A recent fall resulting in a fractured collar bone reminded me how fragile we are. We literally don’t know what we have until we lose it. We tend to take mobility for granted; having it taken away turns our world into a living hell. Losing your ability to perform basic daily functions for a few weeks is a priceless reminder of how crucial it is to be fit and healthy.

In this digital age we seem to think that all we need to be able to do is read, watch, listen, type or swipe. These allow us to consume information, shop, share, and be entertained. To create products, companies, campaigns, and collaborations. Technology became is so accessible in recent years that it is, in fact, possible to live productive lives lying in bed. However, if you are in too much pain to think straight you are miserable no matter how cyber-capable you are.

The same technologies lead us to believe that we don’t need any other people and can rule the world from our iPad while lying in our iBed. This works as long as your body is functioning. If you need somebody to help your get out of bed and carry you to the bathroom, it changes your perspective on life. Robotics technology is nowhere near the point where we can rely on it for help and support.

Reflecting on this short period of disability, it was a great learning opportunity. I’m grateful I don’t have to endure the mental and physical strife of being permanently  handicapped; I can only imagine what that must be like. This ordeal was an excellent reminder of what I have and what I must preserve and develop. If it wasn’t for that careless slip down the stairs I might have never realized how lucky I am.

“Risk more than others think is safe.
Care more than others think is wise.
Dream more than others think is practical.
Expect more than others think is possible.”

I love this quote attributed to a West Point cadet. I think Steve Jobs would have agreed with every word, but I couldn’t be sure about the “care more” part until I read the obituary Eric Schmidt’s wrote, where he quotes Jobs as saying “It’s your heart running around outside your body” when referring to his children. I often feel the same as a parent, but he stated it so elegantly. This, in my view, completes him image as the ultimate embodiment of this quote, which everyone in the tech field and beyond should strive to fulfill.

For many of years, bookstores and libraries played a significant role in the lives of many people including yours truly. We even have a special word for them: “bookstore” (one word) as opposed “barber shop” or “shoe store”. Due to our increasing reliance on electronic media, bookstores are rapidly disappearing. Most small ones are already gone, and larger ones are gradually following suit.

So, what’s next? Where will we browse through books? How will we get a sense of what’s interesting, and more importantly - how will we get that “bookshelf level” breadth of view that seems to only be possible in a bookstore? Electronic books answer these questions through searching, filtering, and viewing recommendation. The technology works seamlessly on the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-readers, and I believe the written word has a great future indeed.

Before paper books vanish from the face of the earth, though, someone has to solve the following problems:

Book lending: Libraries are evolving to feature more internet stations and such, but how will a library look like without printed books? Like a coffee shop? Indeed, some libraries have opened coffee shops to lure visitors. Still, it’s not clear how e-books will support lending and borrowing.

Used books: This market will die, but the popularity of new books will follow the same decreasing curve it has been following for decades. What to do with less popular books? Sell them for half/quarter/eighth of an already low price?

Hanging out, sipping latte, and browsing books: Borders (RIP) and Barnes & Noble have coffee shops inside their stores, but they won’t last long. Coffee shops can carry loaner iPads and Kindles with limited access to e-books, magazines, and news sources. Most people who hang out at coffee shops bring a laptop or an iPad anyway, so I’m not sure it’ll fly.

Touching and smelling printed books: People will probably have to get used to touching and smelling other things.

Home bookshelves: It’s hard to impress your friends with your collection of Kindle books, unless you have a collection of Kindles to show for (but that can get quite expensive). Ikea re-purposing their iconic bookshelves must signal the end of an era.

Coffee table books. Put a couple of iPads at the dentist’s waiting area? Not a bad idea.

“When 27 year old Jason Bloomstein from Turtle Bay, Alabama walked into his local Piggly Wiggly in early May he was surprised by the number of…”

Feature style articles often start with this kind of anecdotal lead. It is usually followed by some numbers from seemingly respectful sources and one or more pundit opinions. The writer then goes back to the anecdote, finally telling us what happen to poor Jason when he stepped into that supermarket.

Many magazine and newspaper articles start with such deluge of frivolous details meant to paint a mental picture. This could have been interesting if not for the fact that no one really cares about young Mr. Bloomstein in an article about the growing popularity of pickles. He is featured there to make the readers feel part of the story, being a “guy next door” type person.

Other articles are just needlessly long – not telling any story, but adding plenty of unnecessary details. The thing that is often lost in the details? the important facts. More often than not the writer turns a fact that could have been summarized in one or two sentences into a thousand word article, adding negligible value to the reader. But why? Why not respect the reader’s time and provide just the succinct facts? Why do magazines and newspapers bother to write long articles?

One reason lies in emotional value. People like good stories. They like gossip. They like statistics (useful or useless). By turning dry facts into a personal saga, articles provide the readers with an emotional outlet. Readers [hopefully] feel that this could have happened to them and are therefore more likely to engage by following links and clicking on ads. Another reason is findability: two-sentence articles won’t get found online. Even if they are, you won’t be able to post ads against them because there’s not enough “meat” for advertisers to find a good content match. Let’s compare:

Typical article
Length: ~1000 words
Time to get the important facts: ~5 minutes
Monetization potential: High

Important Facts Only
Length: ~20 words
Time to get the important facts: ~5 seconds
Monetization potential: Low

Readers would clearly fare better if they’d get the facts only. The paradox is that they will only pay for the long form (indirectly by consuming advertised goods). Since there’s no business opportunity in distributing the facts only, no one provides that (except for aggregators like Breaking News). Readers therefore end up paying for an inferior product that wastes their time.

P.S.: Yes, I know, the gist of this blog post could have been summarized in two sentences.

Accuracy can easily be mistaken for usefulness. If you pay a consultant a hefty sum to come up with a detailed analysis of some key business function, the results may be impressively accurate but can also be utterly useless. Take this example: The graph above shows IDC’s Intel Itanium sales forecasts made in nine consecutive years, along with the actual sales numbers; the difference is staggering. The sad part is that thousands of people paid good money to get these wrong forecasts, and they did so over and over again expecting better results.

Predictions are typically wrong, and very often misleading. We still use predictive models though, as they are the only tool we have for managing the future. As George P. Box said, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.  But what about “real” facts? What about “looking at the data” – querying, analyzing, summarizing, and all that good stuff? No matter how much effort you spend on getting quality data, accuracy doesn’t imply usefulness. Paul Graham tells this story: ”I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn’t worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month. It wasn’t worth doing better.” David Filo relied on facts to make a [wrong] prediction. The facts were accurate alright, but his interpretation was arbitrary.

Turning data into useful information is not trivial. It requires experience, carefulness, and often intuition. Simple problems like deciding on the color of a button, are fairly easy to resolve. Run an A/B test, see which color gets a better conversion rate, and go with it. This is true only if you can collect enough data points, of course. Startup companies very often don’t have this luxury, and their only option is to JFDI.

When the number of variables increases, it becomes exponentially difficult to draw useful conclusions from the data. This is where statistics comes into play. Using the right statistical tools for job is key. Be careful and know what you’re doing, otherwise your “data driven management” might be as chaotic as they come. As John von Neumann said: “There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Management is the art of creating order in situations that would otherwise become chaotic. Managers do this in various ways, most of which (at the lower rungs, at least) fall in the spectrum between micromanaging and letting employees manage themselves. No matter where you are between these two extremes, management goes against the second law of thermodynamics* stating that entropy can only increase, resulting in more chaos and consequently defining the arrow of time. This is true whether you are managing people, processes, or money; it is particularly true when managing free spirited knowledge workers.

The first approach – micromanagement with frequent course corrections – requires setting clear business rules and periodically nudging employees and middle managers toward what top management sees as the right direction. This often drives employees to resent and become increasingly disgruntled. On the other end of the spectrum is self organized chaos – an organization that strives to manage itself. Most startups operate this way, as do some larger companies – most notably Google. From the outside this may look like a mess, but the results speak for themselves. Self organized chaos is the best way to get groups of creative people to work toward a common goal. Management’s challenge is to let attractors form naturally rather than making them up by pretending to be able to tell the future. They only needs to articulate long term business goals and make sure everyone understands them. Beyond that, it’s up to the employees to come up with innovative strategies and implementations.

The statement in the first paragraph is flawed, of course, as the second law of thermodynamics only applies in closed systems. The more closed a company is, the tighter management should be in order to control its natural tendency to become chaotic. Opening up your business to allow cross fertilization and transparency can lead to more effective self-management and greater stability. It allows for hands off management and self-organized teams that deliver winning solutions. The key to success is hiring the right people – smart, creative, and cooperative - who can make things happen. Building openness and freedom into your company’s DNA is the best way to ensure the second law of thermodynamics does not apply, requiring fewer managers and fostering real innovation.

Last year I wrote about Science Olympiad, an amazing science-focused competition for middle and high school kids.  I was surprised by the fact that the vast majority of participants were Asian, and was quite happy to see that this population group cares about their children’s future and is connected to the global reality, in which engineers and scientists drive innovation.

This year, you could barely find a white person in the audience. Try to look for them in the picture above. These blond people in the top row? they’re immigrants from Sweden. As the 2010 census indicates, white people are leaving the Bay Area en masse. Even with this trend in mind, I can’t explain the dearth of non-Asian’s at Science Olympiad. I’m pretty sure the population makeup is similar in other science related events. While this spells bad news to white children and their parents, it’s great for Silicon Valley at large. Research shows that immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurs, especially in the valley.

As I said last year: “I’ve seen the future of Silicon Valley, and I’m happy to report that it’s multicultural, passionate, and hard working.”

How tough must it be for Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and the other design-focused people at Apple to engage with everyday technology. Filling up their gas tank, getting cash from an ATM, using their car radio - all these involve interaction with often terribly designed pieces of technology. How will a gas pump’s user interface look like if Apple designed it? simpler. An ATM? cleaner. A car radio? beautiful.

Apple’s influence on product design is already significant, yet it’s reach has been very limited so far. Apple itself is not going to redesign every piece of technology or make their services available to others. Instead, the “Apple style” - simple, clean, and easy to use is going to gradually take over the desgin world. The reason: this style is so overwhelmingly better that by sheer evolutionary pressure it will inevitably propagate and win. This is a bold prediction as it deals with user experience in addition to the underlying technology. Unlike existing designs, this user experience style requires a substantial investment in design and manufacturing. Still, I believe that it will gradually push the old out.

The reason a strong player like Apple leads the way is simple - traditional design consultancy or in-house designers typically do what the customer wants: the customer being cost-conscious consumers or design-agnostic businesses. Apple is led by a fanatic, detail oriented, micro managing design bigot who makes all product decisions. This is not the case with any other major player I’m aware of. Small companies do innovate in this area, but only a few make an impact. One such company is Arc90 that created Readability, a program that turns messy web pages into readable articles. Arc90 did such a great  job that Apple integrated the open source version into Safari.

This better species had now reached a critical mass in the technology ecosystem and is rapidly eliminating inferior variants or transferring it’s genes to them. How long will it take for this superior species to kill off all the others? It might take a while, but the evolution is unstoppable.

In late December I was awarded US Patent 7,860,673 - Distance Measuring Device. I essentially patented the use of a parallax to measure distances from the user to a nearby object using a simple device that can be manufactured for a very low cost. First conceived when I was 17 years old, I kept toying with the idea and entertaining the thought of patenting it for years. A lawyer friend helped me write the patent application 5 years ago. It was a very interesting exercise in turning an abstract idea to a formal patent applications written in legalese, complete with claims, drawings, and calculations. Following a long review process and after hiring a professional patent attorney to fight a prior-art claim, the patent was finally approved.

What should I do with this patent now? not sure. Devices based on it can measure distances alright, but nowhere near the accuracy required for serious usage. I’m thinking about turning it into an educational toy and selling it online and at science museum stores. It can be a great tool for teaching the parallax effect and geometrical optics in general. Doing this will force me continue this multi-year exercise and complete the invention process by commercializing it. Should be an interesting ride.

Nokia’s new Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale are equidistant from Google and Apple’s headquarters. It’s just a coincidence, of course, but I’m sure the Finnish giant wishes some of the success these local companies enjoy in the smart phone market will rub off on it. The best way to get there might be by poaching engineering and management talent. By building their headquarters in this strategic location (and two blocks from a Caltrain station), they might be one step ahead in their quest to get a foothold in this booming market segment.