Ada on Startup Marketing (@adachen)

The Wilderness Downtown is a super impressive showcase of the capabilities of HTML5.

I recently finished reading Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, a fascinating book about the biological and cognitive development behind the simple act of reading. The initial reason to pick up the book was an equally interesting article read in The Atlantic during a plane trip: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘.

To summarize the ongoing debate, the idea is that Google is ruining our brains. The need to quickly process information bites from Wikipedia and Twitter is driving humanity into a state of ADHD where they simply cannot read an extended book. Why do you need to read a book when the answers are only a Google search away? A humorous example of this is Twilight 10x shorter and 100x more Honest.

In a society where communication is so fundamentally integral to success, the ability to comprehend and communicate via written language is crucial. In her book, Wolf rather neatly explains the premise that the ability to read does not come hard-wired into us, but instead stems from a combination of hard work and the amazing adaptability of our brains. After all, we’ve only evolved so far and our physiological equipment hasn’t changed for thousands of years.

The parallel that springs to mind is the difficult challenge of Internet literacy (aka “tech savviness” for some). It seems like instead, tech literacy should be treated as a new language, an adaptation to the way that we comprehend and process information. This extends not only to the way that we access knowledge — the adaptation to using certain interfaces — but also the ability to process and comprehend large amounts of it.

Have you ever seen an Internet-illiterate person try to use an app? Try handing a 50-year old man an iPhone, and see how much more quickly they understand dialogs, radio buttons and menu UI. Give the same phone to a 16-year old and comprehension seems nearly instantaneous.

Obviously, internet literacy by no means is an indicator of intelligence. Neither was literacy in the first place. We’ve all heard the stories of CEOs and professors stubbornly clinging to their executive assistants for All Things Online. The real implications of this idea, I think, is that Internet literacy has gone far beyond placing your wpm onto your resume. Instead, it is about having the sort of Scoble-esque brain that can read a firehose of information and content. Rather than bemoan the ability to deep read and comprehend War and Peace, we should place new emphasis on the ability to quickly absorb, process and refine ideas from a large number of data sources. The very trend that many of today’s intellectuals has become a critical element to success in the massive world of information.

You can probably get a good sense of your Internet literacy by:

• How often do you check your email and do you have a mobile phone?
• Do you use a service like Twitter and how often do you check it?
• How often do you use the search bar or keyboard shortcuts?
• How many feeds do you have in your Google reader?

We’ve spent the past two weeks trying to find a new home (which, by the way, will end with triumph tomorrow when drop off our signed lease) and the whole process has sucked. Apartment hunting is an antiquated process that hasn’t progressed much beyond moving classifieds online and for free.
Read the rest of this entry »

In largely user-generated communities, it’s always pretty impressive to see how quickly inappropriate behavior gets busted by the user community. In my latest housing search, I ran into one of those “too good to be true” sort of postings, and received the following message from the would-be scammer.  Pretty neat to note that the first alert I received was from the posting being flagged for removal by the Craigslist community. Read the rest of this entry »

To follow up my earlier post about my Apple MacBook cracking, I visited the store and it took “5 to 6 business days” for them to replace the case of my MacBook. But voila, I’m back in business!

Apple’s done a fantastic job of cultivating its clean image of virus-free dependability, but I’ve definitely had my fair annoyances this month with their products. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon’s plan plan to tackle student textbooks has met with plenty of skepticism. Is tackling college students a successful strategy? I did some digging back in my old files to see whether or not the Kindle would have made sense when I was in college not so long ago. I kept fairly good records of how much money I spent each semester in college. Here’s what I spent in one year: Read the rest of this entry »

Not even a year out of the M$ campus, and I’ve adapted to a new life in SF accompanied by the usual mix of geeky accoutrements. Along with the Twitter account and flirtations with new technology, I’ve also managed to acquire an assortment of Apple products including a brand new MacBook (which I’ve affectionately named “AdaBook”) to replace the old faithful IBM ThinkPad T40 and an iPhone.

A week into my new iPhone experience, all of my apps spontaneously stop working! Don’t get me wrong, I love the user experience of the iPhone – it’s unbeatable – but multiple hard reboots and logging in and out of the iTunes store later, I eventually got it to work again. A quick Google search showed that I’m really not alone.

The latest development this week is that my MacBook has started cracking! It’s been chipping away at three points in the case. Two right at the edge of the inner joint (under the Macbook monitor logo) and one at the right palm rest. Photos below:

My MacBook is very gently used. It spends most of the day sleeping on the living room coffee table, and has only traveled a handful of times. I am not a student and don’t lug it around anywhere. I’ll try taking it into the Apple store this weekend and will report back to you what they say.

I definitely enjoy Apple products, but given the issues that I’m having with my month-old iPhone and eight month old MacBook, we’re not off to the most auspicious start. Anyone else having issues?

This past week I was able to spend some time at the Flashforward conference, held here in San Francisco at the Nob Hill Masonic Center.  Flashforward is a conference and showcase for the Flash design and development community. By my rough count, it brought together together a crowd of about 600-800 artists.

Some thoughts on Flashforward:

There was an inspiring keynote on the first day by Miha Pogacnik, a concert violinist whose talk focused on drawing the analogy of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor to life. He threw out a few interesting thoughts: normality is the worst thing for you, and question everything. I enjoyed the talk quite a bit, and it reminded me of a TED talk by Benjamin Zander on music and passion

At one point on the first day, Keith Peters asked for the crowd to raise their hands if they came from a computer science background.  Crickets, and a few hands.  From art and design? By far the vast majority of the room. The people in the room were all very different from the standard developer crowd, with the majority coming from interactive agencies.

Some cools links: flashscene.org – links to interesting Flash design/art demos, and also some picks from the Film Festival finalists: Contrapunctus Variations, Launchball, ensemble, and Twang – winner of the people’s choice award.
The Flashforward Film Festival, an awards show in various categories of Flash development, had lots of stunning content. A great deal of the finalists were commercial, but there was also some interesting indie work too. Along with a few highlights above, you can view all of the finalists here. It’s amazing to see the work that people are building in Flash. This is a short video I took of the Gaming showcase.

I attended an interesting training today put on by the company Skills To Success.  The training was titled “Personal Power & Presence” and featured hands-on coaching on minor behavior adjustments each of us can do for more effective interactions.

The class featured a predator-partner-prey model.  A person can be all three in different interactions, but typically has clear tendencies to lean toward one or the other. It’s pretty easy to infer from the names what each of these is.  Predator – powerful and dominant, but at the cost of eroding relationships. Prey – nervous, submissive, likable and often talked over. Partners are in a happy place in between both commanding and the “kick me” sign.

Perhaps the most useful part of the class was breaking out into a group of 6 people, and being taped on a DVD while giving a speech. We did three rounds of taping: doing a 3 minute introduction; responding to nonsensical and difficult questions while owning the room and emenating confidence; and a longer session around a specific workplace issue.

What did I learn?  Well, I default to prey.  Deer in the headlights prey, all the way down to the dropped eyes, decreased volume and hesitant speech in the face of a challenging situation.

Top 5 actions for me to work on:

• The upward inflection which conveys uncertainty at the end of phrases.  There were many moments in which my coach caught me saying phrases as if they are questions. I say “Hello I’m Ada?” instead of “Hello. My name is Ada.”
• Dropping in qualifiers instead of making statements. “Perhaps the action we should take..” “I would maybe recommend…”
• The power of pauses between short, incisive sentences.
• I hold defensive body posture by clasping my hands in front of me.

The power of broad, sweeping arm movements which help illustrate a point.  Coordinating these movements to make sense relative to what is being said. It really provides a different perspective to see how other perceive you on video. I’d recommend everyone try to tape themselves, we can all stand to learn from this type of exercise. Another interesting exercise which we talked about but didn’t do is standing in a room full of people and shouting: I OWN THE ROOM!  And, quite literally, owning the room. Touching stuff, invading personal space, re-arranging furniture.

Ada

2 – Sonoma Coast (13)
Originally uploaded by adavark. I’m driving up the California, Oregon and (part of) the Washington coast! Impressively, I am logging on fairly often to post photos.

Check them out on my Flickr.