Category: Personal (Page 15 of 48)

Sure, I know we all equate July 4th with a nice 3 day weekend in the middle of the summer.  But I want to take 2 minutes to reflect on exactly what we are celebrating.  Now, I don’t know what really happened 200-300 years ago, but I’ll try to remember what my history teachers told me.  

Sometime in the 1600’s, we were all living in England.  And then some of our friends and neighbors decided they had had enough of religious oppression.  So they hopped on boats like the Mayflower and headed to the new “colonies” in America.  

Eventually, enough of us moved over here that we developed some sort of free market up and down the Eastern seaboard.  And we must have been doing pretty well developing new products, exporting new crops and creating a nice sustainable economy that didn’t require subsidies or loans.  Because the guys back in England said, “You guys are really showing success.  We need to raise taxes on you so we can spread that money around over here.”

Eventually, we got tired of a bunch of professional politicians and lifelong royalty-types telling us what to do.  We were sick of a government that reached out too far, who taxed us too much, and who got involved with things they had no expertise or knowledge about, passing arcane laws that made no sense.

So, as one big group we denounced our relationship with the oppressors.  We announced independence, and developed a loose government in which the colonies – now called states – would govern themselves.  The national government would pretty much be in charge of monitoring interstate commerce and running a national defense made up of all the state militias.  But at the core of the idea, was that we would govern ourselves in a manageable, state by state way.  We’d be responsible for our own welfare, and only rely on the federal government to arbitrate disputes and manage a defense – where if you attacked one of us, you attacked all of us.

Obviously times have changed and we’re in a more complex world now.  But every Independence Day, I like to reflect back and remember what our whole country was based on.  I wonder how many ways we’ve deviated from the original plan, and whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Lazy Friday?  Great video to watch over coffee. Thanks New Yorker.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

This is not meant to be a definitive review of iPhone Photo Apps.  I’m not anywhere near qualified for that kind of analysis.  But, I’ve downloaded quite a few, and here are a few I use pretty regularly to post photos up to my TumbleBlog at AndyBoyer.Tumblr.com.

Also, I’m going to assume you already have tried, or regularly use Instagram and Hipstamatic.  

Photosynth

1) Photosynth: It’s not the easiest tool to use super effectively, and tends to be pretty buggy, but when it works it’s a pretty cool way to take a panoramic shot.  Great for the top of moutnains, stadiums, or places where you just want to capture a 30,000 foot of your surroundings. The issue is that it is hard to line up the string of photos in a way that creates the perfect stitch.  But, I’m sure with a little more diligence, you can pull it off better than I do.  (Also, make sure you are standing next to someone who isn’t going to move around a lot and get their head in the shot.)

2) Diptic: Easy way to quickly stitch a few photos together into one “frame.”  Do the edits right on your phone, and choose from about 10-20 layout options.  Then, upload that picture to your Facebook pge or what not.

3) Comic Touch Lite: Fun little free version of an app that simply ads comic bubbles to the pic.  Nothing revolutionary here, but super simple to use and fun at bbq’s and such.

4) Camera Plus: I like playing with this, and I think it provides slightly better photos.  Not 100% sold though.  (No example)

5) 100 Cameras in One: Basically it’s Hipstamiatic with a different style interface.  Take pics, run them through a filter, see the result.

Things I’m playing with and haven’t decided upon yet.  (ie, saving them for a future blog post.)

 PicPlz, SlowShutter, ToonPaint, MillColour, Phototreats, Retro Camera, Labelbox, LiveFX

Also:

I’ve already written about publishing tools like Zapd and Color, so I left them out of this post.

Let me know if you have any photo editing tools that you are using every day.

I’ve said it every May since 2007 – judging the Investment Round of the UW Business Plan Competition is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s exciting to absorb the energy and inspiration from all of these young entrepreneurs and idea generators.  Sure, most of the 38 “companies” on display won’t ever go past this day, but everyone who takes part surely takes something they learned, something they discovered, or an idea they came up with into future companies.

Enough hyperbole – Let’s talk about what I saw.

Now, the problem for me every year is that there are always these awesome engineering and medical companies that I just don’t get.  A UW med student will tell me something like, “When you combine this UW technology with this UW technology, you get a compound that completely eliminates both cancer and male pattern baldness, AND adds 4 inches to your vertical leap. We would just need 4 years and $50 million to make it work.” And since I don’t understand anything about biology, I would invest in them.  Or, they’ll show me a prototype of a jet pack or invisibility cloak.  The idea sounds cool and reasonable, and I say, “I want one of those.”  Only later do I learn why the technology is impossible.

So this year – and I apologize to the science guys – but I really only visited the companies that I thought I would really understand well enough to ask hard questions of.  And without commenting on who I through my investment “dollars” at, here are some of the ideas I liked and people I liked talking to.

1) Seattleite Magazine – I’ll mention them first, only because I met founder Jane Yuan a few months back and saw an early version of their business plan.  There could be a market for this kind of online pub in Seattle.  It’s a fun read, with lots of good pics of Seattle people and places.

2) Breadcrumb – The reverse of FourSquare, Breadcrumb notifies a person’s emergency contacts in the event that they DON’T check in when expected, dramatically improving search and rescue efforts for missing or injured people.  Perfect for hikers, campers, mountain climbers, fisherman, etc… whose parents worry about them.

3) Online Pay Station – I really root for these guys.  Think old school market meets unlimited product options. This is a company for African residents – enabling people without bank accounts or credit cards make online orders via companies like Amazon.com.  They pay Online Pay Station (OPS) cash at an OPS Internet Cafe, OPS makes a bulk buy to save on shipping, receives the order, then warehouses the merchandise until the buyer picks it up.  

4) PotaVida – Did you know that you can put dirty water in a plastic bottle, stick it in the sun, and then the sun will kill all the really nasty, dangerous organisms in the water in 6 hours or so?  I didn’t.  The problem is, you don’t *really* know when the water is clean.  PotaVida makes a little LED based contraption that tells you when the water is safe.  Go to a disaster relief location, put 100 bottles on a roof at once, but a PotaVida device on one of them, and suddenly you know when the water is safe to hand out.

5) Punchkeeper – Take all of the loyalty cards that you have to carry around, and put them in one app on your mobile phone.  Snap a pic of a QR code to get credit.  That simple.

6) Sky Fu – They call it “Self Defense for the Social Web.”  I summarize it as Radian6 for small businesses who need to monitor Yelp, Trip Advisor and the like.  

7) Pterofin – Designs and manufactures innovative wind energy devices for residential and commercial use.  I don’t get why it works better than regular turbine, but they say it does, so why not beleive them.

8) TripBox – Makes travel planning easier.  Cool demo.  Hard to describe. Maybe Widget based travel planning.

9) Digital Menu – Almost makes too much sense to work.  Rather than spending money printing out paper based menus every day, restaurants just go to this site, pick from the templates, update the menu, and Digital Menu turns it into a mobile or tablet based menu that can be shared online, across social channels, and that you can even view at the restaurant.

10) Soothie Suckers –  Kids don’t want to take herbal medicine.  So the solution – put it in a popsicle.  That’s the theory here.  For what it is worth, the popsicle tastes good.

There were a lot more great companies on display – 28 more in fact.  But that would make the blog 100 pages long.  Here’s the list of the companies that made the next round.  But congrats to everyone who made it from the initial 100+ down to this final 38.

For all the heat Seattle gets for – well the lack of heat – one thing that often goes overlooked is the amount of stuff to do here.  It’s really easy to fall into the trap of focusing on one activity.  We have tons of great venues for watching college and professional sports.  Too many music venues to count.  A vibrant arts and theater community.  And enough trails, likes and mountains for even the most adventurous explorer.  But we also have this educational environment that has a tendency to put amazingly inspirational people on stage.  Sometimes these events try to sneak by you, so you have to pay attention.

In fact, the other day I tried to run through a list of people I have either had the chance to listen to or actually talk with over the last few years.  I’ve been in a crowd listening to Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Colin Powell, Steve Wozniak and Carol Bartz, and actually have been able to chat with or work for Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, Rob Glaser, Richard Tait, Maria Cantwell, Geoffrey Moore, and a host of technology whiz kids like Rich Barton, Nick and Adrian Hanauer, and TA McCann.  I don’t know if you can do that everywhere in the country.

Last Friday, I added to my list, giving up my Marines tickets to spend a few hours listening to Paul Allen, who was being interviewed at Town Hall by Geekwire’s Todd Bishop.

I’m not going to lie.  Part of me was hoping that Allen would stand up and say, “You know what.  David Stern is a $%#&ing a$$.  I don’t care how much he fines me.  I could buy the whole league in cash if I wanted.”

Now of course that didn’t happen, and I didn’t expect it to.  The irony is, I don’t think I can remember a specific thing from any of those speakers, and I doubt there’s anything from Allen’s talk that I’ll take to my grave.  But there were some things about his attitude and ways he tackles problems that I’ll probably walk away with.  Examples…

In two seperate questions from the audience, he was subtly being criticized for not solving the world’s energy prolem or the country’s education issues.  He didn’t come out and say, “Oil Dependency and Teacher’s Unions” but he made it clear that there were external issues that made it impossible to solve these problems right now.  He basically said that throwing blind money at these problems was a waste – and why waste money if the problem can’t be solved without major changes.

Allen also had a subtle shot at all the people who stopped his Seattle Commons project.  Years ago I used this blog as a forum to blast everyone who brought the Seattle Commons to its knees because they didn’t want public funds to go to building a giant central park that might improve the real estate value of the land around it (which was owned by Allen.)  Now, since Allen owned all the land that he was going to donate for the park anyway, when the people voted down the park, he had no choice but to build on it.  So now we have the super cool South Lake Union business district that houses Amazon, MSFT and more.  And ironically, he made a boat load more money on it than had it just been a big greenspace.  It was interesting that he brought up that he was almost forced to make money on that real estate deal since Seattle wouldn’t accept his land for free.

There is some irony in the fact that so many people who attended Town Hall to see Allen, might be characterized as “anti-business.” Some were the kind of famous Seattleites who pay their mortgage from the money they made from Microsoft stock splitting 20 times, but also sent flame emails to politicians trying to stop the building of Qwest, Safeco or a new Key Arena. 

I guess the moral of this meandering blog post is that you really need to pay attention in Seattle.  There are Town Hall events like Paul Allen all the time, and the UW hosts a ton of similarly impressive luminaries.  They may not change your life, but we all should try to collect info from smart people that don’t always think like we do.  Different perspectives can be valuable, even if they dont change your mind.