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Mar 9

Personal analytics are the first step

Yesterday, Stephen Wolfram put out a fantastic look at everything he’s been able to measure about himself for over two decades. The volume of data he’s kept is staggering, as is the mix of curiosity and foresight he had to begin collecting some of it in the first place (keystrokes?!). And the things he extrapolated range from a profound look at when ideas form to a heartwarming white stripe that is quantitative proof of a man’s love for his family.

It’s inspiring, but it’s also a little disappointing. Wolfram only has this view because 20 years ago he started keeping track. He kept email archives and meeting schedules, logged his phone calls and started wearing a pedometer. If you were to start  today, you wouldn’t have that wealth of data for years to come. Luckily, you didn’t start today, you just might not have noticed when you started. If you use webmail, you’ve got email since the day you made the account (you don’t delete anything, right?). Your phone has a call history in it, and might already tell you who your favorite people are. Your accounts on social sites are a running log of your thoughts and activities. Your data is everywhere.

There’s the other problem: your data is everywhere. Without a good deal of effort, you can’t mash sleep measurements with your calendar to see when work stresses you out. You can’t rationalize the $25 you spent at the bar you checked into with the exercise you recorded on the dance floor. All of your data is somewhere else—actually many somewheres—which is the problem the Locker Project and similar efforts are trying to solve. Once you put all of your data in one place, you can analyze it ’til the cows come home, which your location history tells you they do slightly faster when the wind is in the right direction.

The past few years have seen plenty of personal analytics products pop up, so it’s safe to say people are interested in this stuff—but wait, there’s more. With what you know about your friends, or the data they’ll share with you, you get a whole new layer of social analytics. And forget analytics; you get a whole new universe of interactions. You get warned that all your friends already saw the link you’re about to post. Your friends and family pool their data to build an ongoing birthday scrapbook containing every photo taken at every place you’ve been together. Your doctor calls because you have a genetic marker for high blood pressure and haven’t been jogging much since all those restaurants on your vacation.

It’s nifty in the extreme what Wolfram put together, and there’s a lot more low-hanging fruit for personal analytics and everything you can learn from it. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it ends there.

Mar 8

Startup Bus diaries: Day 1

Simon is still roaring down the highway on the startup bus at 80 mph, and it sounds like he’s been cranking out code even faster. They’ll arrive in Austin, for SXSW, tomorrow.

His team is on a tight deadline to finish their project (which can be found here: getgaggle.com), so he didn’t have time to write a blog post today. But I got him on the phone for five minutes – after a few battles with the spotty cell service where he is. Here’s an update on his wild adventure:

He said yesterday feels like an eternity ago. In the morning, they crystallized their team and their idea, and then they spent the day with their heads down writing code.

The idea: Gaggle. It’s a way for you to aggregate content created by specific people during a specific period of time. For instance, SXSW. If you have 25 friends going to Austin this weekend, you can use Gaggle to send each of them a short URL where they can connect the services. Throughout the weekend, you can check Gaggle and see the check-ins, photos and posts from everyone in your group.

If you see a photo of a great party, you’ll know where you want to go. If you want to see where your friends are, just log in to Gaggle and you can see their check-ins. Then, after the weekend, the data remains on Gaggle as a 21st century scrapbook of the event.

So, the three of them divided the labor and started building.

They stopped for lunch and to use the workspace at Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler, AZ. Simon said they space is wonderful and the concept is inspiring. Members pay no money, but everyone chips in to help raise funds and keep the office in good shape. Also, he said they had great BBQ there.

Back on the road, they spent the afternoon coding. After being confronted by a dust storm so severe that the highway was closed, they had to pull over for a bit (though the software development never slowed during the storm.

They got to a hotel in New Mexico last night, and the stability of being off the road and indoors offered too productive of an atmosphere – so they stayed up all night working.

Gaggle is at the point where all three team members have built thier respective parts, and they are beginning to peice it all together. They have a tight deadline tomorrow, and it sounds like they will be working right up to the last moment.

Check back soon for more updates!

Mar 8

New Hire :)

Meet Tyler, the newest member of our team.

If you have questions for him, or just want to compliment him on this performance, just email tyler (at) singly (dot) com.

Mar 7

Node.js Meetup

Last night we hosted the wonderful folks of the San Francisco Node.js Meetup in our office for food, beer, discussion and hacking. Check out a few photos from this fantastic night:

 

Mar 7

Startup Bus Diaries: Day 0

One of our founders, Simon Murtha-Smith (or @smurthas), took off Tuesday on the San Francisco Startup Bus to SXSWi. The mission is for everyone on the bus to spawn a startup in the 3 days they have together on the road. Check back here each day for updates on his adventure.

Day starts at 6am in SOMA, high energy, 1 Scoblizer, 1 TechCrunch camera man. We load the bus, get going, and stop to pick up late comers on the Embarcadero. Hit the 101 south as the sun rises to eLance, in Mountain View, while the buspreneurs do the usual “Hi my name is…and I do X”. Breakfast at eLance, then back on the bus — pitches. One minute each: problem statement –> solution statement. After the pitches, we stop in a parking lot on the side of the highway to mingle and talk with each other. We’ve got max 30 mins to form teams and then back on the bus to get to work. The group starts with about 4 teams, later to become 6 through mergers and break ups. I started with a 9 person team working on “tell a story of an experience in retrospect, via the digital artifacts + some human narrative”. Our nine people split into two teams (half to work on a different idea). Over the course of a few hours, a few people move around teams.

We spend the day working to crystalize idea, get to LA around 5, and hit the streeeeetz for some straight up customer development. We ask a bunch of people walking by questions like “Do you feel that a simple Facebook photo album tells the whole story of your experience at an event?” and “How do you share photos with family and friends?”. This is hands down the most incredible experience of the day — oh, the bits of your brain that start firing when you hear what people have to say!

After a pivot while on the streets and another pivot back on the bus, we settle on something we like to call Gaggle: and easier way to stay up to date with the friends you are travelling with.

We arrive around 9pm at the Super 8 (Motel 6? Who knows after that long on a bus) order some pizzas and…get to work. The coding goes into full gear when the bus stops, because productivity goes up 10-fold when your computer is stationary. Tomorrow morning at 6a, we’ll hit the road again, headed for New Mexcio.

Boom.


 

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