I think about how I made fun of that thing called an iPod when I first saw one as a sophomore in high school. 4GB of music? Who the hell would ever need that much music? I remember buying a 12inch powerbook from the first apple store in downtown Palo Alto as a senior in high school. I also remember the moment I realized that Apple had taken over my generation… It seemed 90% of the students at Princeton were using an Apple notebook of some sort by my junior year. I had a similar feeling this past weekend while I was walking down the aisle of an airplane. Damn, EVERYONE has iPads. The legacy is both broad and deep. Steve has touched us all. Even if you are running Windows Vista, whilst listening to music on a chocolate colored Zune, those products were created with a certain competitor in mind.

The impact and the scope of achievement is what you think about first. But then your brain, acting as a sieve catches but a few moments, and focuses deeply on those. There’s a moment that embodies my image of Steve Jobs more than any other. A day that in the grand scheme of things wasn’t as momentous as others, but highlights the playful attention to perfection that I will always remember.

In 2005, Apple was crushing it with iPod Minis, the most popular music player on the market. In a special event at the end of the year, Steve Jobs explained this, and then says, we’re going to kill it. We’re going to take it off the market and replace it with something better.

Among the original iPod campaigns there was this concept of 1000 songs in your pocket. In a keynote years before, Steve Jobs had unveiled it by removing his iPod from the pair of jeans that he had been wearing the entire time, almost as if to tell the world… Oh hey what’s this in my pocket… I had no idea it was here… Where did this come from… I had no idea… More importantly, it demonstrated that it wasn’t a burdensome, circular cd player that fits comfortably into nothing and needed to be carried around.

“So, let’s get a camera.”

Re-watching the film, this was clearly the pre-planned verbal queue. It’s time. The camera that Steve Jobs asked for provides a close up of the uniquely dark pair of jeans he was wearing that day (dark blue makes for a great background color). With the camera in place, you can sense Steve’s excitement. This is a moment that had been practiced and he knew it would be a hit, the unveiling of the iPod Mini killer. He puts his hand in his front jean pocket to reveal that it’s empty. He says, the original iPod was all about 1000 songs in your pocket * he pauses* and then, with a casual point to that weird, little, front pocket on some jeans he then asks the audience, “Have you ever wondered what this pocket is for?” Immediately, the audience understands… In this little, tiny pocket, hides the next iPod. The anticipation is at a fever pitch. How can it be that small? The cheers from the audience start preemptively. He slides his fingers into the pocket to reveal the next big thing, a pearly white device, the iPod Nano. The look on his face says it all. Ain’t this fun.

On the surface, I see a pair of dark blue jeans and some clever showmanship. Below it, I acknowledge the attention to detail required to manifest, in 5 short seconds, the sum of the efforts of thousands of people over many years. To create those awe-inspiring seconds, one must work for years in pursuit of perfection. We all yearn for those seconds, in one way or another. It’s easy to stare at the pinnacle and say that we too would like to be there. It’s another thing to build the foundation and the structure upon which to stand. Build the foundation and the structure and then, and perhaps only then, does it really matter what kind of jeans you’re wearing.

A book represents an exploration of a question. Do the best books pursue good questions or provide great answers? My three favorite books, Moneyball, The Great Gatsby, and The Lords of Finance, each started by asking a good question:

1) How were the cash-strapped A’s able to defeat their wealthier competitors at baseball?
2) How does the past influence our present condition?
3) What caused the Great Depression?

A good question provides the spring board for the creation of something greater than the question itself– a perspective, a contribution to the sum of human knowledge. What happens when our knowledge contribution channel shifts?

What if instead of pen and paper, questions start being answered by way of keyboard and forum. What if instead of one author, there become many. What if the answer changes over time– as in many cases it should. What if you remove the middleman– the paper, the ink, the cover– and go straight to the discussion and the debate? Will Quora and Facebook Questions bring us any closer to helping us figure one another out, or allow us to flap our arms a little faster?

Theoretically, local search should be little more than attaching a few geographical filters to a broader query (“pizza” becomes “pizza in san francisco”). Practically, “local search” must take into consideration not just location, but time, weather, friends, traffic, economic incentives, and past behavior. Local search is about going beyond the critical review, the 5-star scale, and addressing this one question:

Where I should be going now?

Twitter and Foursquare will be waging war over this question in the months ahead. I’ve been watching this one very closely. I use both applications. For a long time I’ve been impressed with what twitter will be able to do with local search. Two years ago, I created a search application that displays tweets on a map based on location. Last year, I felt that twitter was going to crush local search, but now I’m not as sure.

Having used foursquare, I can see the tremendous upside in their product. People are literally telling this company where they go to do things. The commercial potential of this data makes me shiver. Furthermore, my dream job would be to use this information to develop a time + place recommendation engine that answers the following question: where should I go right now?

Twitter has a grasp on what, Foursquare has a strangle on where. While some say that “what” is more intriguing than “where”, to me the killer data is “where”. Just as google used a hyperlink as a “vote” for another website, a foursquare check-in is a “vote” for a certain place at a certain time. People are utility optimizers, where they are at any time represents their optimal allocation of place utility. On aggregate, where more people are, the better the place. The need for in depth, lengthy reviews becomes secondary. Additionally, by allowing people to find other people with similar “place-tastes” allows one to discover new places serendipitously. To me, the location data is more powerful than what people say about it. Like link tracking, it eliminates from the equation confabulation and strikes to the root of the question: where did you spend your time?

Foursquare is taking the key steps needed to build the foundation that will provide this answer. They will have it in the next 18 months.

1) Encourage People to Share Their Location. The check-in is a concise way to convey two bits of information: location and time. Additionally, by incentivizing users to check-in and earn points to edge out their friends and win goofy badges, Foursquare has taken steps to decrease the pain of having to constantly “check-in” at each location. I suspect they are going to focus their resources on making the check-in process as streamlined and painless as possible. In 2008, I wrote that twitter, by limiting us to 140 characters, was forming the foundation for a global repository of ideas that taken together will have the ability to break news and events faster than traditional outlets. Today, I contend that Foursquare will have the ability to tell us where to go far better than a coupon in a newspaper, an advertisement on tv, or a series of reviews yelp.

2) Build a Recommendation Engine. While each check-in is a unique, independent event, taken together, your check-in history represents your implicit vote for how you’ve decided to spend your time. If we’re a utility maximizing species, where we are at a given time — in most cases –represents our optimal consumption bundle of space, time, and money. Google uses hyperlinks on a page to represent a “vote” for the linked page. A check-in is a “vote” for a place. A series of check-ins is a personal voting history– what types of bars do you prefer on a Saturday night? Are you a brunch person on Sunday? Where should I go this weekend? The potential to leverage the “check-ins” of each user, as well as variables not explicitly provided by the user like weather, event, and even financial data clears a space to build a massive, yet incredibly local recommendation engine. A recommendation engine driven off of more than simply explicit categorical statements of “Thai Food in San Francisco,” and a smattering of polarized user reviews.

3) Involve Businesses. By incenting the supply side of the economic equation to use the product to lure demand, more users will end up joining to gain access to the deals offered– a mutually beneficial event whereby Foursquare can collect more location data, and companies receive a better ROI from their advertising dollars. If Foursquare also allows these businesses access to the wealth of collective intelligence contained in the place/time decisions, as well as the platform to deliver ads to users that meet a specific behavioral profile, you’ll witness nothing short of a revolution in product and service marketing.

4)Third-Party Application Development. http://www.CheckoutCheckins.com/ demonstrates both the primitive state and the potential that location data has. You can map where you’ve been. This app doesn’t even include the time data, but it provides a visual glimpse of the potential benefit of being able to place people’s behavior on a map? Where do males under 25 with an income over 40,000 spend their time?

Jesse Schell is right, games are here to stay, and as we gain the ability to measure more of what we do within our day, the ability for machines to harness collective intelligence will allow us access to better information by which we can answer the question of what we should be doing. Now.

Currently, Foursquare’s limiting factor is the act of checking in. To do so, a user must open the application, find the location they’re in from a list of potential locations, click the screen a couple more times until they’ve finally checked-in. This needs to become a zero click process. Additionally, the ability to pin-point a user’s location is still weak-sauce. GPS does not perform well in urban environments (where foursquare is most useful) and cell tower triangulation is fine for approximating, but it’ll struggle to identify what establishment someone has entered. But, the technology to detect when someone or thing has entered a store is not new. A bell on a door, or a ding when someone crosses through the entrance has been used in the analog world for years. Conceiving of a similar device that detects devices running foursquare in the background should serve a starting point for deeper thought on how to make the check-in a seamless process. There might even be a solution in mesh technology. If a business owner or store clerk broadcasts a unique code from their device running Foursquare in the background, any devices in a small radius would receive proximity notifications and be prompted to check-in at that location. In the same vein, the ability to “Bump” a check-in at a point of sale, much like a swipeless credit card could also yield faster check-ins.

If Marissa Mayer is right, and that 70% of an individual’s economic transactions take place within a 5 mile radius of our home, the ability to reach each individual with actionable information becomes a golden economic opportunity. Right now, we’re telling foursquare where we’re at. Soon, they’ll be informing us where we should be.

For whatever reason, Goldman has a knack for being on the right side of bubbles. They have an eye for finding things that escape economic valuation, propping them up, and letting a wave of animal spirits take over. They’re on to something with facebook. The best performing channels for a company are repeat and referral business– cost of acquisition is lower and lifetime value is higher. What facebook has created is a platform upon which people can easily refer and influence their friends directly to content and secondarily to services.

In the spirit of Seth Godin, we’ve already granted our friends permission to speak. I already trust their opinion. If enough friends– or just the right one– endorse a product, I’m more likely to take an interest in it. Can anyone put a dollar sign on that?

Hemingway directs the pace of For Whom The Bell Tolls like a bull-dozer leveling a wooded field—there’s an occasional deviation from the course, but context is never lost:  Robert Jordan must destroy a bridge. Jordan suspects this mission will be his last and Hemingway does his part to convince the reader that he’s right. War planes are described as “wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks” that “do not move like sharks… They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.” Similarly, a lone hawk, hunting over a meadow becomes insignificant in comparison to “the big afternoon clouds… coming… over the mountains.” Death is approaching and Jordan realizes the merry-go-round he’s on will only take him to meet it sooner.

While Hemingway is building a box around Jordan’s life and applying pressure to the walls, he introduces Maria, a love interest and in doing so establishes the main conflict of the novel: Robert Jordan wants to live, but only has a few hours to do so.

This forces a confrontation with the question of whether “it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years?” On this question, Hemingway seems to suggest it’s the frequency and intensity of our experiences that define a full life. For instance, Jordan at one point reflects that “he would like to spend some time with Maria. That was the simplest expression of it. He would like to spend a long, long time with her.” This comes off as empty and bland—limited by his ability to verbalize the relative intensity of certain experiences over others. While Hemingway spends little real estate on this declaration, he dedicates significant effort to conveying the intensity of a delicate moment:

“From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze…”

Later he explains “living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing.”

Life consists of occurrences—most fleeting, some memorable, and a few intense—surrounded by the vastness of death.  To live, one should seek to maximize the density of meaningful experience with the time they have remaining. As Jordan reflects, “I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”

In four days, Robert Jordan completes a cycle on the merry-go-round. He is born, lives, and perishes.

There’s an obvious but non-trivial implication of this theory. By minimizing the probability that an unintended outcome occurs (A’), we increase the probability that our intended outcome (A) occurs: P(A) = 1 – P(A’)

In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts explores what he calls “the law of reversed effort” and how it applies to psychological security and a sense of individual purpose. Watts, writing in 1951, explains that a drive for efficient solutions, and a rigorous adherence to logic has led us down a path of setting impossible expectations for achieving impossible goals. He likens the dynamic to attempting to capture running water in a bucket. “If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run.”

Watts strikes a less-is-more tone by arguing that the number of causal connections and uncontrollable variables influencing the direction of our lives makes the prospect of constructing artificial happiness a fiction. “Nature and the universe will never ‘stay put’,” he argues, “it is like a beautiful woman who will never be caught, and whose very flightiness is her charm.”

The prescription Watts gives for achieving a life of stability is to foster a vision “of life as it is, of what we are, and what we are doing. Without such understanding… It is like walking busily in a fog: you just go round and round. You do not know where you are going, nor what results you really want.”

Paradoxically, Watts’s vision of “life as it is, of what we are, and what we are doing” is far from clear and most closely resembles a fog. To minimize the frustration and disappointment of being constantly lost in it, Watts would advise slowing down, accepting the fog and the external uncertainty it represents. “The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality,” he claims. “What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows.” As we come to terms with external uncertainties, our internal insecurity (A’) will diminish, leading to a complementary rise in internal stability (A).

Grant’s personal reflections demonstrate a dedication to the question of whether man creates their our destiny or is a product of fate. The best framework I can come up with for Grant’s ontology is that of a fatalistic, rugged individualist. For everyday tasks, he takes full responsibility for their execution and suggests “that in positions of great responsibility every one should do his duty the best of his ability where assigned by competent authority…” Additionally, Grant takes the stance that “it is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may always expect the most efficient service.” In these instances, he seems to be a subscriber to the theory that by doing one’s individual duty, fate will deliver a favorable outcome. Furthermore, on at least three occasions, Grant makes note of how minor, external events nearly deflected the course of his life:

• “I should have been appointed to one of the staff corps of the army—the Pay Department probably—and would therefore now be preparing to retire. Neither of these speculations is unreasonable, and they are mentioned to show how little men control their own destiny.”
• “Had he gone three-quarters of a mile farther he would have found me with my party quietly resting under the shade of trees and without even arms in our hands with which to defend ourselves.”
• “Mrs. Grant was with me in Washington at the time, and we were invited by President and Mrs. Lincoln to accompany them to the theatre on the evening of that day… It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations, more especially the assassination of the President.”

In these instances, Grant appears to concede to the millions of moving variables that surround but the handful he can control. These are valid thought experiments for him to conduct, but Grant was a commanding general, a position that wields such power over a man’s fate that Michael Shaara, author of The Killer Angels wrote, “there’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.” Grant was a director of fate, but not immune from it. He identifies the balance between what he can control and that which he cannot, and in doing so reveals his winning strategy. He realized that other generals “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of [them]. This  was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.”

Realizing that a weak attack becomes a strong one if the opponent is in an even weaker position, Grant was willing to take well calculated gambles that slowly drove the Confederacy to a point of concession. Rather than attempting to control all elements of the war—to concoct the perfect strategy to eliminate all uncertainty from the battlefield—Grant used the great uncertainty of the world as a weapon against those who were most frightened by it.

He argues that our education systems mirror industrialism, whereby mass production of goods by the efficient execution of reproducible processes generates a payoff. In an industrial world, there’s a high demand for engineers to define and optimize these processes. To meet this demand, Robinson argues, our education systems began to mirror the industrial model: take children as inputs and produce rational adults, set to earn a paycheck in industry.

Robinson makes the case that such an approach “ruthlessly squanders” the creative talents of children as it collects the paint brushes of future artists and replaces them with protractors. Teachers force future dancers to sit still and slog through multiplication tables. Robinson worries that this approach educates children in the wrong way. The world is becoming increasingly fast paced and uncertain, where the ability to create in uncertain circumstances becomes more important than ever. Shouldn’t we be guiding students towards “their Element—the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together.”

The Element is Robinson’s attempt to elaborate on why it’s in our collective interest to foster creative talents rather than suppress them in favor of economic expediency. He challenges the commonsense view of intelligence that “we are all born with a fixed amount of intelligence,” and that “it’s possible to measure how much intelligence we have through pencil-and-paper tests, and to express this as a numerical grade.” He suggests that people that we consider successful, be it Matt Groening or Bill Gates, are where they are because “they found the things they were made to do, and they have invested considerably in mastering the permutations of their professions.” They are NOT where they are as a result of a rigorous adherence to the mandated educational standards of their schools’ curriculum.

Rather than mandate additional education requirements, Robinson firmly believes that the role of educators and the system they comprise should focus less on subjects but on mentoring students to find their passion. “When mentors serve this function—either turning a light on a new world or fanning the flames of interest into genuine passion—they do exalted work.” I recall a few key mentors in my life:

-the seventh grade science teacher that went beyond the syllabus and connected with me in a time of great need by believing in me.
-the fourth grade basketball coach that shaped my character by demanding perfection when I seemed content with doing just enough to get by.

I am grateful to these mentors because they understood it was only their secondary responsibility to teach children about plate tectonics or how to play man to man defense. Their primary role was to lift us from our bouts of self-doubt and to “remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.”

Ken Robinson’s twenty minute talk and 260 page book serve as evidence of the impact an individual can have not just on the people they know, but kids that stumble across their material on the internet. He gives them confidence to believe their intuition—that there’s more to human intelligence than standardized test scores, that there’s more to math than problem sets, and that our best work comes in the material we’re most interested in.

For this, I thank him.

After reading the first 20 pages, I felt like I’d picked up a Google public relations pamphlet. Jarvis wasn’t telling me what Google would do, so much as what Google wants us to do— share as much as we can about ourselves on the internet for free. Ironically, I was reading this in a book, something that needs to be purchased. Curious, I did a Google Books search and noticed What Would Google Do? was conspicuously absent. Hmmmmm

But just as I was warming up to do a post on the hypocrisy, Jarvis brings it up himself: “I confess: I’m a hypocrite. If I had followed my own rules—if I had eaten my own dog food—you wouldn’t be reading this book right now, at least not as a book. You’d be reading it online, for free, having discovered it via links and search… I’m no fool; I couldn’t pass up a nice check from my publisher.” Jarvis with the save.

But I still wasn’t done. I had to take Jarvis’s perceived argument to another level. Wouldn’t doing exactly what Google does contradict the whole idea of what Google would do? As Google continues to grow, they’re beginning to derive revenue by way of controlling large swaths of the search and online ad markets. Is Google becoming a middle man? Someone thinking like Google is trying to take them down.

Backing up even further, I found the key flaw in his argument. It’s money that drives business, those who control it are the ones who control the destiny of start-ups around the world. Banking is far from a transparent industry. Clients pay handsome fees to investment consultants for access to their extended network of clients—a pay to play environment which opposes everything that Jarvis argues. But upon further inspection, the concept of a closed banking industry is fully consistent with one of Jarvis’s main observations: a successful business is one that creates a platform upon which other’s can build their own enterprises. By dealing quietly, banking institutions have created a climate where their clients feel they have access to proprietary information that will allow them to run their business more effectively. While Jarvis presents the concept of creating a platform as a novel approach to business, it’s difficult to claim it’s entirely new.

Jarvis is mostly on the mark. But the achilles heel of an argument about openness and the facilitation of information exchange would be a company like Apple. If openness is the key, how can Apple not just exist, but dominate? Jarvis waits until the last pages of his book before addressing this. He notes:

“Apple does not manage abundance. It creates scarcity. Witness the fanatics who camped out overnight to get each version of the iPhone. According to blog reports, the company cut off sales of the phones on the first day with devices still in stock so there would be lines again the second day. Apple makes its own mobs.” So what’s the reason? Why is Apple so good? He throws up his hands and has to concede, “It’s just that good. Its vision is that strong and its products even better.”

Alas, it seems, even the most well thought out positions have flaws. He notes that life—not unlike a Google product—is a beta. Jarvis is clear, honest, and like Google, he’s encouraged people to correct him where he is wrong. In the process, he’s lived his message and has a fun book to show for it.

Sorkin’s book avoids causes in favor of documenting decisions. “This extraordinary time,” he writes, “has left us with a giant puzzle—a mystery, really—that still needs to be solved, so we can learn from our mistakes. This book is an effort to begin putting the pieces together”

While accounts like The Greatest Trade Ever focus in on a small microcosm of the financial world, Too Big Too Fail attempts to portray the entire, fluid, global financial landscape— the one that Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke had to make sense of.

The book is laden with facts and events—it seems that no one sleeps, and Sorkin suggests that key players like Paulson caught maybe an hour or two a day for an entire week. With no down time, the book is successfully confusing— it captures the uncertainty of the situation. Key players were reacting to information as it came in without time to digest it. As a result, there isn’t much time for editorializing on the crisis. In one passage Paulson is asked by President Bush, “How did this happen?” Sorkin could have used this as a spring board into the different theories of why, but he cuts it short:

“Paulson disregarded the question, knowing that the answer would be way too long and lay in a heady mix of nearly a decade of overly lax regulation—some of which he had pushed for himself—overzealous bankers, and home owners living beyond their means.”

Sorkin highlights the fluidity of the decision making. Did AIG need 20 billion, 40 billion, or 100 billion? Did they need it next week, or two hours ago? Over reacting could create an unnecessary level of panic that could cause conditions to further weaken. It was a problem with no easily definable answers. The best anyone could offer was their best guess. Their best guess.

Guesses which so far have turned out to be the correct ones. By taking quick, decisive action, Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner put themselves out ahead of Euro-zone countries which are beginning to realize they too must take decisive action to rescue their systems. The dollar gaining strength against the Euro couldn’t come at a more perfect time—a stronger dollar accompanying economic expansion spells out recovery for not just the United States, but countries expecting to be repaid in dollars. Trust is trickling back into the system, in consequence, restoring confidence and catalyzing investment.