One of my favorite talk at TED in recent years was Sir. Ken Robinson’s talk during TED 2006 on how our education system is many times failing to equip children with the tools they need for creativity.
This was particularly relevant to me since I was one of those children who was most often getting sent to the principals office. After years of “Could do great if he applied himself” I left school when I was 15 and didn’t return until I was 17. By the time I matured a bit I was able to focus myself and did fairly well until I left high school just shy of graduating to start my first company.
The original TED talk became quite a phenomena online and is still one of the most popular TED talks I hear people talk about.
Here is the original talk from TED 2006 by Sir. Ken Robinson.
At TED last year I had the opportunity to speak with Ken and ask him about his work, the affect of his TED talks video popularity and some of the work he is doing to help improve the education system. Here is the video. (The video quality is a bit poor due to a lousy camera I’ve since gotten rid of)
12:45 On my way to a spa with my girlfriend and a nice evening dinner with friends in cottage country. #
13:06 Can you build a Valley ecosystem out of the Valley? Good post by Ben Yoskovitz tinyurl.com/2pet6q#
13:07 I got quoted in an article on networking with Facebook & Linkedin. Good thing my real quote didn’t make it in tinyurl.com/376q8k#
13:09 Quote was "While you can do business in a nightclub there is a reason people still work @ offices. re: Context of Facebook vs. LinkedIn" #
13:16 Off to cottage country. A nice evening away from the computer is overdue. #
I saw the story on VentureBeat about local entrepreneur Rocky Mirza and his company Weblo raising $3.3 million from VantagePoint Venture partners.
I didn’t get Weblo at first, but I had a chance to meet with Rocky a couple of months ago and I was surprised at how much the concept makes sense. Rocky’s a great local serial entrepreneur with a number of succesfull web companies to his credit.
Our networks are becoming social playgrounds. When adults play, they often like to play with real toys and real money. Consider Weblo a grown up version of Monopoly built around real properties. I think there is an cool alternate reality gaming component to this service. There is a fictional story, that involves real world elements and creates interactions and play among its members. The play may be no more legitimate then someone making money selling virtual goods in any number of the social worlds getting attention, but as long as people want to play with others the community will create the economy.
Congratulations to both Rocky and the team at VantagePoint Venture Partners.
One of my favorite highlights of TED are the conversations with the incredible people who attend. David Hornik, who before becoming VC extrodinaire and gracing the pages of Business 2.0 (check your current issue) was my lawyer and mentor when I first went to the Valley, organizes a great dinner party every year with his partners at August Capital.
Here are some fun highlights from last night’s dinner and various tidbits of conversations I’ve been having with various friends both old and new.
My old friend author and journalist Steven Levy (who wrote about my last company in his book Crypto) entertained us with the story how he found Einstein’s brain as a young reporter. Hilarious.
Loic and I had a great laugh about blogstorms. Loic is becoming the accidental king of blogstorms and he has the best sense of humor about the some of the blowback that comes from living publicly in the blog world. Loic just makes me laugh.
Jeff Clavier (who invested $15 million in Zero-Knowledge when he was at Reuters Venture Capital) and I laughed about all sorts of fun stuff. We spoke about his great strings of investments including Dogster and how to build communities online. Jeff also graces the pages of Buisness 2.0 (along with Reid, David and other Web 2.0 angels) and he’s giving me some tips on angel investing
Reid Hoffman is one of the most generous entrepreneurs, angel investors and one of the most brilliant product strategistists there are in the social media space. We laughed about who is the “Sexiest Angel Investor” in the valley. I won’t tell you what I think, but if you know Reid ask him about my theory on who the sexiest angel investor is. Reid also has the best stories of interesting business proposals he gets. Sometimes they extend beyond business proposals
John Doerr and I got caught up yesterday. He gave the most compelling TED presentation on the need to address climate collapse and hosted an incredible breakfast meeting to help instigate and promote postive action for the environment. He is helping Ron Dembo and I with a new project involving the environment that I’m involved with. John is an incredible sales person and a man of action. When he talks about change, it is with conviction and the power of action which gives him credibility that few people enjoy.
This is just an update. When I have time I’ll post the video interviews I did with my childhood hero James Randi, or last years TED talk superstar hit Sir Ken Robinson.
Two different Microsoft employees just showcased some new research coming from Microsoft including Virtual Earth with rich 3D models with hi-res photo’s to help build richer textured models, Photosynth and their Seadragon projects.
This stuff is groundbreaking and visually stunning. They are showed a Flickr mash up that grabbed all pictures on Flickr for the Notre-Damn catherderal and automatically mapped it to a digital model with point of view references to create a collaborative photo mash-up of the building by analyzing point of view and pasting the right pictures to the proper part of the 3-D model.
Absolutely phenomonal stuff. Any pictures you share on the Internet (via Flickr) could start to be linked together and applied on a rich digital reference model of the earth.
I’m glad to see Microsoft sending out some ambassadors who are showing how some of the billions they spent on R&D is being put to good use. Both employees got a warm reception and were funny and self effacing about Microsoft presenting during the Simplicity session at TED.
It will be an interesting couple of years to see how this rolls out.
It is my firm believe that when we begin to visualize the earth as it really is, we will begin to see just how small and fragile this planet is. Perhaps we will being to see how we are all enjoying or suffering the same human condition.
Once this happens maybe the other 6 billion people on the planet will be seen more as neighbours carpooling into the future with us, rather than in the “Us vs. Them” mentality that dominates our cultural egoism in the West.
Perhaps where we are born will no longer dictate our life span or the chance for freedom and happiness.
I just watched a great presentation by Jonathan Harris at TED 2007, where he spoke about how the power of stories to unify the human experience.
While many people look for differences to define our uniqueness (Difference in gender, religion, race, class, wealth etc.) his project We Feel Fine scans the blog world to show how the world can be unified by our common feelings and the stories we tell.
This is an incredible demonstration of the power visualization and storytelling to change the world.
Here are the some of the feelings that he showed that his We Feel Fine project has indexed,
I feel invisible to you.
I feel so much of my dead father in me, I don’t think there is room for me.
I feel I need to be in a small red neck town to appear beautiful.
Check out We Feel Fine and look at how the world is feeling.
He pointed out that the reciprocity that comes from the ever expanding shared human experiences is creating new standards for behaviour. These new standards for behaviour are changing our moral consideration through mass adoption of empathy.
These concepts are at the heart of what we are working on with our new project, and in fact it was Robert’s speech where he called for a new moral revolution that was one of the tipping point moments in my thinking of Project Ojibwe. It was shortly thereafter that Alex and I were talking about our ideas for how we could help usher in an age of shared human experiences that uplift and improve the world.
Valentine’s Day is approaching, and I have to say that I’ve always considered myself a bit of a romantic. This was a great year for my partner Kelly and I so I wanted to come up with something really great for Valentines this year.
I’m nursing a bad cold, so my Saturday morning was going to be spent catching up with my newsfeeds, finishing one of my many draft posts I’m itching to get out, and coming up with something special for Valentines for Kelly. If I had time I was going to to upgrade one of my machines to the new Office 2007 and Vista while I was reading news on Google Reader.
Instead I had my heart broken by Microsoft, fell in love with Stormhoek and Hugh MacLeod’s sense of humor and found the perfect Valentine gift for my girlfriend in the process.
Microsoft Breaks my Heart with a Silenced Paperclip Shot Not Heard Round the World
It happens quite often as I scan hundreds of news feeds that a few disparate posts all of a sudden come together and hit me in the head with an insight for a post. This time, it was my heart.
I had a passing thought about how stupid it was that Microsoft quietly killed Clippy by passing it off to UI coherency rather than acknowledging loudly it was most likely the most hated innovation in user interfaces. Almost every Microsoft employee I know hates the Clippy and has for years and everyone knows that users hate the Clippy. Microsoft was ignoring users and their own employees while defending the Clippy back when Office 2003 came out. While it’s great they have cleaned UI for Office 2007, the answers about Clippy’s death were arrogant by not saying to users “We heard you loud and clear and agree with you”.
For all the work Scoble and other great Microsoft bloggers have done, I was a little saddened that no one thought to just admit that Clippy was a condescending little shit pimping for a complicated user interface that made users feel stupid when they went to look for help.
I’m the first to admit that I love Office and am a serious power user. I use it every day and am incredibly productive with the suite. I have spreadsheet models that are too complicated for Google Spreadsheets (as of now) and I have more plug-ins running to pimp up my experience then most users. Despite some small experiments I’m doing with online office suites for collaboration with various projects, I’m generally a happy Office fan. I am looking forward to testing the new Office 2007 upgrade which I’ve been hearing great things about.
I passed it by without further thought, thinking that I have to get around to upgrading to Office 2007.
It would take a bit of time to realize what had just occurred.
Hugh Seduces me with Big Love
So it was an hour later while browsing my feeds from Gaping Void that my plans for the day where thrown for a loop.
The Hughtrain Manifesto plays a role in how I look at my angel investments, the projects I get involved with and is a central theme to my two current startups. It contains many insights into how to succeed in social media and how communities of change can be formed.
I knew from his blog that Hugh does some marketing work with a wine company Stormhoek - but since I stopped drinking last year (I’m getting healthy for my various startup projects - I’ve lost 85 lbs. since May 2006) and am not the type of wine collector to import wine into Canada, I never really explored Stormhoek further and was happy to enjoy his cartoons & blogging conversations.
So when I ran through my feeds and start to see the series of new video’s he is doing for Stormhoek leading up to Valentines my morning was lost in ensuing entertainment and this blog post that he inspired.
As you can see, Hugh has put himself out there in a hilariously naked conversation. He is inviting us to laugh with him, and share his journey. His heart isn’t just on his sleeve, it’s on his product and part of his story and I immediately wanted to show Kelly knowing that she is going to enjoy these.
Humor and love go hand in hand. When you can share your humor with someone it builds a strong bond if it’s done in an authentic way.
It was this comment from Hugh recent post that brought the pieces together,
Part of love is taking risk, being vulnerable and putting yourself out there for someone else and leaving your own sense of self importance aside.
The disparity between Microsoft’s Clippy approach and Hugh’s Global Microbrand approach to marketing caused my heart to sadden.
By experimenting with funny videos Hugh entertained me for awhile, and caused me to purchase a bunch of Stormhoek swag for Kelly and lithographs for my office. I can’t find anywhere where he is selling a good lithograph copy of my favorite Hughtrain image (which is my investment philosophy) but the Stormhoek ones are great for our the office wall at Project Ojibwe.
I ended up spending the morning checking out Stormhoek learning more about how they are building their microbrand. The entire time I was increasingly getting frustrated about Microsoft’s lack of humor, imagination and the wasted opportunity to engage and entertain me that they passed up.
Microsoft’s Marketing Muscle Mangles My Heart
Hugh’s microbrand marketing with simple authentic humor and love had me engaged and spending a couple hundred bucks on swag. Microsoft’s lack of humor or creativity in marketing Office 2007 or Vista ended up bothering me, and made me dislike them for not even trying to show they listened to users and have a sense of humor.
Amid Microsoft’s marketing muscle being flexed for Vista and it’s $500 million dollars quickly resulting in Vista everywhere marketing (Including a increasingly annoying number of interstial web ads that are annoying me across the web) we have Microsoft bungling so many opportunities to generate good will.
Bill’s quick exit from the set of The Daily Show aside, he has not been doing Vista or Microsoft any favors with his recent performance. Contrast this with his alter-ego, Mr. Jobs, who even in the face of controversy surrounding the Apple options backdating scandal can get up on stage and wow his employees, his customers and the technology community at-large. Steve is a rock star. Bill looks as if he’s been living under a rock. Check out some of his answers in a February 1st interview with Steven Levy of Newsweek:
NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch? Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”
******************** You also talk about improved security in Vista.
Yes, although security is a [complicated concept]. You’re [referring to] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we’ve got [a fix] before there is any exploit. So it’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing. We made it way harder for guys to do exploits. The number [of violations] will be way less because we’ve done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn’t done any of those things.
******************** Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.
How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—
That’s for my customers to decide.
Are you kidding me? Bill sounds a little like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and that he is getting ready to boil Steve Jobs’ bunny. First off, Bill, after having spend an amount exceeding the GDP of several sovereign nations - $500 million - to launch Vista, don’t you think you could have spent even a little of that on media training? THAT is your elevator pitch? Sorry, Bill, but you’re not getting the VC funding you desire. You’re not even getting out of the elevator. Your answer on security: poor. Your paranoia and irritation at Apple’s successful branding and image-making? Nauseating. You’re the richest guy in the world. You do lots of great things with your money. You’re a brilliant man. The Apple threat and a changing world is making you become unhinged. Do something about this. Fast. For your shareholders sake. Please.
I couldn’t agree more. I respect Bill a great deal for the work he is doing with his foundation and think he’s an incredibly intelligent person - but his lack of vulnerability (and some media training) is hurting Microsoft.
I immediately was struck with what a wasted opportunity the death of Clippy was for Microsoft. If I were a marketing manager at Microsoft I would have gotten $250k to sponsor a prize pool for user submitted animations, videos and mockumentaries about the death of the Clippy. Eulogies to this much hated user innovation would be hilarious.
Allow users to submit videos and split the prize money with a charity of their choice. Give the grand prize to the best video that shows the Office 2007 Ribbon User Interface taking the rightful place from Clippy and leave the rest in a prize pool for various categories like Apple vs. Clippy, Tux vs. Clippy, or How a Ninja would Kill Clippy or any other funny ideas. Include special prizes for Microsoft employees or ex-employees to submit videos. Invite Google and Apple employees to join in on the fun.
Proudly admit on Daily Show and your Vista media tours that you are listening to users and show some self depreciating humor as you showcase the funniest user videos about the death of Clippy. Leverage the fact that you HAVE LISTENED TO USERS and gotten rid of an annoying pest. Hire a few joke writers for Bill and get the online community laughing with you.
Microsoft, please let us know you made a huge mistake that took 10 years to correct and publicly bury Clippy’s annoying head in a mass of funny, community generated laughs at your own expense. It’s not the death of Clippy, but rather the lost opportunity to be authentic with your users that hurts me.
With a few of the generally positive reviews of some of the features of Vista and Office 2007 you could milk a fun challenge like this for plenty of positive press and good laughs to support some of your media spending. You could engage the community instead of having us all blog about how weak your marketing is. Move the discussion away from Apple’s funny pokes at you, to your own confident self effacing pokes at yourself.
Make it easy for me to like you. I’ve worked with some of great people in Redmond including a lot of the senior executive team. There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft and say what you will about them, they work hard to release good products. They may not be cool, but the do run a large percentage of the worlds computers for more reasons then they generally get credit for.
I’ve also bitten into enough worms in my long history with Apple (Can anyone say Newton?) that I’m not a religious fan one way or another. I don’t view Apple ads as telling me I’m an ‘dullard’ for using Windows. I view them as funny because they all have an element of truth. Most people in Redmond know this. Bill knows this. We all knows this. That’s why they work and people like them.
I don’t need Bill analyzing the factual basis of the parody. I need to see him joining in and laughing harder at himself to make me like him and his company on an emotional level.
Unfortunately even when I go to find this video to show off a case where Microsoft laughed at itself I can only find a fan copy on YouTube. I know Google owns it, and Windows Media Player is nowhere to be found, but your customers look for video on YouTube and you should get any video that helps your image up there ASAP. Don’t just leave fan versions, it shows you don’t love me.
Hell any decent creativity on how to leverage Bill being on the Daily Show could have included him showing the dance scene from the end with him and John Heder on a Vista machine. Bloggers everywhere would have played the clip and laughed with Microsoft. (Comedy Central’s removal of clips from YouTube makes it hard for me to compare, but I’m sure there have been more views of his mishap on the Daily Show then the 160k views of the Napoleon Dynamite clip on YouTube)
I’m a big fan of my Tablet PC which I’ve had for 2yrs (until it’s graphics card went kaput right in the middle of writing this blog post - it’s on it’s way to Toshiba to be repaired and I spent Sunday trying to mount my hard drive in VMWare on another machine to access all my stuff easily - Arrgh…), and I also enjoy the Macintosh computers and Apple devices I have. I have 7 computers between my office and my home. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Microsoft software licenses throughout my career, at my various companies and at home. Yes I am now using open source for all my development projects - but I am still using your software and tools happily in many places and probably will for years to come.
Why do you make it so hard for me to defend your brand?
A Valentine Gift Emerges - I will work for Love
Instead of upgrading to Vista or Office 2007 I spent the day writing this blog post and thinking about the differences between big and small marketing. Authentic and mass marketing. Hugh’s gift of humor and Microsoft’s annoying blunders.
Bloggers work for love in most cases and that is what caused me to spend my day working on this instead of upgrading. Love. I realized what Hugh’s lesson and Microsoft’s failure to engage me could teach me and I realized how to help someone I love.
Amidst writing this blog post, an idea for a gift for Kelly emerged (in addition to the stuff I bought her at Stormhoek Swag and the mandatory chocolate).
My girlfriend is a massage therapist and does organic body & skin treatments. She has a small business and has been working really hard lately doing promotional brochures, coupons and trying to build her clientele.
She is eager for my help in teaching her how to use the Internet to market herself better but I end up not always finding the time beyond just helping her writing a few brochures. She tries her best (and has done a great job) learning desktop publishing tools and wants my help to be able to market online better, but she doesn’t want to bother me given how busy she knows I am. (She hates to bother me with her small business when I’m busy with the ‘big’ family businesses - but that doesn’t make her work or business not important to both of us).
So for Valentines this year, thanks to Hugh’s inspiration I am giving her a book of coupons I created for lessons on online marketing and helping her build her own little global microbrand. I’ve included items like,
How to set up and create an email newsletter for your clients
How to use Google Reader and Technorati to track content and industry news for your customers and networking
How to use Meetup and Upcoming to organize informational and promotional educational events
How to setup a database of her customer visits with email reminders and CRM systems
and of course….if and when she would like how to setup a blog and an intro course to blogging.
This is going to take some time out of my schedule, but it’s quality time that I’m happy to spend with Kelly and will be the best Valentine gift that I could give her. [Personal Note: Happy Valentines Day Baby - I didn't want to wait until Valentines to post this, and she reads my blog, so I'll have to add some surprise element for this week]
So now Microsoft may have to wait a bit longer for me to upgrade and play with their new toys.
Other people who love me more are competing with you for my time, and I’m sorry to say that you just don’t know how to say I love you - so for now I bid you adieu….
We wanted to do something unique for the holidays, that reflects the spirit of giving and community.
So to support our own project, the Million Dollar Blog Post which is part of our Gifter.Org series of social experiments, we have made the following donations to charity. We gave each of our team members $500 to donate to the charity of their choice.
Here are our donations from our team. Total Donations $2,500 - Wishes available for our friends and supporters 2,500.
Please enjoy your wish and spread the word. We wish you the best for the holiday season.
Since 1958, Project HOPE has worked to make health care available for people around the globe – especially children. It’s in our name: Health Opportunities for People Everywhere. You may remember our hospital ship that traveled the world. Today our work includes educating health professionals and volunteers, providing medicines and supplies, strengthening health facilities, training community health workers, and fighting communicable diseases such as TB and AIDS.
Started in rural Zimbabwe in 1993 by Anne Cotton, CAMFED now has programs in Zambia Ghana and Tanzania and in 2005 alone, provided almost 250,000 rural girls with educational support.
What I like most about CAMFED is that it has been setup so that girls who have been assisted by the program become part of an support network for the girls currently in the program. Not only is the system self-reinforcing but it’s also extremely efficient (their direct charitable expenditure is over 90%). Oh, and my mum is the chairperson of CAMFED’s International Board
CAMFED was just chosen by The Financial Times (UK) as it’s Seasonal Appeal and in 2003 was named International Aid and Development Charity of the Year. You can find out more about what CAMFED does on their website.
The goal of the Wikimedia foundation is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.
In addition to the multilingual general encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Foundation manages a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus named Wiktionary, an encyclopedia of quotations named Wikiquote, a repository of source texts in any language named Wikisource, and a collection of e-book texts for students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks. Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children.
The continued growth of each of the Wikimedia projects is dependent mostly on donations but the Wikimedia Foundation tries to increase its revenue by finding alternative means of funding such as grants and sponsorship.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) with a vision to bring a free and accurate encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. This includes people who currently do not have electricity, computers, Internet access, or even clean drinking water. All proceeds from donations, as with all proceeds from all Foundation fundraisers, are fully dedicated to that charitable purpose.
The Jimmy Fund started in 1948 when the Variety Club of New England (now the Variety Children’s Charity of New England) and the Boston Braves baseball team joined forces to help a 12-year-old cancer patient dubbed “Jimmy.” On a national radio broadcast, millions heard the boy visit with his heroes from the Braves as they stood by his hospital bed. Contributions poured in from people everywhere, launching an effort that continues to bring hope to thousands of children and adults facing cancer throughout the world.
Since its founding in 1948, the Jimmy Fund has supported the fight against cancer in children and adults at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, helping to raise the chances of survival for cancer patients around the world.
Join this more than 50-year tradition of support by making a gift to the Jimmy Fund.
The south of Uganda has been suffering from the highest HIV infection rate in the world. Parents die of AIDS, just when their children need them most. An extended family can be their new home. Fortunately there is enough food in this farming district. But who will pay their school fees, provide medical aid and help them grow up? That is where ICCF Holland helps in the hope that they will be able to take care of themselves, and their children, in the long run.
ICCF stands for International Child Care Fund. This is a small foundation that was started by a few enthusiastic people who visited the Kibaale Children’s Centre (KCC). They worked there to help improve the centre, and got to know the people there and experienced the help they are giving to the needy children. After returning home, they realized that they could help KCC by starting ICCF Holland.
ICCF Holland is a foundation with very low overhead, because all work is done by volunteers. 99.5 percent of the donated money was sent to the project in Uganda in 2005.
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