Twitter

I'm now on twitter, the microblogging service that limits user entries to 140 characters. I'm msederberg, feel free to follow me. Still trying to make sense of how twitter will fit into my daily routine and what my strategy will be. I've noticed that some bloggers that I'd followed pretty closely, such as Paul Allen and Guy Kawasaki, have greatly decreased their blog volume and instead twitter many times a day.

However, the twitter crowd that I "follow" is still a very small subset of the internet group that I'm usually in touch with. It seems like twitter is still in the early adopter stage, but it's growth is impressive: 343% since last year.

I recently downloaded TweetDeck for my Mac and this has greatly increased the usability of twitter for me, since now I get popup notifications when someone I'm following tweets, instead of needing to check back to the twitter website. Using TweetDeck, I searched for recent tweets about NURBS and T-Splines and a few other topics and began to follow the users who had tweeted about those subjects. I feel like I'm slowly being connected to a relevant twitter community.

Bob McNeel

Great article on Bob McNeel, one of my mentors, and a member of our board of directors. Bob has a unique, refreshing way of doing business, as you'll read in the article.

Here's one excerpt:

"When I arrived in the offices of Robert McNeel & Associates in Seattle, Bob was on the phone, telling the caller that Rhino probably wasn’t the best option for what they were looking for and that he (or she) should probably look for a specific vertical application for the industry that they were in as it might do more. Throughout my two days with Bob and the development team I was trying to figure out why this laid back approach to developing and selling CAD tools worked. In the most capitalist nation on the planet McNeel is an anathema to corporate culture. There is almost a total lack of greed and it’s incredibly refreshing.

"While CAD vendors spent millions in marketing, McNeel & Associates doesn’t, instead preferring their customers to be the product’s ‘marketeers’, spreading the good word by mouth and if that’s a slow process then so be it. The McNeel ethos is to listen to the customers, help customers, because if the customers are happy, the products do well. It’s not about milking customers."

Business principles from Ratatouille

The Economist has a nice article highlighting the resurgence of Disney, and paralleling it with the premise of Ratatouille--that for the long-term success of a company, it's important to value innovation and encourage quality work, not to merely chase dollar signs.

Lenovo +/- stat

There is a new stat this year in NBA box scores: the "+/-" stat. I recently discovered that this is called the Lenovo Stat, and is designed to measure a player's overall contribution to the team. Specifically, it says what the point differential was when that player was on the court during the game--whether his team outscored, or was outscored by, the opponent.

Here's the box score from the Utah Jazz/New York Knicks game today.

You'll notice that nearly all the Jazz players have a positive "+/-" stat, and nearly all the Knicks have a negative "+/-" stat. This is because the Jazz led the entire game.

However, one interesting note: David Lee on the Knicks played over 37 minutes, and had a positive Lenovo stat: +3. This means that when Lee was in the game, the Knicks outscored the Jazz! In the 11 minutes Lee wasn't in the game, the Jazz outscored the Knicks by 14, and the Jazz ended up winning by 11. So, even though Lee only had 14 points, you could point to the Lenovo +/- stat and say he was easily the MVP of the game for the Knicks.

One clunky laptop per child?

Like most socially-minded geeks, I have been fascinated with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Mr. Negroponte, a tech guru at the celebrated Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unveiled his dream in 2005 to make laptops available to children in third-world countries across the planet. The idea was to mass produce the laptop (he would only accept orders in quantities of 1 million or higher) and make it robust enough to withstand poor conditions.

Unfortunately, the early reviews are somewhat mediocre. The Economist cites poor implementation of the technologies, lackluster go-to-market execution, the emergence of commercially available low cost computers, which the OLPC people regarded as a threat rather than competitors, and, most disappointingly, the "hubris, arrogance and occasional self-righteousness of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board."

It will be interesting to see if the OLPC is able to succeed. Hooray if it does; if it doesn't, it will provide a valuable lesson about how even the most high-minded of ideas should not be exempt from the rigors of external critiques.

Successful cross-cultural relations

Kwintessential has some great info about establishing relationships with people from foreign cultures.

Is Facebook dying?

I'm a huge fan of Facebook as a tool for keeping in touch--I'm even currently trying to push my great-aunts and uncles to join, as well as my extended family, so we can all get to know each other better.

But is Facebook on the decline? Perhaps, according to this article.