The death of Google Reader is App.net’s next big opporunity

March 14, 2013 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

I’ve been a heavy user of Google Reader for over seven years, so I was a little upset yesterday when I saw that, buried in a “spring cleaning” blog post, Google quietly announced that it was killing retiring the web-based RSS reader on July 1, 2013.

RSS never went mainstream, so Google Reader was always sort of a geeky niche product. But, the people who used it, used it. It was (and is) one of the best way to efficiently scan and consume large amounts of information. If you were the kind of person who still used Reader in the age of Twitter and Facebook, you no doubt depended on it, making the announcement of its closure really sting.

And yet, the end of Google Reader was inevitable. Its user base was tiny in comparison to search and maps, and Google never made an attempt to monetize the product or make use of the massive amount of data it had on users and their subscriptions. Plus, it distracted from the company’s headline social project, Google+.

Life after Google Reader

Google Reader started its life as a web-based feed reader, but over time, its real value became its ability to act as a centralized place that other applications could sync against. Take, for example, the excellent Reeder app for iPhone/iPad. It1 lets me scan through my feeds quickly wherever I am and allows me to read items or take action on them (“star” it, send it to InstaPaper to read later, save the link to Pinboard for archiving and search). New items and read items are synced across all my linked reader applications and the Google Reader web app, so they’re always consistent.

Despite Google Reader effectively killing off competition in the market, there are other web-based feed readers available, so I think we’ll be fine on that end. In fact, I agree with Marco and think we’re going to enter the [golden age][marco] of RSS readers:

Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.

It may suck in the interim before great alternatives mature and become widely supported, but in the long run, trust me: this is excellent news.

What we need going forward, however, is a canonical feed store/sync API to replace what Reader had evolved into. That way, any number of web, mobile, and desktop apps could tie into it and share feed information with each other. That is what made Google Reader so great, and so powerful.

The opportunity for App.net

In episode 13 of Glenn Fleishman’s “The New Disruptors” podcast (now my favorite interview show), Glenn talked to Dalton Caldwell, the creator of App.net (ADN). The big revelation for me was the discussion about what ADN really is. It’s not just the Twitter-like application they’ve built in alpha.app.net. It’s really about the infrastructure and tools they’ve built that allow developers to build other, more innovative applications on top of. As Glenn says, they’re more a Amazon Web Services competitor than a Twitter clone.

ADN already has programming APIs for messaging, file storage, and places. I think a “feed” API would a great addition, and allow for some interesting possibilities with the built-in App.net social features.

In fact, I noticed this morning that I wasn’t the only one with the same insight:

Insightful comment by @ablaze on App.net and feeds.

We’ve already made the mistake of entrusting an important piece of infrastructure to a free product. This time around, let’s put it in the hands of someone who’s interests are aligned with customers and developers, and who will charge some money for it. This is the perfect opportunity for ADN, and I hope they take it.

  1. Specifically, the iPhone version ↩

Filed Under: RSS Tagged With: , , ,

Strength

January 30, 2013 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

I’m going to be honest — I’m not in great physical shape right now. I’m not here to make excuses, but I am going to tell you how I’m going to change this and get into the best shape of my life.

First, a little history.

Thanks to a few smartphone apps, most recently Weightbot, I’ve been capturing my weight every day for nearly three years. Here’s what that looks like on a trend graph:

A few things worth noting here:

  • My weight fluctuated about 5lbs for the last year, between 185 lb and 190 lb.
  • I logged my food intake inconsistently throughout the last few years, usually for a few weeks at a time before getting bad about inputting the data.
  • In 2010 and the first half of 2011 I was running on a regular basis. I ran a handful of times in January 2012, too.
  • I started the 60-day Insanity workout program the last week of September 2011 and ended it the last week of November1.
  • Much of 2012 consisted of inactivity, regular beer drinking, and eating whatever I wanted. I did not exercise on a regular basis.

My Goals

I’m willing to make some big changes in order to get myself into top physical condition. The last time I lost a lot of weight was in 2005, before we had our first baby. I dropped 25-30lbs through brute force — 40+ minutes of cardio every day and lots of salads. Looking back, I can definitely say that I was skinny, but I wasn’t strong.

This time I’m trying sometime different. Because it’s not possible to burn fat and build muscle at the same time, you need to choose. Based on my research, focusing on losing fat first without losing muscle seems to be the best way to go, so that’s my current plan.

This complicates tracking though, because while logging weight is super easy, it doesn’t separate fat loss from muscle loss. BMI, too, is essentially bullshit, and is an unreliable measure of body fat and muscle mass.

The best indicator of progress is body fat percentage, which, it turns out, is also probably the hardest to measure accurately. Based on our Tanita body fat/water scale2 and these body fat percentage photos, I’m currently at about 25% body fat. My goal is to get this down to 15% body fat. Based on a simple ideal body weight formula, 15% body fat means a goal weight of 165 lbs.

Phase 1: Diet

As important (and satisfying) as exercise is, the biggest factor by far in losing fat is simply eating less calories than your body burns. Yes, working out will help on the burning calories side of that equation, but when you realize it takes over an hour of running to offset the calories in a typical fast food lunch, it’s just easier not to eat it in the first place.

I’m already eating pretty well on a daily basis, so I don’t need many changes here. I haven’t had a dount for breakfast in over a month, and I’ve done well in avoiding candy and chips for snacks. We rarely eat out, and almost all of our meals are homemade with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I’m not following a specific diet plan, but I guess you could call it low-carb. I avoid breads and pastas as much as possible and try my best to stick to whole grains if I do eat them.

I am also back to using MyFitnessPal for calorie tracking. While I’ve developed a good intuition for the “cost” of a food from my previous episodes of tracking, I’ve found it difficult to keep a running total for the day without recording it somewhere. Yes, it can be a pain — especially at dinner time when we make something from scratch that isn’t in the MyFitnessPal database. But, it gets results, so it’s worth doing.

The areas where I need to focus are:

  1. Watch my portion sizes. The things I eat are good and healthy, but I need to pay attention to how much I’m consuming. Instead of going for seconds on the main course, have some extra vegetables, etc.
  2. Minimize evening snacking. We don’t keep much junk food in the house anymore, so this has gotten better, but I still need to watch what I eat after the kids are in bed. I feel ok indulging in a big bowl of popcorn once a week, but otherwise I need to stick to fruits, veggies, and nuts.

Phase 2: Fitness

In my adult life, fitness for me has always meant cardio. First the elliptical machine, then, after I overcame my longtime mental barrier towards it, running. I never once considered weightlifting. That entire part of the gym was alien to me, and, to be honest, free weights intimidated the hell out of me.

But recently, I read a few things that changed my mind and made me decide to give weight training a serious try. The first was a 2011 article from Men’s Journal titled “Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie” that really hit home. From the introduction:

Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.

That sounds…a little too familiar. What did he discover was the most effective workout? Plain, boring barbell exercises.

Regardless of which aptitude you choose [strength, power, muscle mass, and muscle endurance], you’ll start by focusing on a few basic exercises – the squat, the dead lift, and the bench press. Those old sessions you’ve been doing, of eight or 10 different single-muscle exercises, that’s over. Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles – they operate as a whole. Even in 2010, picking up heavy things, throwing heavy things up over our heads, and pulling heavy things remain the very best ways to replicate our foundational movement patterns.

This article and the fitness subreddit on Reddit both highly recommend the book Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe. It’s considered by many to be the best book ever written on the subject of strength training. If you have zero knowledge of weightlifting like I did, this book is required reading.

In the three weeks since I started strength training, I’ve already made these gains:

  • Squat: 65 lbs to 120 lbs
  • Bench Press: 95 lbs to 110 lbs
  • Press (overhead press): 65 lbs to 75 lbs
  • Deadlift: 95 lbs to 170 lbs

I’m planning on taking a brief break from adding weight during every session in order to work on my form. I don’t want to keep making increases, only to hit a plateau or get hurt because of bad form. The great part is that at my gym, I’ve never had to wait to use the deadlift mat or the power rack for squats and presses, so I can spend as much time working on these as I want. There just aren’t that many people doing these boring (but effective) barbell exercises.

If I’m not able to make it to the gym for barbell exercises, I use the You Are Your Own Gym iPhone app to get a good bodyweight workout done at home. Even the beginner workout is tough, but some of the advanced exercises are downright tough. There’s really no excuse I can’t get three good strength workouts in per week.

Progress

I’m happy with and excited by the progress I’ve made in January alone. I’ve already lost five pounds, and I’ve made big improvements in my strength. I’m looking forward to where I’ll be later this year, and will be sure to follow-up!

  1. If you’re looking for a good cardio workout along with some bodyweight exercises, take a look at Insanity. It’s great for building endurance. ↩

  2. The method used by Tanita isn’t nearly as good as Hydrostatic Weighing, but is “good enough” as a fast and easy substitute (and a hell of a lot cheaper). ↩

Filed Under: Fitness Tagged With: ,

Sublime Text 2

July 2, 2012 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

Being a nerd is an odd thing. We’re really particular about things that never even occur to The Normals. Take, for example, text editors.

For a web developer or a writer well-verses in Markdown, selecting the right text editor for the task is a Very Important Thing. IDEs and GUI applications often get in the way of development, and Word is almost always overkill for writing plain text that’s ultimately just going to be copy and pasted into a text field in WordPress anyway.

iOS Editors

On iOS, there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to text editors. You want one that syncs to Dropbox and has Mardown editing features? You have 18 to choose from. Me? I alternate between Byword and Elements depending on the task, and have started using Drafts to quickly capture text that I later want to edit later.

Desktop Editors

Text Editors on the desktop are a different beast altogether. I use them for a lot more than writing prose — working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and scripting languages like PHP and Python are a daily occurrence. For a long time on the Mac there was TextMate, a highly customizable editor that became popular with web devs, but became stagnant after five years without a major update1. My copy never got much use since most of my work gets done on my work laptop and not the family iMac.

The text editor situation on Windows was bleak for a long time. Notepad++ was far better than the built-in Notepad, but was never something I felt like investing time into learning or looked forward to using.

I’ve even attempted to teach myself VIM on a yearly basis so I’ll know more than the basics, but haven’t been able to suffer through the learning curve to get to the point of proficiency.

And don’t get me started on Emacs. That thing is inscrutable.

Sublime Text

This brings us to Sublime Text. I can’t remember how exactly I first heard about it, but looking back through my email shows that I purchased my license for Sublime Text in March 2011, so I’ve been using it for at least 1 1/2 years at this point. It was a respectable version 1.x text editor, but even at the beginning, I was in it for the early beta version of Sublime Text 2. The final 2.0 version was released on Tuesday, and it is magnificent.

When you first open Sublime 2, it looks deceptively simple. Yes, it’s cross-platform2 and incredibly fast, but you don’t see much more than an empty screen where you can start typing text. But dig in, and you realize just how powerful of a tool this software is.

I’m not going to do a comprehensive review here, but I do want to run-down some of the notable features that makes this my favorite text editor.

Customization everything

The hundreds of settings and key bindings are both stored in simple json files that open right in Sublime Text. User files let you protect your customizations from any changes made to the Default file during upgrades.

You can also create macros, snippets, and auto-completions with similar configuration files — even on a per-file type or per-project basis.

Sublime Package Control

Sublime Package Control is a package manager you install into Sublime Text 2 that then lets you find, install, update, and remove other 3rd-party packages within the text editor. It makes adding new functionality super easy.

Minimap

The Minimap gives you a graphical representation of your entire file/document, allowing you to quickly “scrub” to the section you’re looking for.

Goto anything

Ctrl + P triggers the Goto box at the top of the window, which lets you open files, switch between files, jump to symbols or specific lines, or search.

Multi-selection

Multi-selection gives you multiple cursors on the page to very quickly make changes to multiple items.

Extensible via Python

Sublime Text 2 comes with a Python interpreter and console that let you extend the editor through the Python API. Python is a great scripting language and is very well-known, so expect many programmers to create wonderful extensions for Sublime Text.

Sublime Text 2 resources

Here are some good resources for learning how to use Sublime Text 2:

  1. A public alpha release of TextMate 2 was made available in December 2011, but a final version has yet to be announced. ↩

  2. Sublime Text 2 runs equally well on OS X, Windows, and Linux. ↩

Filed Under: Web Development Tagged With: , , ,

How I won Twitter for a day

June 29, 2012 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning I broke away from my work and turned to Twitter right around when the Supreme Court was supposed to announce their decision in the Affordable Care Act case. I, like everyone else, was surprised at the ruling, and followed-up with some instant analysis from my Twitter timeline and on MPR.

Shortly after, saw a tweet1 about people threatening to move to Canada because of the Supreme Court outcome (BuzzFeed has a nice collection of examples). I loved the irony of these comments and remembered that I had earlier read somewhere that the U.S. was alone among industrialized countries in not offering universal healthcare. I did some research and found that it was, in fact, true. This led me to post the following tweet:

Upset about today's SCOTUS decision? Want to leave the U.S.? Here's a list of other industrialized countries without universal healthcare:

I thought it was clever, and was happy to see it favorited and retweeted by several of my followers within a few minutes. I was unprepared for what happened after that. Soon, my iPhone screen was constantly on with a steady stream of people retweeting and favoriting it. When I went home for lunch, I had to plug my phone in to recharge it because the battery was getting drained from the constant notifications.

Still in disbelief, I found myself constantly checking Favstar to watch the counts continue to climb. By the time I got back to the office, my tweet had 500 retweets. By 8pm, it had 1,000. As I’m typing this, the count is at 1,450.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of replies by people who didn’t get the joke, and thought I had forgot my link to the list of countries. I even had a little fun interacting with a teenager who seemed completely clueless, and heard from a small business owner who claims the ACA will put him out of business.

@berberich you won twitter for the day!

It made for an interesting day. I’ve never interacted with so many different people in the 5.5 years I’ve been on Twitter. I’m also not expecting it to happen ever again.

A note about semantics

Even though my healthcare tweet was a joke, it’s important to me that it’s accurate. I considered my quick research to be “good enough”, but it’s worth pointing out that my 138 characters message contains two items that are open debate:

  1. The definition of “industrialized countries”
  2. The meaning of “universal healthcare”

Industrialized countries

As best I could tell, there isn’t a single definition for what makes a country “industrialized” or “developed”. Economic criteria (e.g., GDP) are usually looked at, though human development is now often taken into consideration.

The International Monetary Fund classifies 35 nations as advanced economies, a listing that seems to the most current and representative one available.

Universal healthcare

Is “universal access to healthcare insurance” the same as “universal access to healthcare”? Some would say yes, but I’m not so sure. What is clear is that the Affordable Care Act expands healthcare coverage. Hopefully it will be universal someday, and more importantly, hopefully healthcare will be, too.

Map of countries that provide universal healthcare

The point

Getting past the word-parsing, the entire point is this: The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world, spends more on healthcare per capita than all but two countries2, yet unlike its peers, lacks universal healthcare. The ACA doesn’t get us there yet, but it’s a start.

  1. I tried going back to find the original tweet, but I wasn’t able to locate it. ↩

  2. Norway and the Netherlands ↩

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: ,

Surface and Metro - Microsoft’s Last Big Hope

June 21, 2012 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

Microsoft held a big press event Monday evening to unveil their next big product - a tablet PC they call Microsoft Surface1. It’s a big gamble for them, but, it’s one they badly need to take in order to stay relevant. Also, Surface looks, really, really nice.

Revisiting my 10-year prediction about Windows

Searching the archives of this blog turned up a post I made on December 8th, 2005, titled Prediction: You Won’t Be Using Windows In 10 Years. You can go read it for yourself, but the jist of it was that I believed that by 2015, the majority of computer users would be using Mac OS or some variety of Linux instead of Windows. It’s still a bit too early to call it, but I can safely say I missed the forest for the trees.

What I didn’t consider back when I wrote that was that in ten years, the majority of people wouldn’t be using computers. Instead, other, more user-friendly and inexpensive alternatives like smartphones and tablets would become the preferred computing tools for everyday tasks. So while Windows is still on most desktops, that market is well on its way to becoming a niche.

This is why it’s so important that Microsoft get Windows 8 right, and why the company is betting its future on Metro for phones, tablets, and desktops.

Metro

Metro design inspiration

Metro is a design language that Microsoft has been evolving over the years with different products, including Zune, Xbox, Windows Media Center, Windows Phone, and now Windows 8. It’s clean, modern, heavily based on typography, and content-focused - a stark contrast from the Windows desktop, or any other mobile or desktop interface, for that matter. I love it.

Windows 8 Metro

Surface

This brings us to Surface. With Metro, Microsoft has shown that it “gets” software design. As you can guess though, that’s not enough anymore. Apple’s success with the iPhone and iPad show that hardware and software need to blend seamlessly together. Microsoft now gets this as well, which is why it’s no longer depending on its 3rd party hardware partners to deliver hardware running Windows 8.

Microsoft Surface

Surface isn’t the first hardware made by Microsoft (see Zune, Xbox, and their various mice and keyboards2), but it is the company’s most ambitious effort yet. Businessweek:

Let’s be clear, though: Microsoft making hardware is not a natural action. It’s what the company does in times of desperation. With the release of Windows 8 looming, Microsoft was indeed desperate for a hardware company to do something to blunt Apple’s runaway tablet machine. The Surface tablet represents an indictment of the entire PC and device industry, which has stood by for a couple of years trying to mimic Apple with a parade of hapless, copycat products.

Microsoft Surface

This is true — Surface is an genuinely interesting iPad alternative that none of the other Windows 8 or Android tablet manufacturers were able to create. Granted, only Apple, Microsoft, and Google have the kind of cash on-hand where they can invest months and years on the design of a single product, so it’s no surprise that the Samsung Galaxy Dingus and Dell Latitude Whatever are bland, uninspiring products.

Microsoft Surface

Still, there’s no question that Surface is a gamble for Microsoft. It could ship a mediocre product in the fall and/or piss off other tablet/PC makers who might decide against making Windows 8 tablets of their own. Josh Topolsky at The Verge thinks Surface is just what Microsoft needs to unify their tablet and desktop stories:

Microsoft may be stealing a page from Apple’s playbook, but it’s a good page to steal. It also happens to give a narrative to a product which has thus far been something of a mystery: Windows 8.

Since the introduction of the Metro UI and Microsoft’s talk about a “no compromises” operating system, there has been plenty of speculation on exactly what kind of product a Windows 8 PC would be. The combination touch interface and traditional desktop have continuously felt like a jarring mashup of ideas. Despite allusions to hybrid products that function as both tablet and PC, it’s never been clear what Microsoft intended to do with Windows 8.

But the Surface seems to solidify the message of Windows 8, and it puts the evolving OS into a package that makes sense. An attractive package, at that.

Microsoft Surface

A hope for success

I’m hoping that Microsoft is successful with Windows 8, and Surface in particular. The realignment they’ve made in the last few years is astonishing given the size of the company and the incredible inertia their blockbuster products have behind them. Their company-wide unification behind Metro and their push into the tablet market are big accomplishments that I find admirable.

And while I’m both an iPhone and iPad user right now, having a first-rate competitor will mean nothing but good things for everyone3.

  1. Note that proper branding means there’s never a “the”. It’s “iPhone”, “iPad”, “Xbox 360”, and “Surface”. ↩

  2. I have two Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 keyboards - one at work and one at home. Big fan. ↩

  3. Yes - at this point, I consider Google’s Android a 2nd rate competitor. ↩

Filed Under: Microsoft Tagged With: , ,

Kellen Roger Berberich

May 16, 2012 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

Two weeks ago - May 2nd - Casey and I welcomed the newest member of the Berberich family - Kellen Roger. He was born at 3:54pm, weighing in at 8lbs 5oz.

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Kellen’s older brothers are quite happy to have him join our family, too. For the record here are their ages right now: Kael - 6 1/2; Asa - Almost 5; and Jonas - 19 months.

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I was able to take over a week off from work in order to spend lots of quality time with the family and to help ease the transition of adding another person to our daily routine. I’m back at work this week, but we’re lucky to have Casey’s mom here with us to help out with the older kids since Casey has a newborn attached to her most of the day.

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As always, you can find more photos of Kellen on Flickr.

Filed Under: Baby Tagged With: , ,

Entrepreneurship, Business, and Inspiration

March 13, 2012 By Jason Berberich 3 Comments

Prologue

The other day my friend Sam asked me where I turn to for business and entrepreneurship inspiration, which led to the following thought: “Yeah, good question - where the hell do I get my inspiration from?”.

So after a day of intermittent soul searching, here’s my incomplete list of what’s currently driving me.

What’s Not on This List - Business Books

I spent the better part of my twenties building a personal library containing scores of business books. Many I read, but even more just sat on a bookshelf looking pretty and making me feel smart.

I’ve given up on reading business books. They’re either recycled content learned by pioneers decades ago, or pseudoscientific case study bullshit claiming to show you the way to success courtesy of crafty cherry picking1.

And all of them need to lose the filler, drop to 50 pages, and just get to the damn point already.

Except Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen, genius, is the author of the only business book worth reading - The Innovator’s Dilemma2. The book explores the idea of disruptive innovations and how they come to displace established players in markets. This is the most important business book written in the last two decades.

Equally important is Christensen’s more recent work on the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory. In a nut, it says that customers “hire” a product to do a particular job, and this helps explain why they buy one product over another. For example, a Snickers bar is “hired” for a different reason than a Milky Way. You can get a great introduction to the topic in a podcast episode titled “The hiring and firing of milkshakes and candy bars”3.

Merlin Mann and the Back to Work Podcast

Merlin Mann became internet famous for being a productivity guru and coming up with the idea of Inbox Zero. At some point, he became even more interesting when he abandoned the productivity porn racket and shifted into higher level thoughts on creating our best stuff.

Back to Work, Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin, hits all of the important topics - fear, inspiration, seriousness, failure, passion, saying no, drive, buddism, and much more.

The podcast is not specifically business related, which is a Good Thing, because what Dan and Merlin talk about is much more important than that.

Copyblogger and Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio

I find the art of copywriting fascinating, and few do it better than the people at Copyblogger. It’s old school marketing in the spirit of David Ogilvy applied through email, the web, social media, and other modern techniques.

Their podcast, Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio, gives a good introduction to many of the topics and features interviews with interesting and inspiring guests.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is best known for founding Y Combinator, a venture fund/incubator for technology startups. Over the years, he has written a long list of essays on entrepreneurship and programming. Not always applicable to me, but always thought-provoking.

The Others

Who else inspires me? Several extremely hard working entertainers come to mind. Nothing highlights the role of practice and perseverance like these guys.

Louis C.K.

In my mind, Louis C.K. is the hardest working comedian in the business right now. Not only does the guy scrap his routine every year and completely rewrite it, he writes, directs, edits and stars in his own tv show.

Penn & Teller

Penn & Teller have spent decades refining their craft, and it shows. They’re the most entertaining magicians out there. The had complete focus on magic, vowing to each other that they would not take a job outside of show business to force them to take any and every gig offered to them. Anything to get up on stage and improve their act.

And then there’s the story of Teller and “The Red Ball” illusion, which he has spent over a decade practicing and refining. An hour a day, every day, year after year. Practicing and refining in order to make something beautiful.

That’s dedication.

  1. See also, Good to Great, by Jim Collins ↩

  2. Christensen’s follow-up book is also worth reading - The Innovator’s Solution ↩

  3. You can consider The Critical Path podcast a bonus recommendation. ↩

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , ,

Disney World

December 8, 2011 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

To help celebrate my parents’ upcoming 40th wedding anniversary, our whole family headed down to Disney World last week for a few days of fun in the parks. The kids had a good time, but I won’t lie - with three boys six and under, it was a lot of work.

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A lot of time was spent on buses, or waiting for buses, which led to several situations like this:

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It was nice being there while Disney was celebrating Christmas, since it added a more festive atmosphere. They know how to put on a show better than anyone else.

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You can find more photos from our trip on our Flickr account.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: , ,

The Nest Learning Thermostat

October 25, 2011 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

I’m a sucker for well designed products and for energy efficiency technologies. Combine the two, and you’ve definitely got my attention.

Yesterday, former Apple employee and iPod designer Tony Fadell revealed what his start-up has been working on for the last couple of years. It is, of all things, a home thermostat. Called the Nest, this smart thermostat is unlike any you’ve seen before. Yes, its design would be at home with any of Apples current products, but its functionality is what’s impressive.

Nest Learning Thermostat

The Nest has a number of sensors and some smart software that allows it to learn and create a schedule based on how and when you adjust the temperature. It can automatically sense when you’re away and make adjustments accordingly and guide you to make small changes that can save you lots of money. It’s also connected via Wi-Fi, so you can control it remotely with a phone or computer and have it automatically receive software updates to improve itself.

Steven Levy has an in depth Wired profile on the Nest that details the product’s inspiration and the impressive team that created it that is well worth the read:

Fadell got the idea for Nest Labs when he was building a green home in Tahoe. A long-time aficionado of architecture, he threw himself into the details of house design. His domicile would be as gorgeous as the products he worked on at Apple, endowed with the same love of detail. When it came to HVAC — the industry acronym for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning — he worked with architects to drill sophisticated geothermal wells to regulate temperature. Everything was looking great. And then the architects presented him with the options for the thermostats that would adorn the walls of his perfect home.

They sucked.

“What was wrong with them?” he now says. “They were ugly. They were confusing. They were incredibly expensive. They didn’t have half the features you would expect for a modern thing. None of them were connected, so they didn’t talk to each other. I wasn’t able to remotely control them. In Tahoe, you want to be able check on the temperature of the house or turn it on before you get there. Because it’s really cold in the winter. I couldn’t do any of that, and I was like, Why is this?”

So Fadell started researching.

This sort of thing is really excites me, so while I’d love to pre-order one right now, the $250 price tag makes me hesitate. Hopefully they’ll be able to bring costs down the first year and make it a little less expensive, because this looks like a great product that could make a big difference to the environment.

Filed Under: Energy Tagged With: , , ,

Steve

October 6, 2011 By Jason Berberich Leave a Comment

I was shocked last night when, after dinner, Casey took a look at the Facebook updates streaming down her page, and said, “I didn’t know Steve Jobs died.” I suspected the time would come sooner, rather than later, after he resigned as Apple CEO in late August, but I don’t think anyone thought the day would come this soon.

It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such a day-to-day impact on people’s lives as Steve Jobs. The technology he helped design is in the hands of millions of people around the world. My mind boggles at the amount of creativity unleashed by Apple’s products in the hands of everyday people.

Steve Jobs the businessman will always be remembered for his return to Apple, and the remarkable turnaround he led starting with the iMac. By taking Apple from near bankruptcy to one of the most valuable companies in the world, he has proven himself in the marketplace like no one else.

But as much as I appreciate Steve the businessman, I will always remember him as Steve the visionary. His sense of design and his ability to say “no” are what gave us the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Instead of endlessly adding to products, he had the good sense to take away until they were left to their essence as an object. There are no better examples of this than the iPhone and iPad. Turned off, they are black sheets of glass. Turned on, they transform into whatever you want them to be.

Steve Jobs, Apple, and their products, have inspired countless entrepreneurs, designers, and developers to actually design products and not leave it as varnish to slather on at the end. The objects Steve designed and inspired are his greatest legacy.

Thank you, Steve.

RIP Steve Jobs

Filed Under: Apple Tagged With:
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