chasm is made more extreme by the fact that many companies, after early traction and successes with innovators and visionaries, are still young and small. A company like that moving into a marketplace of pragmatists will encounter much larger, mature organizations with different motivations.

The primary trait displayed by the visionary as compared to the pragmatist is a willingness to take risk. Where a visionary is willing to make a bet on a new, unproven product, staking some of their own social and political capital on the success of high tech new solutions, the pragmatist wants a solution to be proven before they invest. Things like social proof, case studies, and other forms of evidence that demonstrate ROI in organizations that look like their own. Not only other companies of their rough size, but ones also in their specific industry vertical, doing the same kind of work. In other words, only a narrow field of successes work well as demonstrable examples of value for them.

Knowing about this difference between market phases, how would a creator prepare themselves to capture the pragmatist customer? One is left with a dilemma: how can I demonstrate proof within other pragmatic, peer organizations when they all want said proof before buying in? We have our own product that’s in (from my optic) the early stages of traction right of the chasm, so many of the psychographics the book provides to define the majority market ring very true in interactions with these customers.

Presented with this kind of conundrum in how to proceed, Moore’s strategy for what to do here is, in short, all about beachheads. He uses the example of D-Day and the successful Allied landings on the Normandy beachhead as an analogy for how you can approach this sort of strategy. Even if you have a broadly-applicable product, relevant to dozens of different industries, you have to spend so much time and energy on a hyper-targeted marketing campaign to connect with the pragmatist on the other end that you won’t have enough resources to do this for every market. The beachhead will be successfully taken and held only if you go deep enough into a single vertical example to hold onto that early traction until you can secure additional adjacent customers. Only then can you worry about moving inland and taking more territory.

All in all it was a worthwhile, quick read. Nothing revelatory was uncovered for me that I wasn’t already aware of in broad strokes. However, it is one of those books that’s foundational to anyone building a B2B software product. Understanding the dynamics and motivations of customers and how they evolve with your product’s growth is essential to building the right marketing approach.

🌐 Tissot’s Indicatrix

This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:

Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection of two lines in some direction which are also shown at right angles on the map. All the other intersections at that point will not intersect at the same angle on the map, unless the map is conformal, at least at that point.

🏞 National Park Typeface

A typeface designed to mimic the National Park Service signs that are carved using a router bit.

Perfect timing on finding this one. I’ve been working on a cartography project to simulate a USGS-style topographic map in QGIS, and this could work perfectly in that design. Excellent work from the Design Outside Studio.

🛰 Starlink

SpaceX is developing a space-based broadband internet system of 24 satellites. The design of this hardware looks incredible. I hope it gets traction and sparks a consumerization of this sort of tech. Between projects like this and the work of Planet and others with microsatellites, that industry seems like it’s on the cusp of some big things.

I just ran across this YouTube channel called Primitive Technology, created by an Australian from the North Queensland bush country who attempts to recreate building things with Stone Age technology. He makes his own charcoal, fires clay hardware, makes tools, and supplies himself with mud, clay, wood, and everything else right out of the local environment.

Each one is silent with the work speaking for itself. Turn on captions to see embedded explainers talking about what he’s doing. An easy YouTube rabbit hole.

Like many in the Twitterverse, I love the platform. It provides my main interface to following what’s happening, along with staying connected to interests both personal and professional.

Jumping off something James wrote yesterday, I’ve felt similar about Twitter’s utility the last year or so. It feels like I’m experiencing some sort of content creep — probably a function of an increasing number of accounts I follow and the neighboring universe of likes and retweets from that expanding footprint, which generates a massive amount of noise in the algorithmic feed.

I don’t spend a ton of time on Twitter anymore, but I do look at it multiple times a day. Unlike some, I actually like the algorithmic feed. The idea of seeing things adjacent to the folks I follow is an attractive one, but it’s gotten to be overwhelming with toxic content, topics I personally don’t want to see on Twitter (or at all), and can be overwhelming echo chamber on some topics when high profile events happen. I need to make the time (as James did) to purge the follow count down of the unnecessary. I did also discover muting topics recently, which has helped tone down the stuff I don’t care about — not via Twitter, at least.

Twitter’s had its Lists feature since 2009, but I barely got into using it before abandoning it and never going back. The process for adding and removing from lists and general list consumption has always been terrible, as if Twitter is likely to kill the feature at some point. James’s recommendation of TweetDeck definitely makes consuming the list feeds more manageable. I’m going to give that a try and set up a couple of topic-based lists to see how that works.

Since I do so many of my runs at night (even as late as 10-10:30pm), I’ve always been mindful of being visible for safety. Until we moved last month, I used to drive down to the Coffee Pot Bayou area and run on what’s called the North Bay Trail, since runs in my old neighborhood were boring. That whole route was on a dedicated trail set back from the street, so visibility was less of an issue. Now that I’m doing most runs in the neighborhood, even though the sidewalks are good, there are plenty of crossings that can be sketchy in the dark. So I bought a headlamp to try out.

I haven’t gotten to use it yet, but will likely be doing some runs in the evenings over the next week.

One feature I do really like to make it a multitasker is it’s got a red light mode. Really meant to be used in outdoors activities to preserve night vision when doing things like checking maps or looking around in your tent, I’ve already found it useful for reading in the bed at night. Usually I’ll only read my Kindle Paperwhite in the bed since it’s got a nice low power backlight, but this is great because it allows be to read paperbacks in the dark, as well.

One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.

Everyone makes fun of it today, but Clippy did presage the world of AI-powered “assistant” technology that everyone is getting familiar with today.

See also this Twitter thread. Love this stuff.

📖 Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art

Wolfe’s work, particularly his Book of the New Sun “tetralogy”, is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on his life leading up to becoming one of the most influential American writers. I recommend it to everyone I know interested in sci-fi. Even reading this made me want to dig up The Shadow of the Torturer and start reading it for a third time:

The language of the book is rich, strange, beautiful, and often literally incomprehensible. New Sun is presented as “posthistory”—a historical document from the future. It’s been translated, from a language that does not yet exist, by a scholar with the initials G.W., who writes a brief appendix at the end of each volume. Because so many of the concepts Severian writes about have no modern equivalents, G.W. says, he’s substituted “their closest twentieth-century equivalents” in English words. The book is thus full of fabulously esoteric and obscure words that few readers will recognize as English—fuligin, peltast, oubliette, chatelaine, cenobite. But these words are only approximations of other far-future words that even G.W. claims not to fully understand. “Metal,” he says, “is usually, but not always, employed to designate a substance of the sort the word suggests to contemporary minds.” Time travel, extreme ambiguity, and a kind of poststructuralist conception of language are thus all implied by the book’s very existence.

📺 Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! The Exclusive Inside Story Of The New Billionaire Behind Tech’s Hottest IPO

Zoom was in the news a lot lately, not only for its IPO, but also the impressive business they’ve put together since founding in 2011. It’s a great example of how you can build an extremely viable and healthy business in a crowded space with a focus on solid product execution and customer satisfaction. This profile of founder Eric Yuan goes into the core culture of the business and the grit that made the success possible.

🗺 A Look Inside The GIS World With Anthony Quartararo, CEO Of Spatial Networks

The folks over at FullStackTalent just published this Q&A with Tony in a series on business leaders of the Tampa Bay area. It gives some good insight into how we work, where we’ve come from, and what we do every day. There’s even a piece about our internal “GeoTrivia”, where my brain full of useless geographical information can actually get used:

Matt: What’s your favorite geography fun fact?

Tony: Our VP of Product, Coleman McCormick, is the longest-reigning champion of GeoTrivia, a competition we do every Friday. We just all give up because he [laughter], you find some obscure thing, like what country has the longest coastline in Africa, and within seconds, he’s got the answer. He’s not cheating, he just knows his stuff! We made a trophy, and we called it the McCormick Cup.

All that time staring at maps is finally useful!

👨🏽‍💻 Why Naval Ravikant Thinks Remote Work is the Future

Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key player in recruiting and hiring infrastructure for startups):

“We’re going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and it’s not too far away. In fact, now’s the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. It’s going to be done through lengthy trials. It’s going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.”

🚙 Twelve Concepts in Autonomous Mobility

Jan Chipchase from Studio D posted these fun, creative, realistic, and sometimes scary speculations on what sorts of behavioral side effects could play out with the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. See also the follow on 15 more concepts.

The practice of what we currently call parking will obviously change when your vehicle is able to park and drive itself. Think of your vehicle autonomously cruising the neighbourhood to be washed, pick-up groceries and recharge its batteries whilst you’re off having lunch. What is the optimal elasticity of your autonomous vehicle to you? What are the kinds of neighbhourhoods it likes to drive around in when you’re not using it? This is an especially pertinent question, when a vehicle is considered a sensing platform — the technology to autonomously negotiate the city can collect rich data for other uses.

🎧 Apple Releasing New AirPods

While the batch of feature enhancements isn’t mind-blowing, I’m glad to see Apple continuing to evolve these. AirPods are the best product they’ve released since the iPhone. I use mine for hours every single day — far more than I ever used any previous headphones. I recently got one of these Qi wireless chargers for my office, so I’ll be glad to have the inductive charging for the AirPods, too. Of course the extra battery life will be a huge plus.

Email is seeing a resurgence in an age when everyone’s been crying that email is dead. The comeback is not so much as a tool for intra-office communication (though it’s still alive and well in most organizations, Slack has overtaken email in ours), but as a publishing medium.

Newsletters have become a popular means for connecting with readers, helping publishers (and especially independent writers) cut through the noise that pervades social media channels. The constant feed of non-stop, clickbait-ish content makes it hard to cut through that waterfall with deep analysis or thoughtful writing.

Blogs are still around, but since they require engaging readers deeply enough to get them to visit your site, it’s challenging to compete with Facebook and Twitter for the attention share.

I still prefer a combination of RSS feeds and Pinboard bookmarks for managing my own feeds (plus Twitter), but I also find some of the new email content folks are putting together to be a nice compromise from the traditional blog. Sort of the best of both worlds combining the longer form subscription to content like blogs + RSS give you with a direct approach to deliver 1 thing per day or week to a place you’ll always see: the email inbox.

Here’s a summary of email newsletters I’ve been enjoying, all of which I read consistently (otherwise I’d unsubscribe!):

• The Exponential View — Azeem Azhar on technology, business, trends, society. Full of interesting links and commentary.
• Stratechery ($) — The strategy and business of tech, by Ben Thompson. One of the best reads to keep up with the macro industry trends. Lots of original analysis on a variety of topics.
• Product Habits — Links about building products, marketing, and startups. Put together by Hiten Shah.
• Axios PM — Axios is doing some interesting things with the traditional news model. I use the Axios PM as a daily touchpoint on what’s happening in the wider world of news. Delivered in the afternoon each day.
• FT World News ($) — International perspective on the news from around the world.
• Daily Stoic — Ryan Holiday’s daily bite of stoicism. Always a good reminder to snap back to reality.
• AngelList Weekly — A nice weekly update on startup news.
• Cleaning the Glass ($) — One of my favorites, with deep analysis of basketball topics from Ben Falk, former analytics guy from the Sixers and Blazers.

These run the gamut; some are free, some I pay for personally, and some we have corporate subscriptions to.

It’s interesting to see these trends ebb and flow. Even as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook cross the decade mark, having been large, mature platforms for about that long, people are still figuring out how to make use of them on both sides — producers and consumers. Authors are rediscovering that email still provides one of the most predictable form factors for connecting directly with a reader, without having to go through gatekeepers.

🔌 Announcing 1.1.1.1: Privacy-First DNS

This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:

We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.

🛰 Opportunity is No More

The Mars rover Opportunity is now out of commission. This Twitter thread from Jacob Margolis goes through a timeline of what happened to the rover. It first landed and began exploring the Martian surface in 2004. The system exceeeded its intended planned operational lifespan by “14 years and 46 days”. An incredible feat of engineering.

🏛 Millennial Socialism

I don’t post much about politics here, preferring to keep most of that to myself. I did find this piece an interesting perspective on the rise of a particular flavor of socialist-oriented ideology, and the too-common notion that so much should be guided, directed, or outright owned by government. On the risk of regulatory capture vs the value of the market:

Bureaucracy at any level provides opportunities for special interests to capture influence. The purest delegation of power is to individuals in a free market.

An excellent talk from a16z’s Benedict Evans on what’s next for tech and the internet.

For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.

Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially work depending on what I’m trying to do.

I’m really enjoying it now that I’ve gotten a comfort level with navigating around and multitasking features. I find that the “one app at a time” nature of iOS helps me stay on track and focus on deeper tasks — things like writing documents, planning, and of course being able to sketch and diagram using the Pencil, which I do a ton of. I’ve liked Notability so far of the drawing apps I’ve tested for what I need.

One of the biggest things I had to figure out a solution for was being able to write and publish to this website efficiently. Since I use Jekyll and GitHub Pages under the hood, I hadn’t found a simple solution to manage the git repository and preview posts. I’ll go deeper on that workflow in a future post, because it’s a pretty comfortable setup (for me) that others might find useful.

Overall I’m liking working on iPad more and more. It gets easier as I accrue knowledge of tips, tricks, and other workflows.

As computing platforms get more complex and critical to daily life, maintaining secure usage gets more challenging.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s a known mantra in the product and IT space that security and usability are inversely proportional. That is, a gain in one is a loss in the other. This has long been visible in enterprise software that is perceived as annoying or frictional in the pursuit of security (password rotation every n days, can’t reuse, complexity requirements). It’s what gives employees a bad taste in their mouth about enterprise systems, among other things. That reduction in usability begets bad behavior on the part of users — the proverbial Post-It note on the monitor with the last 3 passwords in clear text.

Those of us that make software never want to compromise on usability, but us realists recognize the need for secure data and privacy. There are exciting developments lately that might be closing this gap.

Password managers like 1Password already have done a lot to maintain secure computer usage behavior by simplifying the “secure defaults” — primarily not reusing passwords across services and enabling realistic use of longer, random strings. Two-factor authentication adds a wrinkle in usability that (unlike many other auth wrinkles) affords a powerful layer of security, albeit with a cost. The two-factor support within 1Password makes it shockingly smooth to deal with, though. So much so that I enable two-factor auth on any service that offers it, without hesitation.

What got me thinking about this topic again was a specific new addition to the personal security workflow. I just got an iPhone XS; it’s my first experience with Face ID (which deserves a healthy dose of praise in its own right). But the real breakthrough is the integration of 1Password into the built-in Password Autofill facility in iOS 12.

Here’s a before and after example of signing into GitHub on my phone:

Before: Go to GitHub, see that I’m signed out, switch to 1Password, copy password, return to GitHub, paste credentials, tap sign in, go back to 1Password, copy 2FA code, go back and paste it in, success.

After: Go to GitHub, tap “Passwords” in browser, Face ID, pick account, it autofills, paste 2FA code, success.

This seems like trivial stuff, but given how many seconds/minutes of each day I spend doing this process, it’s a big deal. Before, making this process smoother would require a dent in its security. Now we get to have a friction-free process without the compromise.

Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. We’ve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 customers, healthy revenue, and a growing team expanding it to ever larger clients around the world. I thought I’d step back and recall its origins from a product management perspective.

We created Fulcrum to address a need we had in our business, and quickly realized its application to dozens of other markets with a slightly different color of the same issue: getting accurate field reporting from a deskless, mobile workforce back to a centralized hub for reporting and analysis. While we knew it wasn’t a brand new invention to create a data collection platform, we knew we could bring a novel solution combining our strengths, and that other existing tools on the market had fundamental holes we saw as essential to our own business. We had a few core ideas, all of which combined would give us a unique and powerful foundation we didn’t see elsewhere:

1. Use a mobile-first design approach — Too many products at the time still considered their mobile offerings afterthoughts (if they existed at all).
2. Make disconnected, offline use seamless to a mobile user — They shouldn’t have to fiddle. Way too many products in 2011 (and many still today) took the simpler engineering approach of building for always-connected environments. (requires #1)
3. Put location data at the core — Everything geolocated. (requires #1)
4. Enable business analysis with spatial relationships — Even though we’re geographers, most people don’t see the world through a geo lens, but should. (requires #3)
5. Make it cloud-centric — In 2011 desktop software was well on the way out, so we wanted an platform we could cloud host with APIs for everything. Creating from building block primitives let us horizontally scale on the infrastructure.

Regardless of the addressable market for this potential solution, we planned to invest and build it anyway. At the beginning, it was critical enough to our own business workflow to spend the money to improve our data products, delivery timelines, and team efficiency. But when looking outward to others, we had a simple hypothesis: if we feel these gaps are worth closing for ourselves, the fusion of these ideas will create a new way of connecting the field to the office seamlessly, while enhancing the strengths of each working context. Markets like utilities, construction, environmental services, oil and gas, and mining all suffer from a similar body of logistical and information management challenges we did.

Fulcrum wasn’t our first foray into software development, or even our first attempt to create our own toolset for mobile mapping. Previously we’d built a couple of applications: one never went to market, was completely internal-only, and one we did bring to market for a targeted industry (building and home inspections). Both petered out, but we took away revelations about how to do it better and apply what we’d done to a wider market. In early 2011 we went back to the whiteboard and conceptualized how to take what we’d learned the previous years and build something new, with the foundational approach above as our guidebook.

We started building in early spring, and launched in September 2011. It was free accounts only, didn’t have multi-user support, there was only a simple iOS client and no web UI for data management — suffice it to say it was early. But in my view this was essential to getting where we are today. We took our infant product to FOSS4G 2011 to show what we were working on to the early adopter crowd. Even with such an immature system we got great feedback. This was the beginning of learning a core competency you need to make good products, what I’d call “idea fusion”: the ability to aggregate feedback from users (external) and combine with your own ideas (internal) to create something unified and coherent. A product can’t become great without doing these things in concert.

I think it’s natural for creators to favor one path over the other — either falling into the trap of only building specifically what customers ask for, or creating based solely on their own vision in a vacuum with little guidance from customers on what pains actually look like. The key I’ve learned is to find a pleasant balance between the two. Unless you have razor sharp predictive capabilities and total knowledge of customer problems, you end up chasing ghosts without course correction based on iterative user feedback. Mapping your vision to reality is challenging to do, and it assumes your vision is perfectly clear.

On the other hand, waiting at the beck and call of your user to dictate exactly what to build works well in the early days when you’re looking for traction, but without an opinion about how the world should be, you likely won’t do anything revolutionary. Most customers view a problem with a narrow array of options to fix it, not because they’re uninventive, but because designing tools isn’t their mission or expertise. They’re on a path to solve a very specific problem, and the imagination space of how to make their life better is viewed through the lens of how they currently do it. Like the quote (maybe apocryphally) attributed to Henry Ford: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve asked for a faster horse.” In order to invent the car, you have to envision a new product completely unlike the one your customer is even asking for, sometimes even requiring other industry to build up around you at the same time. When automobiles first hit the road, an entire network of supporting infrastructure existed around draft animals, not machines.

We’ve tried to hold true to this philosophy of balance over the years as Fulcrum has matured. As our team grows, the challenge of reconciling requests from paying customers and our own vision for the future of work gets much harder. What constitutes a “big idea” gets even bigger, and the compulsion to treat near term customer pains becomes ever more attractive (because, if you’re doing things right, you have more of them, holding larger checks).

When I look back to the early ‘10s at the genesis of Fulcrum, it’s amazing to think about how far we’ve carried it, and how evolved the product is today. But while Fulcrum has advanced leaps and bounds, it also aligns remarkably closely with our original concept and hypotheses. Our mantra about the problem we’re solving has matured over 7 years, but hasn’t fundamentally changed in its roots.

💻 The Disappearing Computer

For his final weekly column of his long career, Walt Mossberg talks about what he calls “ambient computing”, the penetration of IoT, AR, VR, and computers throughout our lives:

I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought. Your whole home, office and car will be packed with these waiting computers and sensors. But they won’t be in your way, or perhaps even distinguishable as tech devices. This is ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all.

🚁 Drones Go to Work

Great piece from Chris Anderson on the prospects of the commercial drone space. He makes great points about the true success of the technology being its penetration into business applications:

Although it might surprise you, I hope the future of drones is boring. As the CEO of a drone company, I obviously stand to gain from the rise of drones, but I don’t see that happening if we are focused on the excitement of drones. The sign of a successful technology is not that it thrills but that it becomes essential and accepted, fading into the wallpaper of modernity. Electricity was once a magic trick, but now it is assumed. The internet is going the same way. My end goal is for drones to be thought of as just another unsexy industrial tool, like agricultural machinery or generators on construction sites — as obviously useful as they are unremarkable.

✅ Can Do vs. Must Do

Another good reminder from Fred Wilson on the importance of focus. He suggests setting no more than 3 “big efforts” in a year, the “must dos”. More than that is lying to yourself and losing steam on the ones you really care about:

But regardless of whether you have two, three, or four big efforts this year, you should test all of your initiatives agains the “must do” vs “can do” test. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I’ve written about the importance of strategy and saying no. Strategy isn’t saying no. It is figuring out what is the most important thing for your company and deciding to focus on it and say no to everything else.

A couple years ago I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, after moving almost exclusively to ebooks when the Kindle iPhone app launched with the App Store. I read constantly, and always digital books, so I thought I’d write up some thoughts on the Kindle versus its app-based counterparts like the Kindle apps, iBooks, and Google Books, all of which I’ve read a significant amount with. For I long time I resisted the Kindle hardware because I wasn’t interested in a reflective-only reading surface. The Paperwhite’s backlit screen and low cost made it easy for me to justify buying. I knew I’d use the heck out of it if I got one.

I had a brief stint with iBooks when Apple launched that back in 2010. At the time, the Kindle apps for iOS platforms were seriously lacking in handling the finer details of the reading experience. You couldn’t modify margins or typeset layout, iBooks had better font selection, highlighting and notetaking worked inconsistently, and the brightness controls were poor. But eventually the larger selection available on Kindle and Amazon’s continued feature development in their app brought me back.

Buying the Paperwhite was a great investment. The top reasons are it’s portability, backlit screen, and the battery life.

When I say “portability”, it’s not about comparison to the iPhone (obviously the ultimate in portable, always-with-you reading), but with physical books. Prior to the Kindle, I’d do probably 1/3 of my reading on paper, and that’s now dropped almost to zero¹. Even with the leather case I use, it’s so lightweight I can carry it everywhere, and I don’t need to bring paper books with me on trips or airplanes anymore. It’s light enough to be unnoticeable in a backpack, and even small enough to fit in some jacket pockets.

The backlit screen is great and gives the advantage of eInk combined with the ability to use in darkness. The best thing about that screen is the fidelity of brightness control you can get versus an iOS device. In full darkness you can tune down the backlight to nearly zero, still read in the dark and not disturb anyone else. With my iPad, even at the minimum brightness setting it can light up the room if it’s really dark.

The battery life on eInk devices is unbelievable. In two years I’ve probably charged the Kindle a dozen times total. When it’s in standby mode it uses effectively zero power, and even in use (if the backlight’s not turned up) the drain is minimal. I almost forget that it’s electronic at all. In a world where everything seems to need charging, it’s great to have some technology that doesn’t.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the beauty of accessing the massive library of books directly from the device. With a few taps I can have a new book purchased and downloaded, reading it in seconds. Using the iOS version for so long, I’ve missed out on this. Thanks to the Apple IAP policies and Amazon (justifiably) not wanting to share revenue with Apple for book sales, the app is only a reader; there’s no integrated buying experience. I just dealt with this by going out and buying titles through a browser session, but I didn’t realize the smoothness I was missing out on until I had it integrated with the Kindle.

Amazon’s long been an acquirer of other companies, but doesn’t have a great track record of integrations. They bought Audible and Goodreads long ago (2008 and 2013 respectively), both of which I’ve used for years. Only recently have they integrated any of that into the Kindle experience. On their iOS apps they launched a “narration” feature that’ll play back the audio in sync with the pages if you own audio and text versions (a little goofy, but at least they’re integrated). There aren’t many titles I own both audio and text versions of, but the ability to sync progress between the two formats is really nice. On the Goodreads front, the integration there on the Kindle is fantastic. I have access to my “want to read” list right on the home screen for quick access.

With so many devices and quirky pieces of technology, it’s nice to have something reliable and simple that does one job consistently well.