Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Boston, Day 3; Eavesdropping, Neat Receipts, and Climbing

Today was spent mostly tying up loose ends and getting settled in work-wise.

I spent a good part of the day in Harvard Square.  After realizing that all of the coffee shops were probably completely packed, I settled on a Starbucks since I’ve got tmobile account.

This led to overhearing “ketamine, DXM and PCP” in a conversation between a guy and a girl who appeared to be of college age.  It certainly inspired nostalgic memories.

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Mid-afternoon, I came home and setup my Neat Receipts scanner.  I ran a test and it picked up everything.  I’m definitely excited to see how I can make it work well for me.

Tomorrow, I have a call with an accountant to see what is good to keep track of for write-offs, how to track things, etc.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to give him all of the Neat Receipts data – organized – and have him get my taxes done easy and well.

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Later, I went to MetroRock to meet up with Todd Van Hoosear, the meetup.com Boston rock climbing group, and get some climbing in.

I ended up meeting another newcomer to the area, we got our belay tests done, and ended up climbing together the whole night.  Another great instance of easily meeting interesting people.  On a related note, apparently “Online Marketing Consultant” gives the nerd vibe, not the cool vibe.

Here I was, thinking I was fooling people.  Maybe I’ll start telling people I’m a professional traveler…or ass model.

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Tomorrow, I’ll be working from downtown Boston and meeting a friend for lunch.  If you’re in the area, let me know!

Boston: The First 36 Hours

I’ve been here less than 36 hours and am already having a phenomenal time.

Last night, after a quick nap, I met up with Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton) and Chris Owens (@ocell).

If you’re in online marketing, especially social media, and you don’t know Wayne Sutton, get familiar with him.  He not only gets it, he also puts the work into it.  If someone were to hire him to let him loose on the social media world, we should all be scared.

Chris is a fantastic product designer finishing up school at NC State.  He showed me the cell phone design he put together, and I was totally blown away.

After dinner, we went to Sooz’s (@Sooz) house for her “eviction party.”  There, I ended up meeting Todd Van Hoosear (@vanhoosear), who’s one of the most well-spoken people I’ve ever met and really gets it when it comes to social media.  His clients are definitely in good hands.  I’ll be climbing with him tomorrow night, and can’t wait to talk more.

Today was spent getting around town with a friend, getting familiar with the T, seeing Paul Revere’s house, and getting some work done.  While I was at Andala Coffee House (I’ll definitely be going back) for dinner and coffee, I found out from Aaron White (@aaronwhite) about DevHouse.

DevHouse ended up being totally awesome. Lots of really smart people, doing really cool things, in a really short amount of time.  I was totally stoked. (See my Twitter profile for live Twittering of it)

There, I met Mark Soper, Costas Boussios, and another guy named Ben (didn’t get full contact info, but I’m sure we’ll meet again and I’ll post about it in here.  He gave me some fantastic advice and first-hand experience about eLance.com.  I’m writing project descriptions tonight.) who happens to be more on the business and marketing side than the tech/programming side.

The projects shown at DevHouse were totally awesome.  I can’t describe what it’s like to be around so many smart people who are putting together really cool products.  It’s definitely something to be experienced, and just reinforces that we’re in such an amazing time in history right now.

I found out that my Neat Receipts scanner isn’t made for Mac. Gotta send it back and get a Mac one this week.  Or maybe I’ll get the VMWare app for creating a Windows environment and hack at that…I may be doing that anyway.

One of the great things I’m loving about Boston (especially Cambridge) so far is the strong sense of intellectualism and community.  I’m going to be putting together a whole post on this topic, but I think it’s amazing to be at a coffee shop at 11pm on a Sunday night and eavesdrop on such great conversations.

Leaving for Boston on Saturday

So, I’m leaving for Boston on Saturday morning.  I expect to get in to my new place in East Cambridge pretty late at night.

Sunday, I’ll be tooling around, finding coffee shops, getting familiar with the areas, and perhaps buying some running shoes to add another option for fitness.  I was hoping to get out on the bike, but it looks like it’s going to rain.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since it’ll force me to get familiar with the T.

If you’re interested in hanging out, definitely let me know.  As much as I’m traveling for business reasons, I’m also looking to have great conversations with cool people, and take in the cultures of the towns.

The “Summer of Love” for Communications Technology?

A very good friend of mine recently brought up the idea of a communications shift like we’re having now with Twitter, Plurk, etc, and related it to the Summer of Love. Obviously, there are significant differences, but I don’t think that the fundamental idea is too far off.

Here’s my response to him:

I definitely think there’s something big going on right now that’s growing unusually quickly.

The usual pattern of technology acceptance begins with the techy/nerdy people, the technology gets refined, then it gets accepted by the masses.

The difference now, is that it’s not the techs that are pushing adoption, it’s the marketers. And these aren’t the technical marketers…in fact, the more technical a person is, it seems that the less likely they are to quickly adopt these new services.

What that signals to me is that the internet is reaching a point where we understand its usability (combination of form and function), rather than simply function (think command line FTP compared to uploading via web), well enough that applications are being quickly pushed out there that are incredibly easy to use.

Essentially, the Internet has provided this massive and new freeform way to connect with people and information. We’ve now gone through a significant enough part of the process of understanding people’s concerns with the platform: usability, connectivity, speed, portability, etc. These are all new concerns that have never come together like this until now.

It’s much like before cars were pass produced, we didn’t know that people wanted brakelights – why would you need those if no one’s behind you – until things reached a certain critical mass and understanding of what it means to have a lot of people driving cars.

Because these new applications are easy to use, the techies almost don’t even care (there’s no problem to be solved), but the marketers see the opportunity for adoption, and therefore the financial upside, etc.

I guess one of the questions that I have is if things will begin to be released that are immediately adopted by the masses, without the marketers pushing them first. Much like the iPod…it came out, and everyone wanted it. Immediately, it addressed every current and upcoming fundamental concern of portable music players. The new ones that people didn’t even know they had (the iPod wasn’t the first portable mp3 player) were style and status. It meant something to have an iPod…not a portable mp3 player…an iPod.

So, I guess all of that is to say “yes,” I think something like the “Summer of Love” is possible for the technology/communications area, but I think there are a few more pieces to be worked out.

Namely, I think that GPS and/or connection to physical location is going to be the next huge leap forward. Apple is making that step with GPS iPhone. BrightKite is accumulating the experiences of what constitutes the problem of connecting your physical location with your online presence. A whole slew of companies are working on providing the advertising platform for it all.

But no one has come out with the iPod for that…yet.