jm3's posterous

Founder of 140 Proof, the social stream ad platform. Product inventor, pitchman. Coding at high speed since the TI-85. Find me on twitter or dribbble as jm3.
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Blasting goodness into the world since 1977.

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2007 (63)
2006 (49)
2005 (46)
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1999 (4)
 

Patterns in movie posters

(download)

 

originally via http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/64047251.html

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RIP mister Dan Sicko.

Honored awesome collaborator, culture commentator, and friend. You acknowledged me here:

https://skitch.com/jm3net/f47cm/techno-rebels-jm3

I acknowledge you, here. Thank you for all the awesome things you did.

 

Yours with notes of celery and anti-matter,

jm3

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Game-ifying social change: Yoxi, my buddy’s new startup (NYC)

Kickstarter Meets Change.org

Yoxi : Change the World

Everyone wants to make a difference in the world, but many startups are busy chasing dollars, dreams, and the competition. I just learned about a new startup,  Yoxi ("yo-see") that my old friend Josh Fischer from grade school is involved with, which aims for a higher goal.

Yoxi takes the game aspects that I tried hard to push at [crowdsourced photo-funding site] Zivity — by voting for a team, you take on responsibilities to promote and evangelize it — except that Yoxi wraps these social game mechanics around Kickstarter-like social change projects. So teams pick projects, make videos to promote them, and then compete to get funding and change the world. It reminds me of Kickstarter meets Change.org — and that's meant very much as a compliment!

Slick and Glossy

Yoxi is very much the kind of "non-tech" startup I'm known to roll my eyes at: everyone looks very hip and fashionable, the site and the videos are very well-produced, there are no founding engineers or technical back-end aspect, etc. — but Yoxi seems like an awesome company built to do good things… and Josh is a very funny guy. I think they'll do quite well.

Check it out

Watch some of their videos to get a feel for the site:
The FAQ has a nice visual section on how the game mechanics work too:

My advice to Yoxi at this point:

1. Make sure there’s something for all types of users to do. 

 

Right now, some aspects of Yoxi feels like there's nothing  for the middle of the 80:19:1 group to do — power-users can create videos, and casual users can tweet, but it doesn't feel like much of a community … yet.

The "80:19:1" principle in online communities is based on the famous Pareto Principle or "80:20" rule: the idea that 20% of people contribute 80% of the work.

The 80:19:1 rule turns 80:20 on its head and shows that, in online communities like YouTube, Flickr, Kickstarter, Github: 
  • 80% of visiting users are passive consumers who will watch a video or click a link, then ultimately leave. These are the vast majority of "silent" users in most communities, who generate a tidy sum of activity and ad revenue, but don't visibly contribute to the site.
  • 19% of users will go the extra step and vote on items, rate things, post comments, flag issues, etc. These users are sometimes called "curators" or enthusiasts.
  • finally, just 1% of users (one percent!) will go "all the way", creating and uploading their OWN original content that excites other users and pulls them into the site, fueling growth.
These ratios aren't exact, obviously, but they've been empirically shown to repeat themselves in community after community. What the 80:19:1 rule suggests, in community design, is that there needs to be variable levels of engagement for each type of user. If your site only has things to do for the 1%'ers, then 99% of your users will be confused as to what to do (this is a standard "expert community" problem).

Yoxi is just getting started, so partly this might be a cold-start / Catch-22 problem; with more engaged users, the site might getmore engaging … but until that happens, Yoxi should experiment with different ways to get users to engage and share more. Too many of the video pages are simply … EMPTY.

2. No video embeds? What up with that?!

A huge part of how Youtube won (besides Flash) was by allowing their video player to be embedded on other sites so that videos could travel. Bloggers, social networkers, and reporters all used YouTube embeds to enhance their own sites and give YouTube additional distribution. Yoxi uses some super-slick Flash video player, above, but it doesn't allow embedding. If they had, I would have embedded their videos in this post.

So check out Yoxi, see what you think, vote on some projects, and change the world.

PEACE

jm3

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My rough notes from Startup Lessons Learned, the conference, 2011 #SLLCONF

ERIC RIES
ER accepting entrepreneur in residence at HBS
Validated learning: rather than six months of product dev, could have been a single landing page; since there were no downloads, didn't even need a page for the click to land (since no one clicked)

MITCH KAPOR
"Lean Startup is a process innovation that manages risk down Faster"- Kapor. Invention of the "social term-sheet"
The risk of self-funding; too easy to self-delude.

DAVID BINETTI (@dbinetti), VOTIZEN
"Business model designer"; Mentor at Hacker Dojo
If you're in this for the money, you're high! (expected value comparison of goog v startup)
Why lean: convert market risk to technical risk
Pivot: a restatement of your business model
Pivots derive from a vision, not testing

simplified 2-column Steve blank grid
Product
Problem
Channel
Demand
Market
Competitive

(McClure's: AARRR)
Acquisition
Activation
Referrals
Retention
Revenue

No (pre-sales) signature means "No Sale".
This is why PR and vanity metrics are so dangerous.

PASCAL PEREZ - WEALTHFRONT
Democratizing access to great money managers & funds
Reducing risk and code inventory with continuous deployment

LEAN UX / @CLEVERGIRL
Design is a large stack, not a small one.
Users > Needs > Uses > Features > User Stories
"UX is not a *new* field; it's a very mature, established field."
Think. Make. Check. is the "design version" of Build. Measure. Learn.
What's missing has been: FLOW. (not an acronym). Don't get caught up over-thinking, pre-thinking, and un-tested ideas.
Make: prototypes, wireframes, value prop, landing page, hypothesis, comps, deployed code
Revelation: custdev = UX
Goal-driven, but OUTCOME-focused
TaskRabbit: by rushing a day's A/B learning, saved $26k by conv. bump
Prove/Improve, or Test/Invest (loop)

COOPER / TaskRabbit / Pivotal Labs
product stewardship
validated mobile experience framework
* Integrated Team

THE LADDERS / Jeff - "getting out of the deliverables business"
from Waterfall to Agile product experience creation
1. Live Style Guides including code
2. Collaborative design sessions
3. Pairing devs and designers
Learning: human to human communication higher fidelity than human to paper

JOSH / LUXR - How to work with a designer

STEVE BLANK
When The Boardroom is Bits
Experienced advice matters
Solving the early stage
Turning the boardroom to bits

Tn things we learned
1. From east India co in 1650 to the Harvard MBA in 1908
2. Tech entrepreneurship + VC = ~ 50 years old. Startups ,= small big co's
3. Startups are temp co's to search for a sustainable business model
4. Startups need their own tools: c. discovery, c. validation,
5.
6.
7. Business model canvas = the scoreboard / Alexander Oscarbangerblang
8. agile dev is how we build startups
9. Startups that pivot 1 or 2 times have better money raises, better growth, less likely to scale prematurely. Startups with helpful mentors 7x more money, 3.5x better growth than ave. startup
10. we've cracked the code in teaching entrepreneurship

The Startup Genome dataset - sounds interesting

VC has 50-100x the pattern recognition opportunity that u have
"The Early-Stage Experience Gap"
Why have a board meeting?
 Fiduciary responsibility, from investors to their LPs
 Board can ask hard questions based on their 50-100x experience bump
 Guidance
 Obligation
Board meetings are heavyweight processes; the antithesis of lean
(we're still acting like it's the 19th century)
Performance rather than a snapshot.
WHY

Make the Boardroom Bits - connect advisors to/from anywhere
Focusing on what's important:
- the search for the business model
- what at the metrics for the biz model search, which hypothesis should I test

Proposal: Continuous Information Access
Invest one hour week
Structured blog
Un- structured data
Formal business model canvas
Realtime advisor / board member feedback
(came out of the Stanford class)

Basically the jm3, "open-source your process" methodology
Customer development, shown real, no sandbagging, pressure to update

Productized: LeanLaunchLab.com
jdf@mdv.com plus Shawn whatevs from Menlo Ventures
ann@floodgate

SUNEEL GUPTA / GROUPON
Theater and Startups
The Wright brothers owned a bike shop in Ohio, and none graduated college
1. what does it LOOK like. (prototyping UIs) - "PROTO-CASTING", ie a narrated screen cast where you talk through using the aspects
2. what is the PROBLEM we're solving?
3. Blah blah comix sans

Parkinson's Law: Complexity will swell to fit the amount of time allotted

Sent from my iPad


-- 

John Manoogian III  (@jm3)

140 Proof - Founder, Chief Nerd

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Ignite Speed-Talks: Lean Startup / Lessons Learned

[NOTE: I WILL UPDATE THIS POST SOON WITH LINKS TO THE VIDEOS]

Had a great time last night at Ignite: Lean Startup, a collection of speed presentations patterned after the Pecha-Kucha style in San Francisco, organized by Eric Ries.

Everyone did a great job. Public speaking scares most people, and timing your presentation to slides that auto-advance is tough. These were the best of the bunch:

Gleb Budman (@budmang) from Backblaze

Gleb shared an awesome walkthrough of how Backblaze developed a 70TB server in a plywood box.


Jess Lee (@jesskah) from Polyvore
polyvore

Jess gave a great talk on agile product development using "Fake Doors", a technique we use to evaluate demand for a feature before building it.


Shivani Khanna (@sk_shivani) from Fliptoast

fliptoast

Shivani gave an inspired, funny talk about the advantages of being lean without a full dev team.

 

Paul Howe (@phdc), from BlueSpark

bluespark


Paul shared an awesome example of lean startup prototyping using GreaseMonkey, which is a favorite trick of mine.

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"Don't let not having the tools be your trepidation!" — The Business Card Guy, at your fingertips.


Prank calls will never be the same again. 

 


Internet nerds will be familiar with the classic "Business Card Guy" video, a bizarre youtube cult classic of a motivational speaker type guy berating some bozos about the low quality of their business cards, and the high quality of his own ridiculously glossy business card.

Business Card Guy

Now the best quotes from this internet classic video are yours, for free, and are just a click away, for all your prank-calling and office hijinks needs. Introducing:

The HTML5 Soundboard for the Business Card Guy.

HTML5 is pimp

Featuring:

  • Full HTML5 sexiness
  • rspec tests
  • Capistrano deployment
  • works in Safari, Firefox, iPhone Safari, and Google Chrome (sorry if you use some horrible windows browser thing)
  • includes tiger blood
  • built on my totally sweet Sinatra-Template site boilerplate code.

Check it out, share it with friends, amaze your mom, baffle your dog: The HTML5 Business Card Guy Soundboard.

If you haven't seen the original video, you can find it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk


License:

The Unlicense (aka: public domain)

 

Code available on Github.

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Geeky things I've done this week

Learn to use Vagrant to manage local virtualized dev environments

Found and fixed an internal performance bug using NewRelic
Deployed 3 Rails migrations

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Jamie’s Awesome Internet Fame Talk: The JM3 Summary

I work with Jamie Wilkinson at 140 Proof, and Jamie's an expert on being "internet famous. He gave a great talk at the Vimeo Festival on promoting your work online, and I've summarized his presentation for those of you who are too lazy to watch the whole thing. :) Link follows at the end.

ONE. "Write Blog Poetry" - encourage *many* interpretations of your piece by combining multiple catchy headlines (some used in post), pictures, video w/music

TWO. "Ride the Wave" - make work that's relevant to existing online things that that are already popular and trending (remixes, riffes, parodies)

THREE. "Publish Early & Often" - it's impossible to predict what will become a hit, so don't bother — instead, release as quickly as possible — ideally spend less than a day on a project — in order to increase the chances of pick-up.

BONUS 1. - The "Eggbasket Theory" - there are no "influentials"; anyone can launch an awesome project that goes viral, don't focus on being the "influential" guy, focus on making LOTS of projects.

BONUS 2. - The "Min. Effort / Max. Output" Curve: strive to hit the fast, valuable left side of the curve, quantity is better than quality.

BONUS 3. - Pre-Document. Telegraph your intent first with a page / blog post / video (ala Kickstarter), and you might even get press even before you start

WATCH FULL VIDEO HERE:

THEN GET FAMOUS.

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quotes are back.

"You're not thinking about who f*cked you if you're looking at the cookie."
— Scott Banister

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
— Peter Drucker

Creativity does not require invention. At it’s best, creativity is an effort to reveal the truth, no matter how elusive or complex it may seem. It’s 12 Angry Men, not Athena emerging from Zeus’ head.
— MB

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.
— Edward de Bono

Traditional thinking is all about “what is.” Future thinking will also need to be about what can be.
— Edward de Bono

Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
— Walter Gropius

“The past must be invented, the future must be revised. Doing both makes what the present is.”
— John Cage

“Music is continuous, it is we who turn away.”
— old Indian saying

“[HD video] is terrible. But it’s a fantastic terribleness.”
— David Lynch

“Consulting is where product companies go to die. IBM is the most famous example. So starting as a consulting company is like starting out in the grave and trying to work your way up into the world of the living.”
— Paul Graham

“Strategy is simply the recipe for why.”
— me

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
— Adlai Stevenson

“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.”
— Freeman Dyson

“If you can measure it, it’s not innovation.”
— chad stoller, consulting hero

“The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, I’m convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.”
— Rainer Werner Fassbinder

“Yet in leaving home I didn’t lose touch w/my origin because lo mexicano’s in my system. I’m a turtle; wherever I go I carry home on my back.”
— Borderlands, La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua, Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer.

“Man mußden Menschen vor allem nach seinen Lastern beurteilen. Tugenden können vorgetäuscht sein. Laster sind echt.”
(”One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.”)
— Klaus Kinski

“Everything affects everything else.”
— richard saul wurman

“But [LISP] macros are like having these high-powered band-aids, when what you want is not to be wounded in the first place.”
— Steve Yegge

Our internet connection bounces like [dj] godfather’s girlfriends.
— jason pratt

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood or assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint Exupery

“It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.”
— RFC 1925

“They should make a movie of the dances that i do while i wait for my code to compile.”
— me

If your [web] page is like a nice orderly cemetery, moving some of the headstones around or inflating them really can upset the balance of the space. But if your page is like a basketball court, things get out of balance if the elements don’t all respond to the movements, expansions, and contractions of their peers.

I’m not talking about gratuitous typographical animation, but about essential typographical adaptation to the constraints of the rendering environment and the needs of the user.

It’s about porting visual design intelligence into runtime, out of “design time.”

– Todd Fahrner on design thinking

jm3theDestroyer: it’s always been a pet peeve of mine when people use the dirty fonts bone stock, with no post-processing.
Dcnstrctr: “dirty fonts bone stock”
jm3theDestroyer: that’s the pull quote, there.
Dcnstrctr: obviously.


“Think before you click before you design.”
— Ian Anderson, the designers republic

“A lot of my books I’ve intended for children primarily, but nobody would ever publish them as children’s books. I don’t know many children. And I don’t know if I really remember what it was like being a child… Children are pathetic and quite frequently not terribly likeable. I don’t really know any babies. I’ve never known any babies.”
— Edward Gorey.

“Uh yeah, can you turn the sleep knob up to 7, turn the water knob up to 10 and push the food slider back down to 4 for
today, but tomorrow food will need to be back at 7 and sleep back down to 6. if you forget, everything will break so don’t forget okay?”
— elly.org

“Some people do not understand that hacking is an art, a form of artistic expression. Each advisory I write is a statement about how the intricate mechanisms put in place to do nothing but make money are ultimately flawed.”
— Simple Nomad

“if i had known it was harmless, i would have killed it myself.”
— the straight girl, regarding the mosquito hawk. ( a scanner darkly, philip k. dick)

“Everything is surprisingly difficult.”
— Lucy Suchman

Another classic intimidation with which to begin a letter is:

“According to our records…”

It reminds you at once, with that plural pronoun, that the enemy outnumbers you, and the reference to “records” makes it clear that they’ve got the goods. There is even a lofty pretense to fairness, as though you were being invited to bring forth your records to clear up this misunderstanding. You know, however, that they don’t suspect for an instant that there’s anything wrong in their records.

Besides, you don’t have any records, as they damn well know.

“sex times technology equals the future”
— J.G. Ballard

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
— Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

“XSL is a big step back, it mixes everything up again and puts everything in the hands of the few people who can understand this weird declaration thing which is simultaneously both past and future and in which nothing really ever ‘happens.’”
— michael leventhal

XSLT is what every programmer expected HTML would be, before actually using [HTML].
— me

“Although implode() can, for historical reasons, accept its parameters in either order, explode() cannot.”
— the PHP manual

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