Cars are the new horses

While this quote may never have been said by the great inventor, it still speaks volumes about the transformative and unpredictability of huge leaps in technology. Thus, while we look back at the “old days” when the horse was the only conceivable mode of transportation, we commonly admit two perspectives.

First, we admit that it must have been difficult to predict the advent of the automobile. Folks had used horses for individual transportation since antiquity. Steam engines replaced mass transit over long distances, but surely a coal engine for an individual would be inconceivable.

On the other hand, we view the eventual transition to the car as an ultimate necessity. If Henry Ford hadn’t managed to turn the car mainstream, someone else surely would have. The technology was available, the form factor had already been generally proven successful. In short, the conditions were ripe for revolution-- someone just had to deliver on the promise.

Fast forward to the modern age, and we can see a similar climate emerging for the autonomous automobile.

First, it was, until recently, difficult to predict the advent of automatic vehicles. Even as recently as 2009, the idea of a ‘self driving car’ was all but missing from society’s lexicon. It was only in the last decade that the idea of self driving cars earned a share of the public’s attention.

And indeed, future generations will look back at this shift as a simple inevitability. How could it be otherwise? More and more of our lives have gone from slightly automated to heavily automated. We are trusting technology with a significantly greater level of control over our more monotonous tasks. What, indeed, is more monotonous than your daily commute?

This article does a great job of identifying one place where autonomy in automobiles will likely find an early niche: trucking. But it won’t stop there. Indeed nearly everything that currently requires a car, or a truck, plane, train, bus, or boat, for that matter, can and will benefit from some level of automation. Most of these forms of transportation will likely be fully automated in the next few decades. In short, the minivan will likely be obsolete before I’ll be old enough and ‘dad’ enough to buy one.

Quite soon, driving one’s own car will be just as much of a novelty as riding a horse.

The last car I had to my name was a leased Hyundai Elantra. It got me around the crowded and smoggy streets of Los Angeles for three years while I attended undergrad at USC. At the end of my lease I returned it to a dealership up here in San Francisco, and have been without a car for the last year. What’s more, assuming I remain here, I don’t see much of a need to purchase a car for the next few years. With on-demand car services like Lyft taking care of my weekly needs and rental car services like GetAround handling any larger trips I’d like to take, my need for a car of my own begins to dwindle.

Thus it seems readily apparent I may never drive the next car I buy. And soon neither will you. Some self-proclaim that they love driving. I do not doubt that they will continue to find opportunities to drive themselves around, but it will become significantly rarer. It will, indeed, become a novelty. Just like riding horses.

Your phone can do your homework

A few months ago, I did a set of Q&A sessions at a local high school about what it’s like to work in the technology industry.

The students were understandably most interested in the perks, such as free food, unlimited vacation, and all of those other little things that make the tech industry sometimes feel more like play than like work.

But at one point, the conversation turned to the impact that technology will have on the lives of everyone, and especially the lives of younger folks, like, for instance, a class of sophomores at Galileo High School.

To exemplify this impact, I asked the class the following question:

The first answer: “make me a hamburger”. To this, I replied that there have been recent advances in 3D printing technology, and that 3D printing food could very well be just a few years away. It wouldn’t be crazy to imagine the 3D food printer replacing the microwave as the staple dorm-room kitchen accessory in the next decade-- perhaps even before these students graduate from University.

The second answer: “do my homework”. Of course. Who wouldn’t get excited at the prospect of a magical phone application that can take one look at that ridiculous math problem and spit out the answer, as well as all of the requisite steps to get there? But wait. There’s already an app for that. But math has a small advantage when it comes to homework problems, since they’re defined, they’re all (except the ever-loving ‘word problem’) expressed in a universal, camera-readable format, and systems capable of solving them, such as Wolfram Alpha, have existed for some time now.

What about that chemistry problem? Or social studies? What about an app to write an essay on the use of symbolism in To Kill a Mockingbird for you? That’s a bit tougher. But not impossible.

Snapsolve allows students to take a picture of their homework problem, and send it along to a tutor who is somewhat of an expert in their field, who can help the student figure out the solution in realtime. What’s great about this service is that it doesn’t limit itself to some structured type of problems. It’s actually just a tutoring app that centers the relationship between student and teacher around a specific problem, and turns it into a simple transaction.

Though I’m sure some teachers may dismay at the alarming acceleration of tech-powered homework-solving tools, I embrace this sort of technology. In the modern age, base knowledge (i.e. anything that can be figured out with a single Google search) is no longer of high value. Anyone with an iPhone can figure out how many planets exist in the solar system, or whether or not this sentence is grammatically correct. So while knowing certain facts might be important for certain professions (such as the number of planets in the solar system for, say, an astronaut), it’s not necessary to spend valuable brain space holding a fact that is a few keystrokes away.

The world is changing. Things are moving faster and faster everyday. And yes: your phone can do your homework.

"Remember, no one was born old."

Great image posted on Reddit today.

John Zeratsky on Writing Great Interface Copy

Found this fantastic article on Fast Co. Design, and thought I’d point out some highlights.

What is design?

This is an important point– design is as much about logic as it is about emotion. It is a hybrid between force and flow. It’s calculated and completely intuitive at the same time

What’s interface copy?

In a few of my previous hackathon projects, I’ve sat and argued with team members about what word to use to describe a certain thing. For instance, with Amio, how do we go about classifying a task that takes the form of ‘getting the milk when it runs out’? Repeating tasks are easy enough - they repeat every X number of Y time-increments. So we landed on “Alert” tasks, but I’m certainly not satisfied with this.

Personality doesn’t matter as much as you think

This is a concept that can be expanded to include a number of different flaws – Get the big picture down first, and then add flourish with the details. But always be sure that the important stuff comes first.

By the way, people do read

As a minimalist designer, I’m always hesitant to include any guiding text – the form should imply its function. But in some cases, text is necessary to get an important point across.

Learn-to-Code Bootcamps are Being Regulated - And That's A Good Thing

I was browsing TechCrunch this morning, and came upon this article, addressing the idea of regulations for the new industry of ‘learn-to-code’ bootcamps. The article makes some great points in both the pro and the con columns, and in reality there’s a bit of both to the argument.

On one hand, these bootcamps are fantastic. The ones that have hit the mainstream, like App Academy, which boasts a 95% offer rate for its graduates, with an average salary of $91,000. Damn. That’s super impressive, especially when you consider that it’s free unless you get a job.

So some folks might be hesitant to allow bureaucracy and the pervasive inefficiencies of government into the very successful, brave new world of bootcamps.

Then on the other hand, private, non-post-secondary education can really start to get dangerous. It can be an easy industry to abuse– it’s definitely in good taste to ensure a certain level of quality of instruction, so that vulnerable potential-students don’t get roped into an expensive, worthless program.

No special treatment

The tech industry is my darling, and I hate to see old money and old politics get in the way of its success. Tech is the source of the future, and anything that gets in its way is just an annoyance. But it’s important to remember that this regulation isn’t really getting in the way.

It’s not getting in the way of a solid program with awesome instructors and a great curriculum and fair pricing strategies. It’s not getting in the way of successful organizations delivering impressive results. It’s getting in the way of the handful of jerks who think that they can abuse the system to make a quick buck.

As technologists, it’s important to embrace some of the little hurdles like governmental regulation, in order to ensure that nobody is able to cheapen the wonderful ideas spewing out of silicon valley or silicon beach or whatever silicon-embedded location you prefer.

We don’t want Silicon Valley turning into Wall St. We don’t want any Wal-Marts of the tech industry. We, as a generation and population of tech-enabled activists, should hold ourselves to a very high standard, and this is one example of that.

And I’m not alone in this opinion:

The bigger picture

I suppose this comes down to a larger debate over the overall role of the government in business. I don’t want to get political, but if we accept that the way that it is done now, where consumers are protected from potential corporate and financial corruption, then this is clearly a good direction for the bootcamp world to go.

As the startups of today become the behemoths of tomorrow, we’ll have to address a lot of questions about the role of government in these new, highly-efficient, customer-centric companies.

There will be a lot of debates to be had, but I personally believe that our generation has a responsibility to hold our brainchildren to a far higher standard than our parents’ generation did.

The generation before us paved the way for McDonalds and their quality, recently-discontinued, employee benefits program.

We should aim to create a system where solid businesses like Costco and In-n-Out are the model, keeping prices low through good company culture, efficiency, and quality. The myth that business and humanity are somehow at odds with one another should be eradicated, and the tech industry is the best place to do just that.

Again, this is all my own opinion, and perhaps this will be the most divisive article I will have written, but I believe it’s an important issue to face. As millennials and technologists, we are responsible for creating the future, so let’s create a future that makes sense, rewards success, and tramples out inefficiency.

Hackathon Project - Moodsic

A few friends and I spent the weekend at a Microsoft-sponsored USC vs. UCLA hackathon. We worked diligently for 24 hours and made a pretty sick app that I’d like to share.

Also worth noting, our app actually ended up winning the overall hackathon. We barely scraped past the second-place team, who had a really killer idea as well. Either way, I’m super proud of my team and what we were able to accomplish, and I’m excited to share a bit of the experience with you.

The Team

For this hackathon, I teamed up with a couple of friends from USC, and our mission was to make ‘something dope’. We called ourselves SPDerp after our fraternity letters, Sigma Phi Delta. We sorta divided into front-end and backend, with Jesse Chand and Albert Kuo working on the front-end of the app while Daniel Silva and I crafted the backend.

Also a quick shoutout to Kabir Gupta who joined us for the Hackathon but due to team-size-restrictions couldn't be a part of SPDerp. He worked on his own dope application which you can check out here.

Being that the hackathon was sponsored by Microsoft, we were developing for either the Windows 8 or Windows Phone platforms. Since none of us had any experience in either of these platforms, we decided to make a web application instead. So our entire app is made up of native javascript and HTML, with a handful of calls to a couple of PHP scripts in cases where API calls could not be made through javascript due to cross-site-scripting security restrictions.

The Mission

So this hackathon had a theme : Mash-ups. Essentially we were asked to take two different APIs and mash them up together to create something interesting. It was a tough challenge since we’d have to learn how to use the API, how to get the info we need, and combine the APIs in an interesting way.

The Process

We started with Flickr. The truth is that I love Flickr. Where else can you get links to gorgeous, professional-quality images, with a brilliant indexing and querying system? But the real reason that I love Flickr is because it makes it easy to make an app look sexy. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the Yahoo! Weather app, which is almost certainly the most beautiful weather app that has ever existed.

Anywho, we decided that Flickr would be a good place to start, and so we started thinking about what we could do with a bunch of easily-queryable, high-quality images.

And, we thought, images can portray mood as well or better than words. Even an image of a landscape can resonate with a person on an emotional level. So perhaps we could analyze the mood of an image, get some basic mood data, and use that to do something interesting.

That something interesting, we decided, was to create a music playlist.

The App

We created Moodsic: a web app designed to create a perfect playlist by using analyzed image data to determine the person’s mood.

And since it’s all built with native javascript, I’ve hosted the app so that you can try it out for yourself. Quick disclaimer: We weren’t able to spend as much time as we’d have liked to on our image-mood-song analysis algorithm, so the generated playlists are somewhat arbitrary. But the logic is all there and it just needs to be fine-tuned to produce solid results (which we, of course, plan to do).

Feel free to give it a whirl– you will need to have Spotify open (either the native or web player) in order to actually play the generated playlist, but you get the gist.

The Process

If you’re not interested in any of the technical mumbo-jumbo/nitty-gritty/other-cliché, then you might want to skip this section.

Basically, we started by creating a native HTML/css/javascript environment. We designed it to look solid on a tablet (since it was to be demoed on a W8 tablet). In that light, it probably doesn’t look or feel too great on mobile.

The Images

So the Flickr API was easy enough. We decided to use a filter to only select images of landscapes, seeing as it’s easier to decipher the mood if there aren’t any actual people in the image. We were then able to restrict ourselves to very simple heuristics like average red, green, blue values, and brightness of the image.

We were able to extract these heuristics from the images by using the British Columbia Genome Sciences Center’s Image Summarizer API. We were originally set to use Imagga, but we weren’t quite able to get it to work and had to abandon it mid-hackathon.

Once we got the average red, green, and blue values for the image, as well as the images brightness, we were able to determine the ‘mood’ of the image. We got this by essentially mapping all of the possible combinations of different colors to some base emotion:

Admittedly, for this app to really work as desired, we’d have to incorporate some kind of machine learning algorithm as well. But for a 24-hour hackathon, this did just fine.

Also worth mentioning : based on the brightness of the color, we determined the minimum and maximum tempo (BPM) to search for. A bright image would return faster, higher BPM songs, while a darker image would return slower, low BPM songs.

The Songs

Once we had this image analysis on the three images that the user selected, we turned to the Echonest Song Search API to grab twenty random songs based on this information.

Finally, once we have a list of songs, we add each to a spotify playlist and display the music player.

An Interesting Challenge

I’d like to take a moment to explain one of the hackiest parts of our app: the php xml-jsonp wrapper that I built to allow us to query these XML based APIs from native-run javascript.

The challenge is that javascript queries are generally reserved for domain-level queries. Essentially, the javascript running on facebook.com can access any data or resource that is hosted on facebook.com. But if facebook needs to grab some Twitter data, for instance, it cannot do that through the client-side javascript, because this results in some crazy security issues.

So if I want to grab the 20 most dramatic songs from echonest via their api, I’d need some way other than AJAX to grab that information.

Enter jsonp, AKA json with padding. What I was able to do was use a very small PHP script (hosted on my site), to forward an incoming query to the Echonest API. Then, I’d wrap the resultant XML in a javascript method call, and then send it to the native app. This is allowed because the information must be in JSON-acceptable format, which restricts most cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities.

The Takeaway

This app was awesome to build. We wanted to make something really interesting that did some crazy magic behind the scenes to deliver awesome content, and an awesome experience to the user. We wanted to make it super enjoyable to use, and eventually we’d like to to learn how to make better predictions.

Either way, I think I speak for my team when I say that we are all humbled to have won the competition (and a free trip up to Seattle to visit Microsoft’s HQ). I personally had an awesome time, and I’m especially proud of how much we got done in the limited timespan of the event.

Please do check it out ( devonmeyer.com/projects/moodsic ) and let me know what you think. I’d love feedback as my team and I are definitely planning on refining the app. And you can be sure that I’ll let you know when we’ve got it in beta.

HackTech Hackathon Project - Amio

This weekend I attended the first annual HackTech hackathon in Santa Monica, California. It was a solid hackathon and I’d like to take the chance to share the project that I worked on, as well as some of my thoughts about the event itself.

The project

Amio was a brainchild that I had been nursing for a couple of weeks before the hackathon. It all started this summer when I was interning at Apple. I was living in corporate housing with a couple fellow interns, and generally we got along really well.

But throughout the summer, one thing just kept coming up as a friction point: milk. We decided early-on to share our milk purchases– nothing too new or crazy there. But week after week we’d go sans milk because nobody knew whose turn it was to buy the milk, or if someone had already bought milk recently.

So I thought: if only there existed an app where you could input all of the chores and shared tasks (like buying milk) that a couple of roommates might want to fairly share, and it would automatically keep track of whose turn it was to perform that task. Not only this, but if you open the fridge and notice that the milk is gone, wouldn’t it be great if you could immediately notify the person responsible for the next one?

So when some friends and I were looking for a good idea to run with for this hackathon, we decided to solve this common little annoyance, and thus Amio was born.

I paired up with a friend of mine, and we got to work on the app. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but if you’re interested in the source code you can find it on my github.

One thing I would like to mention, however, is that we focused ourselves on making the UI look and feel fantastic. We argued vehemently about views, actions, settings, and colors.

To be honest, the functionality of the app is simple. It’s pretty much just a project management app with very limited task management. There are dozens, if not hundreds of apps that allow you to do exactly what Amio allows you to do. But what Amio has, I like to think, that makes it actually a pretty viable app is a laser focus on optimizing for a very specific use-case.

I’d like to give a shout-out to Jesse, who was my co-developer for the project. He handled the visual design of the application and the view implementation, while I handled the backend and app logic. Also some props to Daniel and Kabir who fully intended to help out with the project, but weren’t able to due to technical issues.

Oh, and by the way, Jesse and I fully plan on taking this app through to the finish line and putting it on the App Store, so look out for that.

The event

As far as hackathons go, HackTech had some major strengths and some glaring weaknesses. In all, it was a solid event, and I can definitely appreciate the time and effort that went in to planning and executing it.

Pros

Cons

In all, it was an awesome event. Hackathons are a fantastic way to learn, build, and discover. I’m excited to keep working on Amio, and I’m excitedly waiting for my next hackathon.

A Plea for 5G

It’s been all over the tech blogosphere recently that South Korea plans to unleash a tantalizingly fast 5G network for its citizens.

Well that’s great and all, but just how fast is this supposed 5G network? It’s only one full G better than what our friendly neighborhood U.S. Telecom companies provide, so is it really that big of a deal?

It turns out that it is a big deal.

Holy Bandwidth, Batman!

The fact is, the United States lags heavily in the connectivity race, and this news should be a wake-up call to all of my fellow techno-enthusiasts. If we are to remain a technology superpower, we must catch up in terms of our connectivity.

It’s simply embarassing that 20% of the population here in the US aren’t online. And furthermore, the country that is responsible for most of the revolutions responsible for starting this, the age of the internet, ranks ninth in terms of average internet speed.

Let’s get our shit together, America. The home of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and countless other tech innovators should lead, not lag, when it comes to pushing the limits of internet connectivity.

Qualcomm's 'Toq' Smartwatch will have wireless charging

I'm not going to say that I called it......

But I did call it.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/18/qualcomm-toq-december-2nd-launch-350-dollars/

Now all that's left is to have a smartwatch with wireless charging, biometrics, and the screen on the inside of the wrist. Apple pls?

A veteran plays American folk songs on his guitar at LAX while his two little girls dance. Literally the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. :’)

"The interesting thing about this is how Sony continues to gain momentum by not doing whatever Microsoft does" Loving this.

Amazon Smile. Doing Corporate Giving Right.

I encountered this article on LifeHacker, and my jaw actually dropped a little bit.

In short, 0.5% of any purchase you make on Amazon can be donated to a charity of your choice.

Now, 0.5% is certainly a small number, but it's very important to note that Amazon operates at a very small profit margin. Despite being #49 on the Fortune 500 list, weighing in at a sizable $166 billion market cap, and raking in gross revenues north of $60 billion in 2012, Amazon makes only about $39 million in actual profit.

Just for the mathematically challenged readers out there, that means Amazon is making .065 % of its revenue in terms of profit. So this is a very rudimentary calculation, and certainly doesn't take into account the complexity regarding why Amazon's profits are so low, but essentially 76% of Amazon's profits may now be going to charity.

Again, that's probably not the whole picture, but it gives some perspective as to how much this 0.5% really is in terms of Amazon's budget.

I, for one, applaud a company that would rather put its incoming cash to good use than horde it away. Certainly I'm not an investor in Amazon-- those folks might not be so happy. But it's a very respectable enterprise, and I love to see my favorite tech companies take more than their share of the U.S. corporate responsibility pie.

Ara. Android for Hardware.

Google-owned Motorola Mobility announced a new hardware project today called Ara.

Ara is to phone hardware what Android was to phone software. It offers a toolkit for manufacturers to create fully customizable smartphones. And these toolkits will supposedly be plug-and-play.

As this article on TheNextWeb says beautifully:

Now, I think there's a lot to be said here for the project. When it comes to either purchasing a pre-manufactured desktop versus building your own, both power and affordability are optimized in the DIY market.

However, self-built PCs struggle from an achilles heel -- you have to know how to build them. Regardless of how easy some claim it is, the average person doesn't want to risk breaking their new >$1000 investment because they were trying to but the square peg into the round hole.

So I'd say this: the major challenge that Motorola's Ara will face is making it easy to self-manufacture.

Perhaps this can be done by making the modules extremely resistant to breaking, or making the process of putting them together more akin to building something out of legos rather than putting together an IKEA desk.

No matter what, I'd highly doubt that folks who currently shell out $199 for an iPhone for few reasons other than its meticulous, beautiful design, will switch to the self-built phone any time soon. Certainly there is a market for it, but until the form factor goes away altogether, there will be customers on the massive-scale manufacturing scene. 

However

This actually could be a red herring. With the recent developments in 3D printing that we're beginning to see, one might wonder if the manufacturing industry as a whole is beginning to wane. It's certainly an exciting view of the future to have a device, sitting in your home, from which you can make any assortment of things that you'd otherwise buy from a store.

Perhaps Ara is one step towards this universal self-manufacturing vision. Perhaps Ara will prove, once and for all, that design can be built in to a self-built machine, and that folks won't care that they have to do an extra hour of work to get there.

I'm not certain, but regardless, Ara has a long battle ahead of it to prove itself.

Amazing, innovative, world changing ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is key.

Reading this article on TheNextWeb, I find myself shaking my head and returning to a lesson that I picked up this summer.

To set the scene, I spent the summer in the San Francisco Bay-- the very heart of Silicon Valley. At an unspecified tech firm named after a fruit, I worked as an intern during the day. It was certainly an amazing experience, but my off-hours activities were similarly fruitful.

I got to spend a large amount of time with, arguably, some of the smartest people my age in the technology industry. It was an honor to spend a summer with these folks, and the lessons I learned day-to-day have already proved invaluable.

But one lesson sticks out the most. That lesson is the title of this post:

Amazing, innovative, world-changing ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is key.

Now, if this blog is any indication, I think and talk a lot about technology. And in Silicon Valley, conversations about local sports teams and politics take a back-seat to emerging tech, design, and innovation.

And, unsurprisingly, every conversation that dives into these technologies ends up spawning a handful of great ideas of how these technologies could be used in fascinating ways.

Coming from a place (Columbus, Ohio) where cloud computing is still a bit of a hazy term and the tech tuxedo doesn't count as work-appropriate, I was amazed by the sheer volume of brilliance that I encountered.

I mean everyone-- literally everyone-- at some point came up with an amazing idea that I couldn't believe it didn't already exist. Needless to say, only a couple weeks into my internship, I felt I had stumbled onto a goldmine of fantastic ideas that I could sneakily turn into the next big thing.

But then I realized something very peculiar: after a while, each of these great ideas became decreasingly exciting. I wasn't getting desensitized-- but every time an idea came up in conversation, I'd immediately jump to implementation difficulties.

"What if there was a way to connect you to the people around you who share your interests? Use your 'likes' from Facebook and your location data to point you to people around you who you'd probably be good friends with!"

What a great idea! Except:

Needless to say that the best ideas have a very long journey from lightbulb to lots of users.

I learned something depressingly important: no matter how amazing an idea is, it's worth nothing without the passionate motivation and keen, strategic execution necessary to turn it into reality. In fact, as the post title suggests, I'd argue that ideas are cheap and tend to be misleading.

So if there's one really big take-away from this, it is as follows:

Stop wasting time trying to find some big, world-changing product to create. Learn how to learn. Learn how to build. Learn how to motivate. Learn how to communicate. Learn how to lead.

Then, it's just a matter of picking the right idea.

Watch the world's most successful tech entrepreneurs talk about startups

Y-combinator recently held its annual "Startup School", inviting the founders of such low-profile startups as Facebook, Evernote, Twitter, and VMWare. What?

No but seriously, some of the most successful entrepreneurs gathered at this event to share their wealth of experience in the complex and volatile world of tech startups.

Go watch and make your brain two sizes too big

http://blog.ycombinator.com/videos-from-startup-school-2013-are-now-online

"It's likely that mobile gaming is influencing social gaming. Not the other way around."