Human Innovation in High Tech

Innovation is something new – typically revolutionary – that reduces the cost of a transaction, in terms of time or money.

But is that necessarily a good thing?

The ideal application of any technology is something that enables you to be more productive while getting out of your way. This is the challenge with technology. Speaking on the phone is a great way to communicate, but subtle cues are missed such as facial expressions. Even with video chat the technology distracts and diminishes communication since users have to be concerned with trivial conditions like lighting and frame composition (i.e. how well can the other person see your face). The very enabling benefits of technology can also get in the way.

In addition to these issues is the prep period – the overhead with setting up and processing the technology. I can't see myself blink when I look in the mirror, but I can see myself blink when looking at a "live" video feed of myself on my computer.

Now we face the challenge with humanizing technology.

We see technology dehumanizing us everyday – and I am guiltier than most as seen in this video making the rounds the past few days. Rather than accepting the interruption of technology, we need to integrate it in better, more subtle ways.

Pilot Procedures and Paperwork

Last year, I mentioned how paperwork has been virtually eliminated from the cockpit due to the iPad. But, when flying through the clouds, pilots still need the old pen and paper.

There are two sets of rules pilots follow when flying an airplane: Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). In order to fly under VFR I need to be able to see a few miles and keep my distance from the clouds (the distances vary depending on the type of airspace I'm flying in).

A key limitation when flying VFR is that I am not allowed to fly into the clouds since I can't see who else might be in there. This problem is easily solved by filing an IFR flight plan since air traffic control will track me on radar and give me a specific route to fly.

Flying IFR is more complicated than the simple "see and avoid" technique used when flying VFR. For example, what do you do if you're flying under IFR in the clouds and you lose communications? (There are specific procedures to follow in this case – needless to say it's not a situation any pilot wants to find themselves in.)

Before departing under IFR I will file my IFR clearance request and then it will be issued to me just prior to taking off. It helps to know what clearance I'll be issued ahead of time since it's a mouthful to write down, as it's being issued, and then read back as you can hear in this simulation.

IFR clearance from San Carlos (SQL) to Carlsbad (CRQ).

To make things flow smoothly I jot down CRAFT (orange oval) in a column to remember all parts of the clearance:
C – Cleared to (usually my destination)
R – Route to fly (blue rectangle in photo)
A – Altitude to climb to
F – Frequency to switch to after departure
T – Transponder code to squawk so ATC can track me on radar

My notes from a three hour flight.

While it's perfectly acceptable to get an IFR clearance issued after taking off it certainly makes things more complex since I'd have to write all this down while flying the plane. It's much easier to do on the ground. Lightening a pilot's workload is the reason commercial airlines have two pilots (the captain and first officer).

Once I'm airborne ATC will usually guide me to fly a specific route until I'm established on my flight plan. It's handy to have ATC act as a second set of eyes looking out for my wellbeing. Occasionally, ATC will give me course adjustments to deviate for bad weather, traffic, or to shorten my route. If I have no course adjustments then the only thing I need to write down are new radio frequencies as controllers hand me off from one radar sector to another.

iPads are great but for quick notes, nothing beats a pen and paper.

Urban Life Conveniences

You can't miss the Amazon Locker by the front door of 7-11.

Today I had two firsts. I commuted on the San Diego public transit bus system and, this evening, I received a package from Amazon using their Locker delivery service.

Everyone's familiar with public buses, even people who never use them. But the Amazon Locker delivery service just started last year. It's perfect for people who live and work in big cities and don't want packages left sitting at their front door.

Instead of having your package shipped by Amazon to an address, they deliver it to a bank of lockers that they own, spread throughout the city. The shipping charges seem to be no different than if the package was shipped to your front door.

7-11 Amazon Locker at bus and trolly stop.

This evening, I received a confirmation e-mail that my package was ready for pick up. So, I hopped on the bus since the nearest bus stop is just a few hundred feet from my place. The last stop on my bus route was right outside – less than 100 feet – from the 7-11 where Amazon has a Locker delivery location. A perfect synergy since they're open 24/7.

Enter your code that pops open your locker.

Picking up my package was so quick I ended up reboarding the same bus that dropped me off because the driver had a five minute break. But, since my bus fare card is unlimited there was a "read error" when I tried to swipe it which the driver dismissed when he realized that I was the same person boarding the same bus.




Both the bus and Amazon Locker services were great customer experiences  – much better than I expected. Door-to-door was well under an hour for this two mile roundtrip  Best part is that the bus ride was effectively free and I didn't have to hunt for parking downtown.

Designing a Better Electronic Book

I love iBooks but nothing beats the durability of a real book. As great as it is to carry around my e-book library on my iPad, it can never compare to the feel of picking up a real book and flipping through it. That's a physical experience sorely lacking on all e-book readers.

So, can the real world feel of a book be duplicated electronically?

Perhaps.. one day... probably. The key is that a digital book would have to feel like a real book. One way to do this is with a digital book made of pages where each is a thin, flexible film, like e-paper, that feel like real pages.

Imagine an e-book full of a couple hundred blank pages made of thin, bendable computer displays. You'd select which book to load and each e-page would display a page of your book. You'd be reading e-ink text on real pages that you could flip through, highlight, take notes, etc.; much like iBooks or Kindle. Just don't dog-ear a page. For books longer than 200 pages, you could just cycle back – page 201 would appear on page one and so on. Now that would be best of both worlds.

The Photo Behind the Photo

Michael taking a photo of a stranger taking a photo.

Last month I was walking to a San Diego Tech Week event with a former Apple coworker, Michael. He has a great eye for design and his work was regularly reviewed by Steve Jobs.

As we walked down the street, a woman stopped to take a photo, through a chain link fence, of some interesting artwork. As she snapped the photo, Michael had the presence of mind to snap a picture of this stranger. He showed her the photo and they exchanged phone numbers so they could text the images to one another.

A coworker taking a photo of me taking a photo.

Less than thirty minutes later, while at the event we were attending, Michael received the photo at the top right and we marveled at the impromptu collaboration that had just occurred. 

We don't know who the woman was, but, like Michael, she too obviously has a good eye.

Joyce Maynard Just Got Married

Joyce Maynard on the far right.

Joyce Maynard just got married.

This past May I attended Joyce's writing workshop at her home in Mill Valley about 20 minutes north of San Francisco. It was a day long affair where Joyce, along with seven of us, reviewed and commented on our manuscripts. While having lunch on her deck, which overlooks Mount Tamalpais, she pointed out the regrettable reality that her fame is too closely tied to the fact that she lived with J. D. Salinger – the recluse author of The Catcher in the Rye – for the better part of a year while writing her first book. Prefacing her bio with this makes it seem she's riding Salinger's coattails which couldn't be further from the truth. Her initial fame, that caught the eye of J. D. Salinger, was a feature article she wrote for The New York Times magazine, An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life, while a freshman at Yale.

Joyce Maynard's kitchen.

I've never attended a writing workshop before Joyce's. Although I've published paid and unpaid journalistic articles, interviews, and blog posts, I wanted to work on improving my writing ever since sticking my toe in the waters of fiction writing, last summer. Although Joyce has written fiction, her true talent is the personal narrative.

I don't recall exactly how I discovered Joyce's workshop other than it percolated to the top of my Google search results. I sent off an e-mail to Joyce with great timing. She promptly responded even though she was at her rural place in Guatemala on Lake Atitlán for her ten day writing workshop with limited Internet access. After a few e-mail exchanges I was signed up for her May workshop.

Joyce taught me more about writing in one day than I had learned anywhere else.

Joyce showed me how to quickly detect when there's a story to be told:
"I used to do ________ but now I do ________."
Every time I filled in those two blanks with my real life experiences I had a story to tell.

My manuscript autographed by Joyce Maynard.

A key point she taught me was to write personal narratives that only I could write. She said, "Don't be a reporter. Tell the story that only you can tell." This concept was new to me since much of my paid writing was exactly that: reporting. Very quickly, with each one of us at her workshop, she could figure out the story behind the story. As I listened to each writer's backstory I noticed myself leaning in to hear more. As Joyce asked me a few questions about my manuscript I realized where my deeper, more personal, and interesting story really was. She even gave me a resounding opening line for my manuscript rewrite.

I clearly understood her lessons; especially about how we should use symbols in our writing. Her biggest point that hit home with me was to write less, not more, much like my favorite author, Ernest Hemingway. Leave out small, unimportant details, and let your reader conclude how to get from point-A to point-B. The idea isn't to shut out your readers, but leave out just enough to pull them in like a mystery novel.

At the workshop, Joyce told me about her upcoming wedding plans and I've been following her updates ever since.

Oversimplifying Simplicity

The Way to Eden.

I'm reading Ken Segall's thoughts and experiences while working with Steve Jobs. He's had so much interaction with Steve while at Apple and NeXT that he's a cornucopia of best design and marketing practices.

Segall talks about how "one" is the simplest of concepts. It's an intriguing philosophy – there was even an entire episode of Star Trek dedicate to this concept and its followers.

This belief in "one" is why Apple's mice, track pads, iPhones, etc., from the beginning, have only one button. One is where it all begins.

What's the simplest numeral system? It's not base 10 (decimal) since you have to memorize 10 different digits. Is it base 2 (binary)? After all, computers and human DNA use binary to store information (ones and zeros, or A-T and C-G combinations). Certainly binary is the simplest? Au contraire; how many people can convert 1010 from binary to base 10? Not simple... not simple at all.

The simplest numeral system.

It turns out that unary is the simplest numeral system for representing natural numbers – in other words, unary uses just ones. This is how a cave man would keep track of "How many?" things he owed, even before there was written or spoken language. Take a pile of rocks and for each one of something, you move a rock to another pile. Do the reverse when taking inventory.

This is how a bouncer counts people at the door or how the simplest of card counters tries to beat the house at blackjack. We've all used unary to keep track of things when we tally items with four slashes and then a diagonal.

Something Simpler?
Where I disagree with Segall's thinking is when he points out "zero is the only number that's simpler than one." Ironically, this not the case as I learned from my assembly language professor, Mr. Lee. If you think back to when we learned Roman numerals in grade school (I, II, III, IV...) you'll quickly realize that there was no numeral for zero. This is also true in other ancient civilizations' numeral systems such as Chinese and Arabic. As simple as zero seems, it's a fairly complex concept to have nothing of something – just try to ask any handheld calculator to divide by zero and you'll see that it does not compute.

Trying to be simpler than the simplest makes things more complex.

How to Become an Astronaut

What's the first step to becoming an astronaut? Apply.

Click to enlarge

It was fairly obvious, last month, that I wasn't accepted as an AsCan when the Astronaut Class of 2013 was announced, but this letter I received today makes it official.

I've never been so fond of a rejection letter for a job I truly wanted.

Surprisingly, the basic qualifications to become an astronaut are fairly simple.

Personal Services via Mobile

As I type this, Betsy and Joel are here cleaning my condo – I scheduled this cleaning with Exec Cleaning. Since I've been spending more time downtown San Diego, to be closer to the tech scene, I've started using more and more personal services that I schedule with my iPhone such as Car2Go and Lyft.

Obviously, mobile and GPS are the key elements to the proliferation of these personal services. From the get-go, user-generated content and markets were the first to democratize the World Wide Web with the launch of eBay in 1995; and now, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter brought all of it into the social media realm.

The really nice aspect of these services is, like craigslist, there can be anonymous contact between the customer and the service provider and each can rate the other. Plus, customers can see photos of their service providers before they arrive.

Betsy checking in to begin cleaning.

Leading up to my cleaning, an Exec Cleaner contacted me via in-app texting. Even better is that a Lyft driver can call me (or I can call my Lyft driver) without our caller IDs showing up on each other's phone. When was the last time that you could track a taxi as it made its way through town to your front door?

I doubt these services will be a fad. Everyone needs to clean their home and travel around town; and the nice thing is that these services are becoming easier and easier to use. Of course, there's always room for innovation. I'm sure it won't be long until we see self-driving Car2Go vehicles.

Changing Business Models Through Technology

Innovation can be defined as anything that reduces the cost of a transaction.

It has been years since I washed my car in a self-serve carwash bay. Usually I get a carwash with a gas fill-up or go for the full detailing when needed.

Since today was a warm, sunny day I decided to try the self-serve carwash route. In the past, I'd have to bring singles and use the change machine to get quarters. Each quarter might buy me 15 seconds of wash time. The problem was I had to guess, ahead of time, how long it would take me to wash my car. How long was enough? Four minutes? Six minutes? It was either a race against the clock or money down the drain.

Nowadays, credit card readers are places I never considered five or ten years ago, from smartphones to parking meters; and, of course, at self-serve car wash bays. Much like Car2Go's pay-by-the-minute rentals or Amazon's pay-by-the-hour servers the self-serve carwash bays now let you pay for only what you need. Just swipe your credit card and turn the dial from pre-wash, to soap brush, to rinse whenever you're ready. A much better UX.