Tonight I attempted to create a blog post that served as a reflection of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which I have been reading over the past month or so. I made a couple of lists: things that stuck out to me within the book, things that surprised me, lessons that I will always remember, etc. At the end of my list making, however, I realized that after reading this book I have a much clearer understanding of what it is like to be in a pivotal leadership position like Steve Jobs. In no way do I want to play down his peculiarities-- as many have said, Jobs had his demons. This was evident in the way that he interacted with those that he hired and fired, as well as the overall tone of how he went about his daily routines. In one sense Jobs was a crazy leader who had extreme expectations and was disliked by much of his workforce. In another sense he was one of the greatest visionaries and creative people of our time. Regardless of which you think is the dominant trait, the persona of Steve Jobs was multifaceted and one of a kind. As a result, it is a bit hard to write about. I didn't want to sit down and give you a simple recap of his life-- if you want that you can turn to Wikipedia. What I do want to talk about, however, is the way that Jobs kept recurring throughout the semester. In January I set out on my independent study quest, starting with Steven Levy's In the Plex. I spent the following month in a haze of Google, preparing for interview after interview and becoming very interested in the company's history, particularly that of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I loved reading about their individual stories, which prompted me to begin my Innovation Leaders series. Throughout the semester I talked with a range of people about their path to an innovative career and how they value their current technological capabilities. One of the recurring themes was Steve Jobs himself-- many people included him in their descriptions of what inspired them at a young age and what they wish to be when crafting their corporation. Yes, Jobs was an incredible businessman, but this stemmed from a concentrated dream and tunnel-vision that made enemies quicker than it made friends. One of my favorite things about Issacson's book was the honest depiction of Job's as a person and as a family member and friend. He took an honest approach in describing Job's personality, but was also sure to highlight his greatness as a leader and as an innovator. For example, when Jobs gave his team an assignment with the Lisa computer and a strict deadline, many thought the feat would be impossible. When asked if they could have an extension, Jobs simply told them that that was not an option. After reading a couple of hundred pages, I certainly feel that I better know the man behind the myth of Apple Computer. He was no kind soul, however he accomplished in a lifetime what most only dream they could do. Throughout the semester I have talked with many local and national innovation leaders, our conversations always centering around the current state of America's technological innovation, as well as how and why we are where we are. Although many of these professionals come from different places and work in different fields, mot of them brought up Job's name at least once during our discussion. He made a mark on Kimberly Jenkins and Ajaz Ahmed at a young age, giving them a spark that lasted throughout their lifetime. Not only did Jobs inspire people, but he has been a visionary for some of the most revolutionary products of the century. I wrote an entire post on my first spring break as an iPhone owner, a device that I could barely comprehend when I was a Blackberry user. Although Jobs is no longer alive, I feel that his name will continue to come up in the realm of professionals with which I identify. I will be spending my summer at Google (I start work in less than three weeks!), where I look forward to applying the entrepreneurial and professional lessons that I have uncovered while researching for this class. Doing this independent study was an extremely valuable use of my semester because it gave me time to step back from my assigned homework and readings and realize what kind of company I admire and what kind of corporate world I would fit best in. However, the biggest takeaway was likely how to be a great leader, which is a skill that I am spending time developing while here at UNC. I have loved interviewing people, reading and writing for this class because all of the subject matter was exactly what I wanted to learn, which forced me to delve deeper into most topics and to conduct much additional research. Although I could talk for hours about what I did throughout the course of the semester and how much of it [surprisingly/unintentionally] relates back to Steve Jobs, in his honor I want to keep this relatively minimalistic. I plan to continue my Tech Thoughts blogging from the Googleplex this summer-- stay tuned! I look forward to see if I hear Steve Job's name has frequently there as I did at school this semester. Cheers!
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Greetings from some really high altitude as my flight ascends into the clouds on our way from Denver to Charlotte. I was lucky enough to spend the first half of my spring break exploring Colorado- a state that I had never been to before and that I absolutely love after six days of adventure. We flew into Denver last Tuesday and then spent a few days in Breckenridge before going to Vail for Snowball Music Festival. This was my first spring break since the iPhone epidemic devoured my friend group; last year I spent the week in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and recall that most of us were still 100% Team Blackberry. I don’t want to over exaggerate the importance of phone make and model on the ability to have fun on spring break, but this year I noticed many iPhone-specific habits amongst spring break goers, myself especially. (Many of these are also applicable to Android phones, but I will focus on Blackberry vs. iPhone). In a short year I have totally changed how I utilize and leverage my mobile connectivity- and I bet a year from now things will be monumentally different once again. It’s a little bit mindboggling to think about, but exciting nonetheless. Four reasons why upgrading from a Blackberry to an iPhone improved the way I explored Colorado: (1) Mobile Location-Based Knowledge I have written about this before but it still shocks me when I travel: due to the iPhone (as well as Android- in most cases), we have reached a new level of constant connectivity. This spans many areas of travel, but especially when it comes to location-based knowledge, one of my favorite mobile improvements. This was relevant throughout my entire trip- from checking in on Foursquare at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and again at Denver International Airport (+4 points for 1336 miles between check ins!) to using Google Maps to navigate walking shortcuts around Breckenridge. The iPhone navigation system is a perk unto itself, which I will elaborate on later. Location-based services are much easier to utilize on an iPhone compared to a Blackberry- not to mention how much more aesthetically pleasing the user interface is. I used to be freaked out by touch screens- I thought they seemed unreliable compared to tangible buttons and controls- but once Blackberry ditched the rollerball for a touch-controlled trackpad it seemed that they might as well switch to 100% touch screen (not to imply that their Blackberry Storm was a successful attempt). This leads me to my next iPhone perk: (2) The Bigger, Better Utilized Screen Although I will certainly acknowledge that it took a bit of time to adjust from my three-dimensional Blackberry keyboard to the 100% glass iPhone screen, I now view the touch screen as a big perk in the Blackberry vs. iPhone travel debate. It allows the user to take advantage of the size of their phone. For example, why should half of the Blackberry be devoted to a keyboard if the user isn’t typing 100% of the time that they are using the device? Apple understands this; therefore they created a phone that only displays a keyboard when the user needs a keyboard. My flight from Charlotte to Denver was the first time that I opted to use a downloadable mobile QR code instead of a printed boarding pass. This option is much easier on an iPhone because I can display the QR code as well as all of my flight information on one screen. For those who are timid to rely on a digital ticket, the iPhone can easily capture a screenshot that includes the QR code, which will then be saved as an image in the phone’s camera roll. Although I agree with some that QR codes have become a bit overrated and aren’t appropriately utilized (especially in advertising), I think that using them for airline tickets is plausible. Also, imagine how much paper would be saved if all iPhone users downloaded QR code airline tickets. A lot. Newer identification technologies, such as fingerprint or cornea scanners, could take the check-in process to a new level, but these options are likely expensive and slow to implement. This makes me think that QR ticketing might stick around for awhile. (3) Navigation For most of the duration of my Blackberry career the thought of using my phone for directions was a comical notion. Sure, Blackberry has navigation capabilities that have certainly been improved over the past few years. That being said, the transportation knowledge that the iPhone (and most Android-based phones) offer is leap years ahead of RIM’s technology. If you were stranded in a forest with one Blackberry friend and one iPhone friend you should probably go ahead and sacrifice the Blackberry friend—you’re going to need the iPhone’s GPS technology to get out alive. Yes, that is an exaggeration, but after having my iPhone for almost a year I can’t imagine navigating a new place without it. I lived in Los Angeles for three months last summer and my iPhone got me out of many tricky directional situations. I am not confident that my Blackberry would have done the same. Navigating new places on an iPhone is easier than a Blackberry for a few reasons. The most important is that thanks to a better integration of Google Maps and faster loading time, it is easier to see what is around you in less time. I am a Google Maps addict and the Maps team is one of my top choices when I am at Google this summer because I think the platform still has massive potential. (I am going to do an entire blog post soon about my favorite parts of Google Maps.) Without this technology it would have been much harder to navigate the complexities of Vail. The walking directions were particularly useful. There are many other useful navigation tools aside from Google Maps. For example, the Find My Friends app is extremely helpful in the festival environment. When I went to Bonnaroo two summers ago I would often know the stage where I was supposed to meet my friends, but due to massive crowds the task was still daunting. With Find My Friends I could simply view a map of Snowball and locate the exact location of my friends within the crowd. (4) New technologies Many of the things that I love about my iPhone compared to my old Blackberry are related to the capabilities brought about by the speed at which the iPhone can function. The Internet is now more accessible and apps are easier to navigate. This has allowed for an entrepreneurial opportunity based on creating iPhone content. During Snowball Music Festival there was a start-up called SmartBar launching, based around the idea of “beer and wine without the line.” The app was based around ordering and paying for drinks from your iPhone so that they could be picked up at the bar without the hassle of waiting in line: As the capabilities of our mobile phones continue to evolve I believe that more of our daily activities will be programmed like this. For example, if I know I am looking for a prom dress I could wake up on a Saturday morning, scroll through the store’s inventory on my phone and select which dresses I am interested in trying on. When I arrived at the store that afternoon the dresses I selected would be waiting in a dressing room. Our concept of efficiency will eventually be redefined because of our interactions with technology. I doubt that the shopping process will ever be entirely like this, however, because I could easily argue that scrolling through dresses on my phone is an inefficient way to select clothing. For example, a royal blue dress on my phone might appeal to me because it is my favorite color but once I get to the dressing room I might instantly realize I hate the fabric. In our current shopping system the dress would have never been moved to the dressing room because hating the fabric would have overruled that it was my favorite color. It’s pretty crazy to think about the future of shopping, especially when you throw virtual dressing rooms into the mix. This has absolutely nothing to do with mobile phones or spring break, but it’s still worth watching (it's only 49 seconds long!): (But to summarize, new apps are redefining the way that we go about doing things, such as buying drinks, with the help of our smart phones. The purchasing process is likely going to change significantly as our technologies evolve.) When I started this blog post I made a really long list about all of the iPhone-enabled improvements that I saw while in Colorado, particularly at Snowball Music Festival. The list was long, and this blog post has become even longer. I could jabber forever about all of the ways that having an iPhone has upgraded my travel experience, but I will post about the rest of the list later (which includes Twitter and Facebook mobile communication, the ways that the iPhone has evolved real-time photography and uploading, utilizing Siri and wifi in the Colorado Mountain Express buses). In short, iPhones allow their users to travel more efficiently and to better take advantage of their surroundings. This leads to a less stressful travel experience and more free time for exploring (without getting lost!) Many of these technologies are relatively new and are constantly evolving—it will be interesting to see what the iPhone is like by next year’s spring break.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently finished Steven Levy's In The Plex. I have spent the past few weeks reading Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, which has given me valuable insight into the art of reaching collaborative conclusions in the business world. I have been drafting a post that compares many of these lessons to the tech giants that I am studying during this semester, and am hoping to wrap that up and post it this evening. The past few weeks have been quite hectic but I am proud to say that I landed my dream Google internship and will be spending eleven weeks at the Googleplex this summer. Now that I have that resolved I will be able to devote more time to this blog, which I look forward to. I read these two books at an appropriate time because Levy's work discusses Google's culture and campus while Martin presents many business models and paradigms that are utilized in the company's daily decision making. Above: Google's Mountain View campus, dubbed the "Googleplex." Look at all of those beautiful solar panels!
Over the next two days I will post more about what I liked and disliked about both of the books mentioned in this post. Stay tuned :) This semester I am doing an independent study with Paul Jones, one of my favorite professors at UNC. I had planned to spend the first chunk of my time studying Google, which is convenient because I was lucky enough to receive an interview for their summer internship program. The first round of interviews were two weeks ago and I am flying to NYC on Thursday for the final round. It has been a unique experience to have my personal academic interests mesh perfectly with what I am doing extracurricularly, and my fingers are crossed for the final round! That being said, I have spent a large sum of time over the past month taking notes on Google and the plethora of products and programs that they have created, and it has caused me to get a bit behind on my independent study blogging. I have designed this page to evolve into a blog that I post on frequently- ideally once every three to four days. I would like my posts to be diverse in both form and subject matter, although most of it for the time being will focus on Google. I am currently finishing up In The Plex by Steven Levy, which has been a fascinating read about the inner workings of Google. I have also been reading a lot about specific Googlers- Marissa Mayer in particular. Mayer joined Google in 1999 as the 20th employee and first female engineer and I believe that she is the quintessential Googler. Does it really matter what a quintessential Googler is? Why would someone care? The core of these questions is one of the things that draws me to the company-- no one cares about what the quintessential Wells Fargo or Microsoft employee is like- so why am I fascinated by what Mayer represents? This question ties back to the essence of Google's brand and the fact that although they have grown into a massive corporation, they have yet to lose [much of] their start-up spunk. Studying symbolic systems and computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence at Stanford, Mayer has an academic background that reeks of Google. But she has much more than intellect. She is quirky, well-spoken and has a wide range of interests beyond the computer screen. I am going to do an entire post about her contributions to the product management team at Google (she gets to make some fascinating decisions about design) later this week. "Passion is gender neutralizing".. What a great perspective. I will have a post up in the next few days about my favorite parts of In The Plex.. Stay tuned!
A recent post on my Facebook wall, recently dubbed my Facebook ‘Timeline” read: “your facebook confuses me it took like 234389743 seconds to figure out how to write on your wall...because there is on such thing as facebook wall anymore, apparently. what the hell is this shit” I have noticed this confusion is widespread amongst my Facebook friends, judging from disgruntled Facebook statuses and tweets, anger no different than any other time Facebook has chosen to redesign against our will. Each time they change the aesthetic of our profiles or news feeds people freak out, claiming that they hate Facebook and that they are over it, vying to commit Cyber Suicide and quit Facebook altogether. However, with the integration of the timeline feature, Facebook has done something sneaky. Not only have they totally shifted the way that we digest information on each other’s profiles, they have created something that will keep us tethered to the site for more hours in each day, more days in each year and more years in our lifetime. Although with the introduction of Timeline many people are claiming that they hate Facebook, they will now spend more time than ever on the site. This increase is for obvious reasons. For example, another recent post on my wall read “Im scared to switch to fb timeline because im terrified for people to see the deep-hidden beauties of us from circa 2006 resurface......and after looking at them from your timeline my fears were right. ” “Facebook stalking,” as many have coined it, has now been taken it an astronomically different level. You can look at my unattractive middle school pictures with a simple click. And this brings us to the first way that Timeline will affect our private lifestyles: it will expose them. It will no longer be considered weird to know what your new friend wore on her 17th birthday. You can figure it out in 2 clicks. What month did you go to that Red Hot Chili Peppers concert? Oh yeah, according to my timeline it was in November of ’08. Our timelines will become a way to learn about each other, the same way that we scroll through Wikipedia to learn about historical figures and events. They will soon become a ubiquitous reference source, a destination whenever we have questions about our past experiences or past interactions with friends and family. With the introduction of the Facebook Timeline, your unattractive middle school pictures are no longer hiding behind a thousand recent images. They are easily accessible by any of your friends- which will lead many people to go on an untagging rampage. Granted, it is easy to remove information from your timeline, but I urge anyone reading this to keep yours the way it is. Yes, there might be some embarrassing pictures, or “hidden beauties” as some might say, but that is the essence of the Timeline. It is designed to show all of your experiences, though some may be less frameworthy. The second way that Timeline will affect our private lifestyles involves future generations. Within the next few years, people will make a Facebook timeline for their child right as soon as they are born. Some of you won’t believe it until you see it, but I assure you it is going to happen. And it makes sense. As our lives transition from the Guttenberg era to the digital era, we no longer document via photo albums and scrapbooks. A Facebook Timeline will chronicle our children’s lives with minimal effort on our part. The modern parent uploads ample photographs of their children to the web. By simply tagging the child in the image, there will be a perfectly organized visual timeline of the child’s life, composed of pictures from parents, relatives, etc. Plus, how cool would it be for us now if our Timelines extended to our birth? I would love to know which friends were at my 4th birthday party without having to drag out the cumbersome photo albums that my mom compiled for me in the ‘90s. The decision for our Facebook Timelines to span our entire lives was a purposeful choice made by the Facebook developers. We currently have the ability to manually assemble our Timeline from birth, but it will be impossible to make it as accurate as the Timelines of future generations. If you need some help imagining this trend in life-documentation, watch the Google Dear Sophie TV Spot: This spot is completely unrelated to the Facebook Timeline but offers some insight into how technology will be leveraged to digitally chronicle children’s lives. The difference in Dear Sophie and the Timeline; however, is that the timeline will be built from all different sources. At the moment I have 2,164 friends on Facebook, which means that in theory my Timeline is a culmination of my interactions with each of those people. As our Timelines become more developed we will begin to feel more comfortable with what I call “overshare.” The integration of location-based posts on Facebook will let your friends know where pictures were taken and where you were when you wrote on their wall. The interconnectivity is slowly becoming comfortable for our generation, while our parents probably think that it is overkill. The number of my friends using location-based apps like Foursquare is growing, and in the future everyone will utilize such tools. Our Facebook Timelines will be able to chart dense maps of where we have been- for example my Timeline will let me revisit what I did each day on my trip up the Pacific Coast Highway- showing me a map of my route and corresponding pictures based on location.
Last night I was with a few friends who claimed that they were going to delete their Facebook accounts after seeing the Timeline redesign. I tried to convince them otherwise, although I have noticed that the rejection of the new profile is widespread. A few will probably go to the extent of Cyber Suicide, but I encourage you not to. Over time we will become comfortable with the level of sharing that the Facebook Timeline allows us to achieve. One day I will likely utilize my timeline to scroll back to ’06 and show my kids those “hidden beauties” that were recently uncovered. As I scroll through my trip up the Pacific Coast Highway I will be reminded how good that Morrow Bay coffee shop was when I visited on July 30, 2011. Facebook will become a way for us to digitally chronicle our lives in an easier, more integrated social format. There will be continued outcry from the Millennials, but future generations will find nothing strange about the Timeline interface. Merry Christmas! |
Started restructuring this site on 12/24/2011 by adding this page. It will mainly consist of technology ramble and things that you probably won't read.
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