Yuval's company Eye-Fi has been doing great work these past few years. I remember when Madeline was not even born chatting with Yuval about his original concept that looked like some device to attach to cameras to snag photos off of them and how he was considering leaving Cisco to pursue it. Last week on Friday a day before Zachary's arrival was rapidly approaching he asked about when I would get one of his wireless cards and start using it to get my photos out faster. Meanwhile he was heading out to the Consumer Electronics Show to achieve his destiny to win the CES award for best gadget, a nerd of the year type honor. I am hoping to receive my new Eye-Fi card in the mail shortly to help get photos online a little more effectively than in the past. As step one I have purchased a LaCie 2 terabyte RAID network storage drive where I will move all my photos and media to. Step two will be to upgrade one of my PCs to make it a modern machine to speed photo editing and other things I do in the office.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't normally read the Supply Chain Management Review. But after hearing about Walmart's policies towards the environment I needed to know more about what they have actually done. Here is the article I found that outlines their approach to greening their business The Greening of Wal-Mart's Supply Chain. What is amazing is that a company as influential would be so comitted to environmental stewardship to take the steps normally used to increase profits to increase accomplishment of goals like Walmart's "To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and the environment." With their approach they can drive 60,000 suppliers behavior by setting requirements on how the suppliers operate in order to be able to sell through the Wal-Mart retail distribution channel. So this is what is so amazing and unexpected to me.

Corporations have been portrayed correctly as inhuman and often acted inhuman in content like the movie "The Corporation" establishing that corporations were created as entities that may employ people and have many of the rights and responsibilities but aren't people. So they have done things that a human wouldn't actually do like ignore human rights issues (think pre-unions), pollute the environment to their own advantage, place unreasonable expectations on suppliers to push for price, force customers into modes where they had no choice of supplier (monopolies), push countries/regimes towards military actions for their own profits (debeers diamonds), exploit third world populations for labor, treat livestock/lab animals in a cruel way (factory farming), etc.

From the imdb site on The Corporation:

"Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it." Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

They needed to do these things to compete and in the Darwinian sense of evolution of corporations if they were non-competitive they wouldn't exist and persist. But unlike evolution of humans going back some 100 million years - corporations have only existed for a few hundred years.

The corporation is evolving. The environment around them is radically different than it was even 15 years ago. Customers always wanted scale to reduce the costs of their goods but they also wanted "Good" practices to be behind them. The big dinosaur of the Wal-Mart's of the world can't hide from the millions of potential critics in the world waiting to expose a flaw in their social ethics. They need to create web sites like Wal-Mart facts to educate themselves and critics about their business ethics. So in order to maintain competitive they need to lead their own organization ahead of the critics. In Wal-Mart's case they partnered with NGOs, big environmentalist organizations, and consulting teams knowledgable about how to do transformation to move in 2 years from being perceived as the big monster destroying American small town jobs into the most powerful instrument on the planet driving change.

The big cool enlighening part of the Wal-Mart effort and what fascinates me is that when Wal-Mart looked at their entire impact as a retailer the tentacles reached farthest and widest when they considered their impact through their influence on the suppliers. So Supply Chain Management designed for changing how you purchase stuff cheaper and reduce inventory, one of the key drivers of Wal-Mart's and many other companies' success, has had an unexpected impact - the supply chain can be managed to achieve ANY objective set by a consumer of the supply chain. So a retailer with pressure from customers to be environmentally responsible can drive back that requirement backwards and it can cascade down to the lowest levels of suppliers of raw materials over the course of each link.

So while the corporation is a legal entity that may not be human it is fully responsible to the demands and needs of humans that ultimately consume it's output. After all corporations must produce some product or service of value to a human sooner or later in order to get that money that the economy operates on. So the new co-evolution of the corporation and the human is leading towards sustainability, the "symbiotic" relationship necessary for the corporation to survive under the scrutiny of us highly judgemental and humans.

Even Deloitte is in the game. They wrote a white paper called Creating the Wholly Sustainable Enterprise. In it they wrote some broad reaching requirements for transformation:

"In evaluating a company’s evolution to WSE status, there are some organizational constructs that may limit or
reduce the effectiveness of an enterprise-wide sustainability strategy.

• ‘Green’ Is Not A Corporate Function: Companies that limit sustainability efforts on to a specific department or
function (e.g. EH&S) may fail to advance in the journey towards overall sustainability. Ownership of
sustainability by a single function suggests that responsibility resides with a specific, limited number of
individuals rather than responsibility residing with everyone as an inherent element of the overall culture.

• ‘Green’ Is Not An Executive Position: Companies are experimenting with a ‘Chief Sustainability Officer’ and
other such titles, perhaps a positive step but insufficient on its own to drive consistent value. While executive
ownership and accountability for ‘green’ is an essential element of an overall approach, it is not, in itself,
sufficient to drive the enterprise-wide activities required to succeed.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Fad: Like business trends of recent decades, sustainability as ‘the next big thing’ may be
advancing as a means to driving competitive advantage. Yet ‘greening the company’ is more than a fad. Many
business improvement methods of recent years—MRP, reengineering, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and
others—can be considered specific application of sustainability principles applied to business activity. It would
be appropriate to begin to think of sustainability as an organizing principle within which business improvement
methods are developed, applied, and evolved. And over time it is reasonable to presume that the next waves of
business improvement frameworks will be based at least in part on principles of value-driven sustainability.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Cost of Doing Business: Thinking about sustainability in this manner establishes a culture of
sustainability as an ‘add-on’ or incremental cost. Rather than being an integral part of every process,
sustainability is evaluated after ‘core’ decisions are made. This can be illustrated by describing the difference
between a traditional design project followed by a ‘value engineering’ phase, vs a design project initiated as a
A Practical Guide to Driving Shareholder Value Through Enterprise Sustainability 6
‘green’ project where sustainable materials, systems, etc. are a core part of the initial specification and
conceptual design amongst key participants in the design process.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Political Statement: The history of conflict between ‘environment’ and ‘big business,’ combined
with the natural politicization of the issues creates a substantial amount of ‘baggage’ to the company
undertaking a broad Sustainable Enterprise effort. The successful organization will undertake this
transformation based on the principles of improving shareholder value and company performance, and the
environmental and social benefits will be positive, concurrent consequence."

The fun part of all of this is going to be watching the corporations scramble over the next 5 years to digest the shock of the wave of sustainability. I think we have the following to thank for it: Internet transparency, Supply Chain Management, Improved Movie/education distribution, Global communication networks, Real problems/risks to our planet, and most of all -- millions of people consuming beyond price to drive suppliers for something better. The impact of all of this leads me to believe that the structure can reduce the same drivers for war as we are finding for the environment so that we can conquer the problems raised in the worry around the military-industrial complex in each country hoping to participate in a global economy. Imagine if Wal-Mart, McDonalds decided to stop/prevent wars rather than drive sustainability? Wasn't Michael Moore complaining that Wal-Mart sells bullets and guns? So much seems possible.

So I am filled with something rare about the environment, human rights, animal rights and wars - HOPE!

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Design That Matters on Tuesday morning and what they are doing is very inspiring. They are having a benefit dinner listed on their web site that might interest people.

The group has taken a new approach to working with problems in developing countries where issues that may be solved here are still lagging and the impact would surprise people. Their solution is to work as a non-profit to design solutions to these problems in the form of new products that understand and address the complex issues and reality of the environment/local ecosystem themselves.

For example, in some countries 4 of 5 adults can't read. So Design That Matters team analyzed the problem in villages and with governments learning that classrooms only work at night since people have to work to support themselves. But classrooms don't have an easy way to share information. I would just get a digital projector and a laptop but that's an expensive solution readily available in my world. In those countries what turned out to be more helpful is a low cost and low power portable projector and microfilm with lots of content on it.

The presentation focused on a design challenge of infant mortality and I got an education on the need for incubators for low birth weight babies to regulate temperature and oxygen. Stevie Wonder, among many people, is blind because when he was an infant his incubator delivered too much oxygen. The modern $20,000 incubator that you see in a neo-natal intensive care unit (sounds very expensive) isn't what's out there in the world. There are hand me down incubators and make shift solutions like blankets and oxygen tubes feeding into plastic boxes put over the infant's head. The result is that within about 2 million infant deaths per year, 1 million would be preventable with a proper incubator. So they have been working to design a solution that deals with all of the environmental issues like the fact that nobody can repair an incubator in a remote village other than the car mechanic, moving the incubator from the delivery room to the ICU on stairs and across unpaved surfaces since there aren't nice elevators, etc.

It was a pleasure to learn about the organization and if someone has some interest and skills (like mechanical engineering) or a fund looking to be green they might be a useful source. I have noticed and I feel like I suddenly awoke in a new world in the past month the sudden GREEN revolution reaching the business world. Folks who were in the Internet boom and bust that I know are starting to build companies that are focused on environmental sustainability. I can't get into everyone's details but one example is Terry Swack who is doing green design and a green marketplace with her start-up Clean Culture, Business Objects put a big green page for using BI to reduce global warming Insight, folks have created One Percent For the Planet that directs corporate funds to environmental non-profits, NYU had a conference on the social entrepreneurship pipeline Dave Berry is creating green fuel from bacteria, and another contact of mine is in stealth mode doing an environmental sustainability project.

I'm not sure what is driving this shift of business to look at green issues but my hope is that it is the consumer. The big black box that is where we get our stuff from is getting more transparent because information flies fast and far quickly with internet publishing, social networks, email, ratings systems, and blogs. The planet is at risk and getting back in control of the black box is important for business in order to satisfy consumer demands from it and to sustain itself. I loved the quote on the One Percent site

"There is no business to be done on a dead planet"
- David Brower
Environmental Visionary
1912-2000

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was bothering me today that I can go to the supermarket and put money into the changestar machine and it will credit me with 85% of the change that I dump into it for use in buying my groceries. BUT if I want to deposit change into my local Bank of America bank account I need to roll the change into these stupid change rolls. Why doesn't retail banking in ATM machines or within banks have a section where you dump your change into a container to deposit it. If banks want lifetime customers maybe they should start with folks like Madeline at age four or so. If I had a bank I'd put a change depositor machine into the mix and make a big deal of it in my advertisements to show that we care and we innovate.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since I was inspired by Dr. Berry to tackle a complex problem I was losing sleep last night about the question of obesity. In recent years Americans have been getting progressively fatter. This is nicely illustrated in the following map. The resulting complications of obesity are higher likelihood of diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and ultimately chronic heart failure – the big chronic diseases that people should be afraid of. The government pays for care of a lot of the obese with chronic conditions through Medicare and Medicaid so it strikes me that getting obesity under control in America would be a very good and strategic thing. Here are some thoughts on potential solutions that I could come-up with.

1. Exercise is not in the current American way of life, especially for men with slight to major obesity. These people aren’t really marketed exercise as either an activity or a product. Gyms currently target healthy fit people who want to improve performance or go the extra 10% because those people seem to be the folks who will sign-up for long-term gym memberships and keep paying for them over time. For the fatter people they need to show-up at the gym once in a blue moon and then are self-conscious and decide not to risk more embarrassment in sweat suits. The only marketing I can see really targeting obese men is Subway and that’s for eating sandwiches not exercise BUT was very successful. I am also thinking along the lines of the Netflix guys who basically started the company because the founder hated late fees on videos. It bugged him so he started Netflix. On my end I hate the fact that I pay for the gym even though I don’t show-up. So my concept is for a gym that was focused on weight loss and that charges members based on usage rather than membership periods. The system might even be able to provide pay for performance fees to pay for additional weight loss over a period of time for people with a BMI over a certain number. This would align the incentives of the trainers and the folks visiting the gym so that the trainers would need to work for the core hope that the people investing in the exercise would find. Secondarily I think the pay for performance gym could also be tied into insurer policies and workplace health initiatives better than the monthly memberships. In a measured membership system you could only get the benefits FREE if you meet your usage quota. This would reward use and discourage non-use. But it would still allow the individual to choose to pay if all they were going to use was a small amount of the service. It’s my contention that people who currently subscribe to big name gyms like BSC (Boston Sports Clubs) could be wooed away from these with a different and disruptive business model. The one above may not be right but the right one could be worked out by delivering a service and taking care to integrate feedback in terms of how people spend their dollars and what they are looking for in a new service. The investment into the market is a good timing. Look at the map. The obese are a growing market and they are huge.

2. There must be a pill that can safely suppress people’s appetites. The gastric bypass surgeries have been thought to limit hunger not necessarily by making the stomach smaller but by disrupting the primitive nervous system of the gut which is the predecessor to the more advanced nervous system of the brain. If marijuana can give you the munchies and folks on heroin don’t need to eat for days then there must be something in between that has a focused effect on just hunger/satiation. Let’s finally find this thing and give it to people so that they aren’t hungry all the time. It could make lots of money as a blockbuster drug too. Hopefully the drug isn’t nicotine.

3. Our culture is sick. One physician I met with at a conference of medical informatics executives let me know that we often confuse healthcare problems with health problems. A healthcare problem relates to how we care for diabetics. A health problem is that people despite it being bad for them continue to get obese and cause their risk for diabetes to get dangerously high. In other countries this isn’t happening. Folks in Europe despite having access to unlimited food like we do have been able to keep their weights in check because they culturally have a healthy lifestyle involving exercise and portion control (and some would say smoking). To fix our culture will take some overhauls somewhere but some ideas would be to bring health into the workplace as an issue just like we bring health insurance into the workplace. The two are connected. I went to a company a few years back that was founded by a man very into health and he had a large gym at the center of his building. It sounds stupid but having corporate sponsored gyms built into campuses and planned during working hours sporting events could be very helpful for employees. While productivity may go down the benefits would be to have lower long term health costs and better strength and conditioning in employees that could lead to better performance mentally and physically. Another option would be a national health initiative to build thousands of facilities for people to exercise more readily. Build more parks for kids. Have more little leagues sponsored by the Federal and local governments. I’d rather pay for sports than for dialysis, heart surgeries, and gastric bypasses.

4. Let’s figure out why people are obese in America rather than figure out that they are becoming more obese. Someone should pay for this research and figure out the answers to the top questions: Why are American’s becoming more obese? Which American’s are becoming more obese? Are any American population segments becoming less obese? Are there any factors in recovering from obesity to become non-obese? Can these factors be promoted? Is that guy from Freakanomics just going to tell us that we weren't measuring anything other than that the baby boomers are getting older so the whole population is getting fatter showing the whole obesity trend is a hoax? If we figured out some causes and scientific conclusions maybe something can be done that we haven’t thought about.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“You’re afraid of your imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.” From H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

I liked the idea that having a vision of something, a dream of what could be, carries with it a responsibility to work towards fulfilling the concept. It puts us as sometimes unwilling servants to the creation of our own ideas.

While I was on the plane I had the other idea. There was a passage about how the main character was reading a book that had been annotated by another character. It made me think of something that might be a cool concept. What if different people could collaboratively annotate a book analogous to when one person reads a book already underlined and written in by another. It wouldn’t be a very hard technology but basically everyone could be the equivalent of a Talmudic scholar writing in the margins around a book. Sure we have discussion forums on news articles but I was thinking of taking a political book like the one from Barack Obama and letting people add their thoughts. The reader can then choose to read thoughts or view underlined comments from other readers. Some could be in the same group like a class or a book group and others could be strangers like experts or just fans of the author/genre. The annotations could contain links potentially to other books when a book refers to content in another book. It might be especially interesting for something like Shakespear, the bible, or pop-fiction.

There is the barrier that people don’t yet read books in electronic form… but that could change any time now.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While flying into Indianapolis for a sales meeting this week I was looking down at the trees below. As usuala flying afforded some time to comtemplate solving the world's problems in impractical ways. The area I was focused on was energy. Given that carbon dioxide is a problem as an energy by product it is amazing how trees absorb solar energy and consume carbon dioxide as they go. So it would be nice if genetic engineering could take what we know of various genes and create a tree that could convert sunlight into electrical power that could be added into the overall grid of power. The great thing about it is that a forest of these trees would be a power plant so planting and nurturing the forest would be beneficial to the needs of humans for consumable power. Now this somewhat happens today but we burn the trees instead of maintaining them since it is the current most efficient way to extract energy from them.

I figured we could investigate one of two routes to accomplish this. The first would be to engineer battery fruit. The fruit portion of the trees would output high power batteries that could be connected into devices. This didn't appeal to me very much because it required harvesting the battery and seems like it could lead to problems like explosions in the forest when fruit became over ripe. The second would be for the tree to convert energy from sap/sugars flowed from the top to an organ near the roots that consumed the sap to output voltage and current. This organ would have a plus and minus node for DC current that could be wired into the grid through cables designed to look like vines run along the forest floor that would consolidate into a central station to pump the power outwards. The electric eel is the obvious place to look for genes that might provide a way to convert chemical energy into electricity.

I also was considering my body vs. my total genome regarding how much of my genome encodes information useful to intelligence. I figure that most of what my body does is very mechanical in nature. The heart is just a pump and connects to a big sewage and transport system, digestion is a process for obtaining energy but it is largely low value add when it comes to intelligence, locomotion is helpful but not fundamental since a quadraplegic can still be intelligent, and all of the parts to run individual cells of different types and just the basic cell functions is mostly unnecessary doing the same sorts of maintenance. So without putting any science behind it I figure about .05% of my genome is focused on intelligence and thought. It is probably a lot of information but not that many instructions? So I figure eventually we should get computers over the hump on some of the areas of intelligence by understanding the algorithms that result from the expression of these genes. Among them, my favorite, is the operant conditioning system. It's the functionality behind why clicker training dogs works so well and people will stand in front of slot machines for days on end. So I would find it interesting to create an AI prototype that focused just on implementing operant conditioning as a model in software to train a computer.

Unfortunately I have no time to play with genes, people, power, and computers.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday morning the ground was covered in ice from the stuff that fell from the sky. Sarah’s car got stuck so I used my steel-toed REI Kilimanjaro climbing boots to knock the ice from under her wheels. Afterwards I wandered around the corner to look for some ice melt to help get my car clear and to get the ice in her spot to melt. What I found was a large supply of day old marked down Valentine’s day candy and a new set of more expensive Easter candy. I did not find any ice melting substances. I then went to Stop and Shop and had the same experience. So my conclusion was that someone should make “Ice melting Valentine’s day candy” or the local venues should stock things that are useful in winter despite the predictions of tropical weather and parrots flying through the Boston rain forest until they actually see a passion fruit plant growing in Boston Commons.

On Saturday morning I watched “Good Morning America” since I was already up for three or four hours from the earlier showing that Madeline put on to demonstrate that she was bored at 4 AM that included readying some exciting board books, testing a new farm music CD, munching on blue berries, and playing pick-up quarters from the floor. On the show they featured a guy who had invented a robo-plow out of an old golf cart frame. It was actually not robotic but instead a remote control device that he could either control by looking out his window or control from his television using the cameras and lights mounted on the front of the plow.

That was the interesting thing to me. Maybe the true application of telepresence is to outsource common household tasks like lawn mowing, driveway maintenance, and vacuum cleaning to people living in countries where they can use fast internet access to control household appliances in other countries. I can imagine saying that we outsource our vacuum cleaning to India and our lawn to Africa at some point in 2015. The key is for the manufacturers of these pieces of equipment like Toro and Electrolux or some smart Japanese manufacturers to figure it out and start making these appliances and the service contracts now. They have outsourced the person who takes your order at McDonalds over that intercom so the time is near. Maybe it’s time to get a patent on the whole business model for remote controlled outsourcing of household chores before it is too late. But what will the neighbor’s kids do for cash?

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual."

- Mason Cooley

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was thinking about the issue of the web 2.0 price point since folks have been working towards making things closer to free per this ZDNet article. My thought on the world of the free is that is somewhat how software started. Things were "free" but that really meant that the software was integrated with a bunch of services to keep the hardware running. The model started to break down when folks like Microsoft, Lotus, and SAP figured out that software could be made well if it wasn't free. What I noticed in the mid-late '90s was that the Microsoft software was doing much better than the free world of Unix that was tied into vendor operating systems and had lots of strings attached that caused the non-commercial software to get fragmented into tons of versions. I would expect that Open Source will continue to have this problem but that isn't exactly what Web 2.0 is supposed to mean completely.

The iswithwith free stuff is that it tends to get worse over time against stuff that costs money. So eventually if you value the item you want it to be not so free. The one exception is when things are free because they come attached with something someone else wants. In the case of most internet services that are free the attached thing is advertising. The search engine game isn't new. We've been getting advertising with the phone book, and media outlets like magazines, newspapers, radio, and television forever. So the free stuff that is advertising funded ought to stick around for quite a while. But the entire web 2.0 world isn't advertising oriented... or is it?

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received a promotional item in the mail yesterday. It was a notepad that read at the bottom "Don't make a move without me" and had a small picture of the realtor at the top. The message was rather disconcerting when taken literally that I couldn't do anything without this stranger being involved. I promptly dropped the notepad into the trash with a twinge of guilt that I was wasting paper. It was frightening enough that I would have burned it if I could have.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was thinking of the problems that the airlines are having with screening luggage now that people are putting larger bags and more bags through due to increased security restrictions. When I thought back to our trip to California my general take was that baggage as a whole is a major pain in the butt. You have to get to the airport early because of it then you have to wait longer afterwards because of it. I heard on the report that some people have started to Fed-Ex their luggage to their destination in advance. This makes a lot of sense and could be taken to an extreme for an airline such that it covered "No baggage" flights as a specialty and re-routed all luggage through a non-carrier route including delivery to and from the doorstep of the passenger's leaving location and destination. That way when I got to my arrival city I would just need transportation to my hotel and my luggage would already be there when I arrived. If there wasn't any luggage on planes then they could board and leave faster with less time to turn them around, have less security issues with the baggage, reduce overhead related to handling the baggage in expensive airport locations and with large numbers of staff. Maybe the planes themselves could be re-engineered to hold more people or provide better and more comfortable seating on the plane because there wasn't any baggage on it.

Even if it doesn't happen... it would be a pretty cool concept.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing like a good poem to liven-up a mentoring group meeting. Here is one good reason why MIT's mentoring program is better than most. Guys like Lou Goldish have a lot of heart.

Ode to VMS Mentors
By L. Goldish

Every month I stand up here reporting,
The new ventures which I’ve just intook.
On the other end there sits Roberta,
Looking stern, so I’ll go by the book.

Just be nice, and describe the new ventures,
Don’t talk long; set a positive tone.
It’s your job to get each venture mentors,
Or you mentor that group on your own.

So please, guys, please raise your hands skyward,
And for that I’ll be thankful a bunch.
You guys really are super mentors,
And that’s why VMS gives you lunch.

As you know, VMS takes all comers,
Every Mahesh, Jin, Nguyen, or Jamie,
No matter what field their idea’s in,
Even if it appears cockamamie.

‘Cause you never know who’ll be successful?
We must help founders learn so much more.
And I know some of us find it stressful,
But come on, guys, that’s what we’re here for.

Yet, you think, “What the heck’s going on here?
Some ideas are just fanciful tours,”
But, remember the words of S. Greenblatt,
“Our job is to build entrepreneurs.”

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

About seven years ago ChannelWave hosted an e-lab team to do market research and generally help out the business for a semester. Since then every six months or so I get invited to the e-lab CEO reception at the Sloan school. This year they got nice and feisty with their RSVP standards and put out the following message along with their invitation.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center is pleased to announce the deployment
of our new networking software algorithms, motivated by Emily Post's
landmark masterpiece, ETIQUETTE

1.If you RSVP = YES and don't show, you are dropped from all future
invitations.
2.If you plead for forgiveness after the first violation you can be
placed on probation for one year..
3.If you wait to sign up 'til the day of the event, you are marked in
our database as "high maintenance"

I was quite frightened by this threat regarding failed etiquette so I arrived at the event after having been called by someone to confirm that I would arrive. So when I arrived they had not made a name tag for me so I assume that I may be accidentally uninvited because they can’t match my RSVP to my attendance.

The event was better than usual because now that I have been with VMS (MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service) for over a year I recognize a number of people who are entrepreneurs that I have worked with as well as the mentors. The event gave me time to chat with the folks I already knew and to discuss how they were doing with their ventures. I even connected with some new people like some folks that have interns from Norway that work at Boston University. That could be helpful for my fledgling business(es) given that I haven’t been able to convince the e-lab folks to volunteer for my newer ventures after submitting a project three semesters in a row. I also managed to rekindle some old ideas and got some juice in me again about making things go with some ideas that just had stalled like my "pet project".

I highly recommend following the rules for the etiquette because the event is a great one for MIT based folks who have engaged with Sloan in the past. It has a “no bozos” feel to the group which keeps me from watching my back for roaming lawyers and weirdo consultants and the folks there are all very interesting to chat with and very interested in making MIT based entrepreneurs successful. Even at the end of the evening last night I had a conversation with a man who said that he could now recognize faces by using striking imagery associated with someone's name (Brian would look like they had a brain sticking out of their face).

To whoever hands out the invites. Thanks for inviting me year after year.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yuval took a chance and pulled together a company around an idea he had a year ago. I recall chatting with him about the idea only about a year ago and he already has what appears to be the big IT bloggers excited with a product that is already headed for an alpha test. I can't say more than what is on the web (not that I really know more!) but I am wicked proud of Yuval and his team for following through with a good idea, refiniing it, and turning it into what appears to be a going concern at Eye-Fi.

Just yesterday Robert Scoble wrote a piece on eye-fi that basically says that once their device hits that he advocates it and I am sure many more folks are to follow.

Awesome... Totally awesome. Congrats Yuval!

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Someone asked me today why I don't give-up the low security world of consulting and entrepreneurship and get a nice secure position at a big company. I figured I might sleep better but then I watched Taxi Driver and this quote from Wizard, played by Peter Boyle (yeah the guy from Everybody Loves Raymond) seemed appropriate.

WIZARD
Travis, look, I dig it. Let me
explain. You choose a certain way
of life. You live it. It becomes
what you are. I've been a hack 27
years, the last ten at night.
Still don't own my own cab. I
guess that's the way I want it.
You see, that must be what I am.

A police car stops across the street. TWO PATROLMEN get out
and roust the JUNKIE from his doorway.

WIZARD
(continuing)
Look, a person does a certain thing
and that's all there is to it. It
becomes what he is. Why fight it?
What do you know? How long you
been a hack, a couple months?
You're like a peg and you get
dropped into a slot and you got to
squirm and wiggle around a while
until you fit in.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday night I finally got out to see Lisa and Dave’s Sweet Wednesday full band show play at Sally O’Brien’s. Sweet Wednesday after more than three years of work, probably a lot more actually, just released their first CD as a band. The CD is called Wherever You Go and the tracks are available for listening through the web site as well as an option to buy the CD online.

The show included some great moments. I heard the song that they wrote for Madeline for the first time and it was a rockin’ tune that I’m sure Madeline will come to love along with plenty of other folks. Unfortunately I don’t have a recording of the song yet but I am hoping to get one shortly from a live set. Sarah would have loved it when the band played “Take a load off of Annie” later in the evening including a strong showing from the audience, at least me, singing along. The Sweet Wednesday band shows are a ton of fun and anyone who is missing them is just missing out. American Idol was playing on the television behind the bar with nobody wanting to watch it while a real band, with songs written by the people playing the music was standing on a small stage making a lot of great sound. America needs to dropkick the synthesized Nick Lachey pop idol crap and start getting out of their homes to see some real people play music at their local bars.

That song from Hustle and Flow (Whoop that trick) has been stuck in my head since I watched the film. The basic notion from that movie was that this pimp puts his time into making music and creates a demo tape to show to a rapper who was successful. The rapper doesn’t give him much help but one of his prostitutes does promote the tape and it becomes a hit. So this is where Sweet Wednesday is now. They have the music mixed perfectly and it needs to get fed into the media machine so that people can realize that it is just some great music that needs to be put onto the radio play lists.

We also watched The Hotel New Hampshire on Friday night, probably the eighth time I’ve seen that movie. I never before noticed that the actor playing the younger brother named Egg was Seth Green. The story line has the father chasing after his dream of running a hotel only to have two failed ventures. He is described as wanting to start a hotel no matter what happened because he was a Gatsby, someone who chases their dreams even when they are failing over and over again. So being a musician or an entrepreneur like my sister and myself are puts us into that category of the American’s who keep trying and failing despite the more conservative folks providing sage discouraging advice to get a real job. It’s a long, suffering, depressing road full of nos and occasional maybes.

Why do we do it? What keeps us coming back despite the discouragement?

To find out listen to the Sweet Wednesday CD. Buy a copy for yourself and ten copies for each of your friends for birthday and holiday gifts. Get the barrista to play the music in your local coffee shop. Tell your friends they need to hear this music. Request Wherever you go from your local radio station. Complain that the CD isn’t in the shelf for local musicians at your local record store. Review the songs and put your comments in a podcast. Do something to get this CD heard and then drop me an email and maybe I’ll give you a hand the next time you have something that needs to be heard.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Marvin Minsky was working on artificial intelligence in the 1960's he discovered that when dealing with the press to describe some of his projects that the one story that the press always reported to the world was that he was working on a robot that plays ping pong. He was not in fact working on a robot that did this. He created the term eigenstory to describe this sort of scenario. The eigenstory is named after the types of results that often return from differential equations that are more a function of the system than the input. So the eigenstory is the one stable output from the media that people want to hear as the real story whether it is actually true or not. The important lesson from this from a marketing perspective is that you can feed the press your own version of what you are trying to make but they may only register an eigenstory result. Rather than fighting this result it might make sense to just learn from the output of what people are able to hear and repeat and try to create a product that does exactly what the story output of the system suggests. I have become less impressed with the individual genius of inventors given the basic view that products themselves do evolve out of the system. They are the eigenstories of societies that have become concrete.

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence recently given the recent slow roll backwards in the pro-choice/pro-life debates driven by actions like the South Dakota abortion ban. I am a believer that we will be superceded by the evolution of intelligent machines more equipped to explore the universe. Once the computers do become self-aware among the first problems that we will face is the restructuring of politics. Politics is how people are organized and governed but these intelligent beings won't be people or have the same interests and needs as people. To have a separation between humans and machines with two political systems will also pose the problems that laws that govern the interaction between them need to be consistent. But it's unlikely that there will be room for AI voting in the US legislature. The AIs would be unlikely to be trusted in the executive branch given their track record in movies like The Terminator.

The issue of AI reproductive rights would be a key problem. Any organized group of living and self-aware intelligent things is going to worry about how the group adds new members. The conventional religious answer is to become as plentiful as grains of sand. Since our silicon buddies are most likely made indirectly from processed sand that might not be a problem. But if an AI is developing and it probably will take about 10-14 months for one to develop rather than just machine them off a production line. Part of the AI development process will be the slow act of becoming self-aware with a unique personality learned through a neural process following a sexual intermixing of code from AI parents rather than a fabrication of a machine from parts in a factory. Will operating systems come into play and is Microsoft going to try to control life through a control economy while freedom is available through an open source market economy? What will the machines decide in their own right to life debate if they are allowed to self govern? When will a new machine be considered to be alive during it's development process? Will we decide for them when a new AI life can be terminated? Will the AIs have problems with gender inequalities, incest, rape, and abortions? Will they just follow the human lead or supercede our primitive understanding of life as is written in the bible or in scientific texts? All of these questions will be told in headline eigenstories in the future.

Personally I would like to play ping pong against a robot and it could be as far as we get in my lifetime.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jeremy while obsessing about the quality of the sound and focusing all of his brain cells not dedicated to filtering the Internet dating scene has tasked me with figuring out how to properly enclose and promote the revival of our college radio show in the form of a podcast. The initial test can be found on a blogger blog called Entropy and packaged as an RSS feed using Feedburner.

Among the interesting things that I found for promoting the podcast was the Podzinger site. It is a search engine that indexes podcasts into text and then allows you to search for the content and load the section of the podcast that raised your search results. At first glance this appears to be some incredible technology. What I found interesting about it given that I have been doing some research into the speech to text world is that Podzinger is a BBN technology. Now for those people who are unfamiliar with BBN, they were a big time government contractor building among many things the original infrastructure for the Arpanet, the government’s private predecessor to the public Internet. One speech to text expert had mentioned to me that BBN had a large contract in the 80s building speech to text for the government, probably the NSA, in order to filter international telephone calls. The system would convert International conversations to text and then identify conversations that might be worth listening deeper into for national security. If BBN has been working on this technology since the ‘80s for Uncle Sam then they probably are going to be getting to the point by now where they are good enough at it to really recognize what it happening when people are talking. They might even be better at it than the Microsoft Speech to Text engine.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having worked as a father with an infant for over three months I have been pondering various areas where modern technology could work in my favor to reduce some of the labor of handling a child. Since the average budget for a baby is unlimited given that other people are buying items off of a registry I don’t see why the makers of baby products don’t work on some of the challenges that I have faced. Below are some product ideas that I would be happy to talk to any private investor about turning into a large enterprise.

Problem area 1 - Feeding

The breast pump has gone through significant breakthroughs in the past century moving from manual extraction to an automated portable systematic way of pulling milk out of mothers. The good thing is that us fathers have bottles full of milk to feed our hungry children. The bad thing is that we have to sit and hold the baby while they suck down the milk and the bottle itself isn’t nearly as good as the breast. The breast doesn’t have any air in it while both the standard bottle and the ones where you put bags in the bottom both have air in them. Air means burps and milk spilling all over the place. That isn’t to say that burping isn’t needed for breast feedings. Since I can’t feed during the breast feedings I tend to get put onto burping duty. Unfortunately the burp cloth on the shoulder technique requires a lot of dexterity when switching shoulders and the burp cloth, which is really an old style diaper, tends to slip all over my shoulder and not cover the actual area where the infant burps, down my back. So here are some solutions to these feeding problems…

Bottle holder/feeder: They managed to build the automated feeder for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and that was back in the 1920s. A robotic arm using a visual sensor and feedback from the bottle that could properly hold the bottle in the baby’s mouth while they are seated in the perfect feeding position, strapped into a harness, would allow me to happily talk to the baby and keep my shoulder from getting sore scrunched into a ball. The baby would also be treated to the perfection of the perfect hold.

Hold it yourself long thin bottle: I noticed that the reason why Madeline doesn’t hold her bottles herself at three months is that the bottle is far too wide for her hands. When she was given a thin bottle, which is what formula samples come in, she was both able to put her hands around the bottle and keep it stuck in her mouth for an hour as we walked through Boston. A long thin bottle designed for the baby to hold the sides would allow me to be hands free during the feeding. I would imagine it could even be optimized to avoid air by looking like and working mainly like a syringe.

Electric bottle: If the pump can automate getting the milk out of the mother then the bottle should be able to automate getting the milk into the baby properly. The pump uses electricity to get the milk out while the bottle relies on air. The plastic bag in bottle solutions seem to have the best answer to the no air problem but they tend to get air into them anyways. Using a second hole and a pump to take the air out of the bottle (but not the liquid) would be a better bottle system.

Breast nipple: Breasts distribute milk through lots of little ducts and not one little hole. Why not a nipple that does the same. It would output milk more like a sponge with many small holes rather than one big one. That way it is harder for the air to flow back into the holes to put air into the bottle.

Burp collars: Since burp cloths are always sliding everywhere when you put a baby on your shoulder and need to be switched back and forth, a collar that provides spit-up milk catching optimization that can be worn during burping would be ideal. The collar would cover the shoulder and upper back areas and be easy to put on quickly when burping.

Problem area 2 - Entertainment

Babies like to be entertained and suffer from the unfortunate condition that they can’t use a remote control or even sit-up in bed. So the entertainment needs to be brought to them. Some progress has been made by the Fisher-Price corporation with bouncy seats that have vibrators in them and swings that move the baby around but these don’t seem to do the trick most of the time and the music that they play is monotonous and annoying to adults. Mobiles and play gyms are good but they require placing the baby in the right spot to see or play with them so when the baby is lying on the bed or in their seat they aren’t readily available. Plus the mobiles need to move to make the baby stimulated. Here are some solutions…

Exchangable music in toys using flash ram: Basically if the makers of toys that play music could just include an MP3 player in them instead of the annoying canned music then we could use a USB cable or a 8MB Flash RAM card to update the music. Otherwise it feels like we are trapped like an FAO Schwartz employee listening to music that can drive us into a psychotic state.

Ceiling projector or television: Babies can’t sit up. They stare at the ceiling most of the time and unlike the rest of the room, there is nothing to see on the ceiling but the lights and white paint. To improve the ceiling experience a projector mounted on the floor would should something stimulating, like the visualizations from Windows Media Player, Barney (hopefully getting eaten by rodents), or images of mom and dad saying important phrases. Using crystals their child can bring key advice back once the child leaves the mother planet and goes into their fortress of solitude on the North Pole.

Mobile mobiles: Mobiles are great but they need to be mounted from the ceiling. But if the mobile was hung from a little, but heavy remote control car, like an RV that could drive around the room to wherever the baby was it would allow them to be entertained anywhere. The mobile could then automatically be moved and jostled in time to music or based on feedback from the baby.

Mobile fishing rod: I already built one of these. It is like those fishing rods for cats when you drag a mouse around except it holds the mobile over the head of the baby and allows me to bob it up and down in synch with Techno music.

Humanoid robot: This would have obvious uses in holding and calming the baby without causing too much long-term emotional damage. It also would prepare the child for the next century, The Age of Intelligent Machines, when robots like Arnold Schwarzenegger will control the world.

Car seat train ride: The car seat is a safe place and Madeline can be calmed down often by swinging it around right after she is put begrudgingly into it. Some people don’t have my extreme upper body physique that allows me to swing around the car seat. What Madeline appears to want is a small indoor Disney style roller coaster that the car seat can be placed on that can ride her at a reasonable velocity up and down hills and with some turbulence. The seat is safe and everyone loves indoor train sets. It could require a lot of power but given that they already have electric cars this shouldn’t be too tough to power.

Problem area 3 – Changing and strolling

When moving about with a baby in a stroller or baby carrier a number of things can go wrong. One of them is that the baby needs to be changed and can leak gross baby refuse all over. Knowing that a change is needed could help reduce leakage since a quick change might catch a leak before it causes too much damage. Unfortunately babies enjoy wallowing in their own urine or feces. They only cry when bored or hungry so they are unlikely to warn that a diaper needs changing. The second issue for leakage is dealing with the problem that diapers don’t actually contain what I like to refer to as explosive diarrhea. After cleaning-up the baby, which has adequate technology short of the humanoid robot to do it for me, dressing the baby is a whole other story. Some solutions…

Diaper nano-technology warning system: Batteries have been providing little meters to determine their level of charge for a number of years now. They include these little chemical meters that don’t usually work until you try to puncture them with your fingernails and even then you can’t figure out whether they have a charge in them or not. Well if we can make battery testers then we can make diaper moisture testers. People working on the problems of moisture detection in buildings and construction are already placing small nano-tech sensors into walls to detect the moisture in them in order to alert building maintenance staff. Every bottle of Pepsi may have an RFID tag in it soon. So how about an active RFID tag inside of each diaper to measure the level of moisture and potentially other things. It could be polled by a monitor and would sound an alarm if the monitor registered that a diaper needed to be changed.

Diapers that don’t leak: Anyone with a baby knows that despite advertisements that you can pour a cup of water into a diaper that this isn’t good enough. A better advertisement would be if someone were to put eight carrots into a Cuisinart with peanut butter and then shot the resulting beverage out of a cannon at the diaper at close range. If the diaper showed no leakage then I would buy a container truck full of them. The folks who are doing aerodynamic optimization for the car companies should take a look at the physics of the baby projectile poop and redesign the diaper folds at the edges to contain it.

Clothing that’s easier to put on the arms (arm snaps): Maybe I am incompetent but I find it hard to put baby clothing on. The snaps are helpful but I generally get stuck for a long time trying to get the arms through the little holes. The folks at MIT doing knot theory should be able to create a surface that can be easily snapped together to avoid the dreaded pulling through of the arms.

Smart light blocker: When in a stroller the direct sun tends to get into Madeline’s face. We don’t like this because we were told that we would go blind if we stared at the sun. Madeline likes to stare at the sun and we would prefer to not have her go blind. We also don’t want to have her get sunburned. The problem with our stroller set-up is that the rain cover doesn’t shield the sun well. What I’d prefer was an arm that held a parasol that moved it automatically to being between the baby and the sun. If that isn’t possible then some other automation to block the sun would also work fine.

While this list is not likely to be set-up as SBIR challenge grants from the US Government I’m always in the market for some good products. Unfortunately soon all of these will be obsolete since Madeline is rapidly outgrowing the need for all of these. But plenty of new customers are born every day.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now that Sarah and I are back from our vacation in California we are ready to face the next big hurdle in our lives. After three months of maternity leave, on Monday, Sarah returns to work. While this was a known event it crept-up on us suddenly and now we are scrambling to figure out how to not become totally dysfunctional while having both of us work with an infant needing our constant care and feeding. The initial plan is to have me stay home on Monday, Sarah to stay home on Tuesday, for me to take Madeline to my mother’s on Wednesday, and take Madeline to Sarah’s mother in Bedford on Thursday. This leaves the conundrum of what to do on Fridays. But that isn’t a problem until it happens.

The return to work is taking a toll on both of us. I have to adjust to getting back into a rhythm for my work and it is tough with a mix of programming, marketing, management, sales, etc. to find the right priorities to get everything done. Sarah was nearly crying over not having gotten the laundry finished and put away last night along with the apparently relentless cancerous growth of clutter in our apartment. I think everyone suffers from a general haze in January trying to figure out what they are really supposed to be doing this year. I intend to spend more time selling and less time developing or marketing but that may be a tricky proposition. I have been getting plenty of calls from people offering director of product management jobs but I have been turning them down because the arrangements at my current gig are still quite good and the whole scene around personal knowledge management or medical data warehousing haven’t played out yet. I belong more on the initiation phase than as a clean-up guy even if it pays better to just organize a bunch of people already rowing a ship out of synch.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had this idea about a year ago. I am filing it under things I'll never continue working on.
Among the areas that made this less appealing were competitors and I think that I was going to mainly copy a site that focused on doing this for books called allconsuming.com

Hypercrit – thoughts

Mission: To create the largest independent online rating system for media and high-tech products for the community of bloggers.

The system will need to have a source data set of items that can be critiqued. To begin with it can be a basic database of items like any publicly available database of movies or even a way to allow people to find an item on Amazon and import the item.

The business model is that there are many companies today that have a large inventory/database of products that seek increased mind-share among consumers. These companies include online merchants such as Amazon.com, Netflix, and itunes as well as content providers connected to the specific industries like CNET for hardware. This list could also be expanded to organizations like comparison shopping engines like PriceGrabber and Froogle. Many of these organizations thus far have mainly built their own rating and recommendation engines into their systems.

This is fine but may not be the model preferred by bloggers to rate and recommend products because the content does not result in information included into their blog. By creating a blogger friendly tool for publishing ratings to individual blogs that includes their promotional objectives a business model can be reached that allows bloggers to achieve affiliate revenue or credits from these companies for driving traffic and it allows the online merchants to drive increased consumption through them as a channel. The central hub for opinions can also be a source to drive increased mind-share for the vendors.

In order to get the blogging community interested in a tool existing blogs with strong influence could be targeted directly as well as the major blogging tools (Movable Type, blogger, etc.) Specific early champions of the tool would be critical in the process.

Constituents

Bloggers:

• Publish reviews and ratings of products
• Improve look and feel of blog entries for ratings/reviews
• Simplify the process of publishing or re-publishing ratings
• Drive increased blog traffic through active rating
• Have ratings included in a central repository
• Link to other blogger opinions
• Find other bloggers with similar opinions
• Achieve affiliate revenue/credits from vendors

Merchants:

• Sell more products
• Increase traffic on specific items
• Syndicate relevant blog content
• Achieve new affiliate revenue from actively publishing bloggers
• Increase sales within blogger communities

Comparison shopping sites/publishers:

• Increase traffic
• Achieve new affiliates from actively publishing bloggers
• Add relevant content from syndicated blogs

Non-blogger consumers:

• Quickly obtain reviews
• Learn more about reviewers through blog entries
• Quickly link to products for use or from merchants from blog entries (e.g. add to Netflix queue, get showtimes, compare prices, etc.)

Content producers (media companies – movie makers, book publishers, etc.)

• Drive increased consumption of listed media
• Achieve faster time to market for new media items
• Access the influential independent “blogger” press

Competitors

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As someone not too afraid to fail at things I am currently a member/founder/leader of two organizations. This week was the post Labor Day, come to Jesus, come to the meeting to see who is really a member week for both of them. On Monday the Boston Bootstrap network held it’s second meeting at Flat Top Johnnies and we had a total of three people at the meeting. This was a bit of a drop-off from the 25 or so who attended the first month but Bijoy, the founder of Bootstrap Austin, is a big proponent of quality over quantity. So that group will be slowly growing from our small core of three people.

The Off The Shallow End improv group on Wednesday met where the general concept was that anyone who didn’t show-up was going to be declared by default someone unable to perform in the group going forwards. By sending out a stern message our leader, Suzy, got replies back with potatoes in or out from most of the former class. We lost four people including Gadi, who couldn’t make the commitment because he is starting a class this fall on data structures. So our Improv group has shrunk from 11 people graduating in the class to about six dedicated improvisers. The nice thing about having the smaller set of people involved now is that we can all commit to working harder and more focused on improving. We spent a while talking about getting a director for the group and Suzy and I butted heads about how we needed to fix some problems independent of a director with regards to work ethic for the group. After a long pow-wow we got to doing some improv and had some great scenes based on detailing an environment.

So fall is a time of contraction and harvesting for my hobby groups. I like the tightening of the groups to their essentials. It makes me more comfortable to see commitment and common interests in a few people than to wonder about it with a larger group that doesn't all share common purposes. It makes me think back to the Good to Great and Electric Acid Cool Aid Test discussions about success of organizations being about getting commitment for the question - "Are you on the bus or not?" and getting the people who want to be off the bus off as well as upping the ante for the people who want to be on the bus.

Posted by Melody at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The CEO of Forrester sent an email to lots of people about changing from bowties to diamonds and assumed somehow that people know what you are talking about when you say <> or >< with regards to working with customers.

;)

Excerpt:
"Using Jack Welch’s model of servicing the companies you build products for (the diamond: <>) versus merely making the products (the bow tie: ><) revolutionized the buyer/seller relationship in big industry."

Read Bowties to diamonds if you are interested. I didn't bother to try.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you have ever tried to sell enterprise software and been presented with responding to a dreaded RFP. This is what an RFP would be like if someone was interested in buying your house. I dug this off my old computer too. I am not sure why I wrote it.

Home Owner RFI

This RFI (Request for Information) has been sent to you because you have been selected as a potential vendor for Daniel Housman and his family in the area of HOME OWNERSHIP. Mr. Housman and his family have contracted our consulting firm Amoco, Price, and Kraft to aid in the selection process. Your response is due on [ print yesterday’s date] in order to be considered for a demonstration of your home. If your home is selected for the next round of our purchasing process you will be contacted via a secret code and be provided with a key to unlock the code. In order to respond you will first need to send back an NDA that you have received this and are not intending to show it to anyone else.

If the house burns down will I be able to replace it the next day? What tools will you use to rebuild it?

How many houses have you sold before and to who? Can you provide 50 references of people who have purchased properties from you and which types of things such as bathrooms, swimming pools, or solar panels were included in each one.

Can your house fly?
If not what are your plans to make your house fly in upcoming remodeling?
Can your house fly if we remodel the basement?

Our family would like to move our current swimming pool to where your swimming pool is because we like our swimming pool better. Can you describe any tools you are offering with your house to allow us to do this? Is there a price break for bringing our own swimming pool (REQUIRED)

What materials was your house built with? Please explain how it was built describing each layer in the houses architecture.

Does your house support all standards for power, television, and reception? We have some appliances that we bought in England and would like to use them in our new house including a telephone – France , a toaster oven – China, a Television and VCR – England. Please describe how your house would accommodate these appliances.

Does you house provide broadband access?
Do your outlets support industrial machinery standards?

How many people can be fit into your house before it crumbles t o the ground. Please provide any load testing you may have done on your house such as total volume of people that can be fit into the building as well as what will happen during particularly active periods with varying numbers of participants such as

A) A dance party
B) Riot
C) Tae-Boe

Have you ever held a party with more than 800 people in your house before? IF so please provide the names of some of the attendees at the party.

Home features – We are evaluating features of our home please enter whether you have any of these features and whether it is a “Minor”, “Moderate”, “Major”, or “Impossible” home improvement to improve your home to meet our requirements

Included – Included in price of home
Minor – Small adjustment to furnishings
Moderate – Cosmetic change such as paint, interior modification
Major – Structural change to walls, floors, etc.
Impossible – Beyond the laws of physics

Kitchen - Requirements

Big Sink big enough to fit 100 unwashed dishes
Self-Cleaning Oven with top grill
Microwave oven
Sub-Zero Fridge
Wooden Cabinets
Wooden floor
Washing machine and dryer
Robot that cooks and cleans for me

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I nest and clean the apartment I find old thoughts that I had locked in laptops like my NEC Versa from the nineties. Here is an example showing that I was still obsessed with start-up survival even back when Survivor's first season came out. I actually watched it back then...

Lessons learned from the TV show "Survivor"

Although the show Survivor is only a representation of a sample of one group of people in a scenario that is obviously contrived, when watching it I can't help but make some observations about the nature of competition among people that can be applied to competing