Sean Shadmand

Some Thoughts on Entrepreneurship

April 21, 2010

I was recently asked to put together some quick points around entrepreneurship. Points became paragraphs and since I rarely get a chance to blog I figured I would kill two birds with one stone.... You have the x-factor Try to listen, question, get help and delve into guidance and advice that makes sense or intrigues YOU, not just what people tell you makes sense or what is the current common thought. If you are special enough to be successful, it's because you have your own mind and...

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Are we as humans not born moral?

July 22, 2009

Religion doesn’t create morality ....our humanity is the foundation of morality. Give the power of being human the ability to love life. Do you love life? Do you want to kill right now? Even if God said not to love would you, could you love your wife, your dog or your son less?  That feeling within, that conscience or that burning feeling in your chest is your humanity. That person on your shoulder telling you not to do wrong is within you, and that regret you feel and can’t get rid of...

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What do you and Sonic the Hedgehog have in common?

July 6, 2011

Have you ever played Sonic the hedgehog? Man, what a classic! The objective: Get your hedgehog, named Sonic, to jump, run and even roll through a stage, avoiding the array of animal-ish enemies, only to reach a guarded exit, protected by your arch nemesis, Dr. Evil. Beat him and the entrance to the next level is opened. Keep this up, level after level, enemy after enemy, and you will win the game. -- But wait there’s more! If you are attacked without a collection of magical...

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Let’s have cleaner debates with our neighbors: Not the facts, just the data.

January 23, 2012

I am not trying to get entrenched in the political back-and-forth going on. I actually do understand all of the he-said she-said going back-and-forth when it comes to peoples opinions. Opinions are each persons right to have, especially when it comes to social philosophy. Additionally, opinions are hard to "verify"; your beleifs are your prerogative. However, it is amazing to me how non-opinion based information gets thrown AS opinion. It is even more distressing because it is so easy...

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Points of Life

May 16, 2010

Life has two very distinct points. Birth and death. You cannot escape these points and the run in only a single suggestion. As you may know the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. COnversly the only way you can increase the distance between two very static points points is to focus less on the fairly impossible task of moving sad points but the extremenl easy tasks of increasing the diversions and curvatures of the path itself. I. Life has two very distinct points --...

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“And”, and how it can kill your business

August 17, 2010

Focus is extremely important when starting a company. It is easy to think that the best thing to offer your customers is everything they need. I mean wouldn't you want to be the one stop shop for someone's needs so they can keep wanting to come back for more? Unfortunately, that always sounds great in theory, but in reality it's a concept that kills. McDonald's does burgers, and even though now they have a fish fillet and a McRib now and again, they are a burger joint and when they started...

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Team City Monitor (with coverage history) for GAE

August 3, 2011

Per my last post about the splendor of GAE, below is one example of a tool I built for us at Socialize to keep an eye on code coverage and lets the group know if a build is broken (if our tests have failed.) This script is built to run on Google AppEngine, checks against a TeamCity...

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• Some Thoughts on Entrepreneurship
• Are we as humans not born moral?
• What do you and Sonic the Hedgehog have in common?
• Let’s have cleaner debates with our neighbors: Not the facts, just the data.
• Points of Life
• “And”, and how it can kill your business
• Team City Monitor (with coverage history) for GAE

1. The Know Nothing Party. The past finds a home when you aren’t looking.

   I was watching Gangs of New York and some of the anti-equality debate sounded familiar. So, I started looking things up as I love to do.

   It’s funny how every generation has a group of their own that are composed of those that are sure others are less equal to them, and their way of life is threatened. What I found even more interesting was  what was threatening the lives of the political parties of our past, more than 100 years ago.

   The “Know Nothing” party was political group created for the those that feared change, and was wiling to kill to keep those unlike themselves out of their towns in the late 1800′s. The differences they found to mark their divide were the “native” vs. the “non native” (AKA fresh of the boat irish vs. those born here) and the divisions of Christianity each gang chose as their own.

   Check out the write up on the Know-Nothing party here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing, http://history1800s.about.com/od/immigration/a/knownothing01.htm), or on your own. Utterly amazing how little somethings change.

   Hate and inequality seems to always find a way to sneak its head into the eyes of those thinking they are prototecting tradition.

   I guess a question to ask is, will your party, group, or even your name make its way onto that page for your kid’s kids to read 50 years from now so they can say, “wow, how stupid were they?!”

    

   Category politics | Tags: , history, know nothings, movies, political party | 1 Comment

   January 27, 2012 by sshadmand

2. 3 iOS Tricks That Are Amazing Unknown

   It sucks not being able to search a web page for a specific word on a webpage in your iPhone and iPad.

   I – Find on page

   iPhone & iPads

   1. Click on google search box
   2. enter the word you want to search
   3. At the bottom of search results for the web, the search results for whether the word appears on the current web page your on is listed.
   4. Scroll down to reveal the words found on the page

        

   Just iPad

   iPad recently added a new search web page fiend to the keyboard when eacrhing on the google input box

   

    

   Have you used four fingers on your iPad lately?

   iPad only.

   II – Swipe between app

   When having more than one app in your background place four fingers on your screen and swipe to the right or left to alternate betwen apps in your background wthout needing to double click or opening and clssing apps

   III – Open app in background with swipe

   You can access your background apps without doubleclicking your home button on Ipad.

   Simply use four fingers on your screen swiping upwards and you will get the listing of all your background apps.

   

   Hope you have fun rediscovering the fun you can have with your iOS devices!

   Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

   January 24, 2012 by sshadmand

3. Let’s have cleaner debates with our neighbors: Not the facts, just the data.

   I am not trying to get entrenched in the political back-and-forth going on. I actually do understand all of the he-said she-said going back-and-forth when it comes to peoples opinions. Opinions are each persons right to have, especially when it comes to social philosophy. Additionally, opinions are hard to “verify”; your beleifs are your prerogative.

   However, it is amazing to me how non-opinion based information gets thrown AS opinion. It is even more distressing because it is so easy to find many statistic directly from the source, before they are muddied by political agenda, or distributed in off-the-cuff comments and hearsay.

   So, I figured I could help…

   The following are just the data & graphs of screen-shots taken from real census data (and yes the URL of where I got the data from is also noted next to each graph.) Feel free to browse the data yourself and make your own observations.

   Debate the implications all your want – but below are not news reports or debate notes, they are charts taken from the actual data sources. All I ask, and hope to acheive, is that no matter what side your on, just remember not to include non-sensicle bullet points that just aren’t true and instead try to argue around your beliefs. Do not get caught up in baseless, inflated, skewed, or inaccurate depictions of history as it relates to hard cold metrics.

   Important notes on data around first day of office dates

   The first day in office for elected presidents is in late January following the election results, coming two months before in November.

   George W’s First Day	Obama’s First Day
   January 20, 2001	January 20, 2009

   The stock market
   The stock market shows the amount of money distributed in US corporation. The rich, and anyone investing in the rich wins when this graph goes up. Note 2007 and 2008 were shockingly bad, the worst downswing since the mid 80s. The good news everyone is it has only taken four years to get back from our bubble burst of 2001 which took eight.
   http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI (You want this going up)

   

   

    

   Unemployment Rate

   This one is a often heavy argument point, but the data is all very easy to lookup. When a single percentage is called out it is hard to know its context. Those that scream and point fingers from he top of a mountain often end up implicating everyone – if those at the bottom of the mountain did a little research…. Again 2007 was the beginning of the frenzy. And if you remember there were many sad days and foreclosures making an “america is shutting down” environment. It was the intense swing from just a year before in 2006 that scared people the most. 
   http://goo.gl/2O2zl (You want this going down)

   

     2007-2009 was the sharpest upswing of unemployment we have seen over 30 years.

   

   

   Debt

   Here is another amazing story of how politicians program you to just repeat what they shout, programming you to have their debate. Again, the data is there to have your own debates and ones that aren’ skewed by anyone. Debt sucks, and gus, we have had it growing for a long time. And this rate back-and-forth argument is again a graph away. You can see the linear growth of date below.
   http://goo.gl/d9Wvz (You want this going down)

   

    

   Personal Income

   This is one that people don’t talk much about, because we like focusing on the negatives. BUT your incomes have been growing fairly steadily for a long time. We had a short blip of our first downward trajectory in 2008, actually the only one in recorded history of the US, but it corrected itself pretty quickly after 2009.
   http://goo.gl/2CaIc (You want this going up)

   

    

    

    

   
   

   I also found interesting that the following census data shows a steady increase in revenue and income in the US for decades.

   Disposable Income per capita

   This is also a great graph to be going up. Like the income graph we saw our first real blip ever in 2008, but for the most part we have consistently been getting a linear growth.
   http://goo.gl/QQOlG

   

   Revenue

   This one is a bit less cheerful, but t’s the reality. We had some great years as a country with revenue, but unfortunately the money stopped coming in in 2007 and we have all felt this graph at home.
   http://goo.gl/DFMK8

    

   

    

   Category featured, Style | Tags: , charts, data, graphs, politics | 1 Comment

   January 23, 2012 by sshadmand

4. Facebook gets into the continuous scroll promo page game

   Facebook has embraced the continuous scrolling, animated-esque homepage style. Like I mentioned in my other posts about this style of website (animated scroll sites), the format reduced the closing doors effect that clicking around a site can create. You bring the user into a story and prevents the message from being broken up. The single stream of consciousness keep a user curious to see what comes next. Combine the scroll with the hit-the-bottom-to-load-more-content system the potential for great workflows is there. Im really liking these design patterns, and they keep getting better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this style of website becomes the standard in the next year.

   https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline (2011-12-15)

   You are introduced to the homepage with a video. A pretty good one at that.

   

   Clicking a button on the bottom quickly scrolls to a new section, so whether you start by scrolling or you are more of a clickster you are taken cre of. And both actions quickly teach you how to interact with ethe site.

   

   As you scroll, the section headers rise to the top and stay there. (much like the other sites I have blogged about, and possibly started form the ios table header design pattern). ALso becoming a standard is the button navigation animates to sync up with where you are scrolled to in the website.

   

   Category design, products, Style | Tags: , scroll sites | No Comments

   December 15, 2011 by sshadmand

5. Long Lost Bucket List

   I was going through some old Google docs of mine and came across a bucket list a wrote in 2008. Haha, I can even remember writing it. It was after I saw Ted Leonsis speak about what he has learned and accomplished in his life, and how his bucket list helped in decide to do the things he did. In his words [paraphrased]:

   “[when the oppertuity came to produce a movie at first it was a hard descision, but looking back at my bucket list, and seeing it on their, reminded me to take the oppertunity I was given before I die]”

   It felt much like finding a time capsule, and one that I forgot I even placed. With so much having happened in the last 4 years, and so much happening in the last week, it offered a pretty perspective on things. As I read through the message in a bottle sent to me by my former self, I was excited to be able to cross of a couple items on the list, and dissapointed at the vast majority of things I could not.

   I really encourage those out there to mak a bucket list. It offers perspective into you life as yo find yourself focusing on so manythings over the years. It helps bring you back to a core goal, or reminds you of one you may have forgotten.

   From a more technological perspective (I can’t help it, I am a technologist after all,) I encourage you to write it in google docs. I was not obly able to easily find this old list, but since Google Docs are live docs I can see the revision history of the document over time. I can imagine how interesting it will be to check out the changes, and additions I make to this list over the next 20 years.

   …

   While looking for bucket list-esque pictures for this post on the web I stumbled onto this site (http://bucketlist.org/) that helps people share their bucket list publicly.

   Category Stories, Style, Things I've Done | Tags: | No Comments

   December 13, 2011 by sshadmand

6. Google TV is finally a google TV

   Got home tonight and notcied my google tv wasnt responding to my harmonay iphone remote…..after some fiddling around a simple update ended up being all that was required. To my surprise it wasn’t just a minor release, like it usual ends up beeing. My google TV has changed considerably! (along with my iphone remote,) and the my Google TV finally has the Adnroid market, ergot finally a real Google TV! Yay!

   I downloaded some apps, checked out the new user interface and workflow. I know have a 50 inch non-touch tablet :)

   There is also the “allow unkown sources” option in the settings, along with enable debugging, so I guess developing for my TV is now piled onto my list of things to do.

    

   After some googling, I found some info on the update. You can check it out here: http://www.google.com/tv/

   Category Feature Tech, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

   December 11, 2011 by sshadmand

7. Deciding on a new feature: An Insta-Test-market. (AKA: Ghetto Testing)

   I love making a decisions tree as efficnet as possible, especial around discussion that steer the business or the product within a business. Or in another words, I HATE “tough decisions.”

   Here is another addition to the decision tree to make life easier, it is called “Ghetto Testing” and coined by the founder of Zenga.

   How do you figure out if you should go with a feature with minmal disruption to the company or its engineers, and how can you invest in it with the highest posible certainty of success? Ghetto Testing a feature. The concept is there are a wide range of data points you can aquire to guage interest on an idea before the idea is fleshed out. At the “Ghetto” stage, it sint so much a test of the product value or feature set itself, as much of a servey to see if the concept will get clicks or interest by the public. It’s basically an adhoc test market. If you think people will love feature x for instance, create a google adword promoting the vapor-ware concept and run it for 5,10,30 mins.  The resulting page of the ad could technically go to a 404 page, and although that would be a horrible experience it still wouldbe a valid ghetto test.

   From there you can invest incrementally into how deep of a gauge you want to testing of the idea i.e. a pretty landing page with feature highlights, a download, or a purchase wall.

   http://grattisfaction.com/2010/01/how-zynga-does-customer-development-minimum-viable-product/

    

   Category Business, Feature Concepts, learning, Philosophy, Process, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

   December 8, 2011 by sshadmand

8. “Should I add x to my product line?” litmus test

   For small startups it is essential to decide what not to do as much as what you decide *to* do. As new technologies come and go, ideas for change could cripple a companies productivity or ability to reach any single objective (AKA Distractions.)

   If your objective is to build an awesome product, and work hard at solving a problem that others may not have been able to solve yet, then here is a “is this a distraction right now, or a need for change?”  litmus test for small startups.

   Test:

   Do I believe we should *only* do [new idea] and grow the company out from from there?

   (i.e. stop focusing on the other thing you had previsouly decided was *the* way to grow the company from.)

   If you find yourself getting to a strong yes, then the convo to get into the new idea may be ripe for discussion, and it may be time to focus energy on a new strategy and to pool your resources to build a world class product. I’ll go into what you can do to break the new idea down further from there, to see if it makes sense in your business in other ways, in later blogs.

   Side notes as to why this problem may often come about:

   For one, the grass is always greener. So you need to be carefull when shifting towards an idea that is not on your mind every hour of every day…There will often be different problems, not less, to overcome when you switch.

   Second is brain time. The amount you spend on solving a problem has some (not sure yet what amount yet) relation on the lack of time you have spent thinking about the new thing. All the litte details that are reflex knowladge for you for is lost with a new idea and direction.

   Analogous Exmaples in life:

   For a simplified abstract example, you spend a few hours packing the night before a trip. Last minute the morning of the flight you realize, “Hey, I can just take the smaller bag! How much smarter of me, I can save much space!” So you do.

   At the airport you realize that one of the side reasons you wanted the bigger bag was not just to carry more, but to so your friend could but his shoes in it. Damn! You over looked ne of the many small details that led to the dscisoin to pack the big bag in the first place, but the new idea that came to mind, that you took action on in a shorter amount of time, did not allow you to consider all the many reasons why you made the decisions you did the night before.

   A more common example: “Ughhh, I left my wallet in my other pants pocket!” You look better, and it’s a good thing too because now you need to find someone to pay for your dinner :p

   Closing

   You may not be able to avoid these smaller mishaps, but you definitely have the power to minimize disrupting a company by paying attention to these business distractions vs changing directions type decision points.

   Remember: A small comapany needsto solve *a* problem, focus on it, and when they get their fit and a few wins the grow into more spaces. Here is a great article on focus as it pertains to Product Market Fit and MVP:

   http://www.svproduct.com/mvp-vs-product-vision/

   “…But of course that was just the beginning of the product line and not the end.”

    

   Category Business, Philosophy, Process, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

   December 8, 2011 by sshadmand

9. Smart Car Makes Clever Website

   I was oddly propelled to click on an ad today, brought to me by the makers of the Smart Car. It was a pretty, clean, well made site. I scrolled up and down to see if anything would catch my eye, and strangely enough something did.

   Some time ago I made a post about the coolness of sites I see that take advantage of telling their story, not through pages navigated to by the standard point-and-click, but by animating the home page based on the amount of scroll a user applys to the site. (You can find the post on cool scrolling animated sites here )

   Some people have done a poor job of creating well balanced sitethat not only tells a good story, but does in a animated way that tells the story better than it otherwise could be told. And done smooth enough that the coolness, or story, isn’t hindered by the latency and choppyness of the meium.

   Well This smart car ad page did just that. And without futher adu, here are some screeen shots and the link to the smart car ad site (2011-12-4).

   It begins with a simple page, that focuses all the users attention to the car, and its size.

   

   As you begin scrolling the colors of the sites changes and the a different smart car is presented.

   Notice the menu on the right site, letting you know where you are in the story. The white cricle tells you what part of the story you are currently in, and what is coming up next. Notice the blending from one “page” to the next as you scroll. Notice how you find you self scrolling more and more, and digest a few tid bits of knowladge thatyou would ohter wise not have gained behidn a barier of clicks. Well done. :)

    

   

    

   
   

   Category design, products, Technology | Tags: , scroll sites | No Comments

   December 4, 2011 by sshadmand

10. Doing the impossible is a matter of discovering what’s possible to do.

    Me

    Category Quotes | Tags: | No Comments

    December 1, 2011 by sshadmand

11. De Beers in De Valley

    Better late than never. De Beers diamonds is getting in on silicon valley action and investing in the next generation of semiconductors which will be made out of synthetic diamonds.

     

    Read more at PopSci here: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/diamond-industry-invests-lab-created-knockoffs-semiconductors

    Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

    November 20, 2011 by sshadmand

12. What startup babies did Yahoo, Google and Facebook give birth to?

    

    Here is an info-graphic my friend turned me onto (click the image to get the full view.)

    

    It shows the exodus from some of the biggest tech companies (facebook, yahoo, google…) that supplied the man power, and brain power, to feul various startups such as: Zoosk, Hunch, Tapjoy, Color, Foursquare, Quara and more.

    Want more?

    Here is an article outlining the biggest winners and losers involved:

     

    http://blog.topprospect.com/2011/06/the-biggest-talent-losers-and-winners/

    Category Business, Feature Style, Style | Tags: | No Comments

    November 17, 2011 by sshadmand

13. The Quintessential Optical Illusions

    
    Check out this Quara post (http://goo.gl/YjQYI) for some new and old optical illusions. What caught my eye was the optical illiso on the left I haven’t seen before. Can you tell the difference between the male and female pictured? Well you shouldn’t, they are the exact same image. The illusion here takes advantage of how our perception of gender is based on hues and tones as much as the facial features themselves.

    Category Feature Style, Style | Tags: | No Comments

    November 14, 2011 by sshadmand

14. The hardware won’t stop changing

    When the iPhone first came about there were plenty of neh-sayers that rebeled against the native functionality on the phone and how it was destined to be doomed by more standard tech already in place on the web.

    The problem when attempting to prophesize the future of new technologies is that many people forget that the technology they are predicting against is not a controlled variable. Not only will the technolgy advance that they forsee, but the technology they are basing their predictions on will change as well. That every changing system means you can never be too sure what the life time of a new product will be and how it will develop. The only good bet is: all parts of technology are ever advancing.

    The mobie device epitomizes that fact. A fragmented distribution of lightweight, fairly inexpensive, devices that are constantly in use by its users and is getting completely revamped and bought up every year and by eager customers ready to upgrade. The manufactures will keep pumping more features into the device that go beyond  weight, and better screen resolution. And with form factor constraints relativley out the door, compared to their laptop and PC predecessors, native device functionality will always trump what the generic standard products will pump out. Of course RF functionalities ar making their way into our everyday life, and now Andoroids may be getting a barometer: http://gizmodo.com/5851288/why-the-barometer-is-androids-new-trump-card.

    As these products evolve native apps will keep going strong.

    Category Feature Tech, products, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

    November 13, 2011 by sshadmand

15. That is a pretty freakin’ cool sphere!

    

    This is pretty awesome… A real hovering ball that seems to defy gravity and do some other neat tricks too. Yeah, we have seen some cool hovering toys these last few years, but this little doozy goes well past just hovering. Not only does it hover, but it is able to jet  of in any direction lickity split, and its gyroscopes (along with its auto pilot mode) give it the ability to stay in hover state no matter how hard you try to push it down. Just when you think you got your bearing with this thing it shows off a few more tricks as it dives to the floor, rolls over better than your dog skip, andtake right back off again. It seems to master land and air, and is made by the Chinese ministry of defense – yikes!

    Category Feature Tech, products, Technology | Tags: | No Comments

    November 11, 2011 by sshadmand

16. Easter Egg-ish Feature in Google Image Search

    You have probably searched for images on google image search before, but what you probably missed was the drag and drop image search feature. After hovering over an image from the image search results (ex: http://goo.gl/hwiJ0) drag the image over to the search text box. Once the image overlaps the search box, the search box extends allowing you to “drop the image” there.

    

    What seems to happen next is google uses meta data about the image selected to generate a text search that display results of web sites that are related to the picture.

    There was a google labs project a while back that gamified the manual tagging of images, mechanical turk style. Maybe this is one of the bi-products of that project.

    Category Technology | Tags: | No Comments

    November 9, 2011 by sshadmand

17. Has the iPhone camera quality really improved?

    Check out the picture below made by Lisa Bettany and featured on Gizmodo that demonstrates the differences in picture quality over the many iPhone generations. From the original, all the way to the 4S. The simple answer to the titles question – you bet you a$$ it has!

    

    Category Feature Tech, Technology | Tags: , apple, camera, ios | No Comments

    November 6, 2011 by sshadmand

18. Are you seeing things? Instant super-imposed 3d objects on 2d pictures

    

    See that picture to the left. It is a picture taken of a room with a billards table, can you tell what part of the picture is fake? We have all hard of super imposed by now (even the talking goat from Adam Sandler’s comedy cd in the 90s is now aware of the power of superimposing.) What makes this a breakthrough is that fact that the 3d objects (by the way, the balls on the table are the fake objects) were super imposed onto a flat, 2D picture. Even more interesting is that fact that those 3D objects can interact with the 2D objects in the picture, as if they were 3D them selves. Check the demo by Kevin Karsch (below) where you can see what I mean. Basically, you can take picture of a hall with stairs, and later add a 3D virtual ball to the picture, and in seconds watch the 3D ball bounce its way down the stairs case. Pretty B.A.

    Category Feature Tech, products, Technology | Tags: , 3d, graphics | No Comments

    November 5, 2011 by sshadmand

19. Prove It! Would you bet your life on your wifi connect-ability?

    

    It’s fine and dandy when you say you can get three nines of service uptime, but would you be willing to have your server control your car’s brake system? Well if you did I woud guarantee you that your servers would find a way to be up more often – one way or another. That is what Computer scientists at Saarland University were thinking when he used their wifi as the communication channel is their bikes. They wanted to demonstrate how certain they were that their wifi can get up to thirteen-nines of accuracy. I really love how they are putting their money where his mouth is. They basically alined their lives and their product’s quality perfectly. Now their success is yours :)

    Check out more at Alpha Galileo.

    Category Technology | Tags: , wifi | No Comments

    November 4, 2011 by sshadmand

20. Braille 2.0

    

    The iPad (tablets) is at it again. After all these years Stanford has uped the anti on what the bar is for acceptable braille reading and writing devices. The tablet system shown here calibrates through a swipe and audio queues, and sets the type pad to where ever the users fingers lie. (This solves the problem with the lack of tactile response the flat screen of an iPad provides. In essence, as descried in the video, the input points find the users fingers, not the other way around.)

    

    Category Feature Tech, products, Style, Technology | Tags: , blind, braille, ipad, tablet | No Comments

    November 3, 2011 by sshadmand

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