Marshall Kirkpatrick
Martin
Dear friends, let’s get small talk out of the way before SXSW
I’m going to see a lot of friends over the next week in Austin that I’d like to catch up with, but imagine if we got the small talk taken care of ahead of time and could start our brief conversations from a different place. Scott Beale, Violet Blue, Rachel Weidinger, I’m picturing you in my mind. It’s in that spirit that I offer below 7 quick bullet points summarizing the most relevant parts of the last year of my work life and what I’m doing at SXSW this year. My personal life is mostly...
Marshall Kirkpatri...How I trained a robot neuroscientist to walk my dog
I need to go walk my dog. I could listen to music, to a podcast or to my own fabulously fascinating thoughts – but I’m not going to. I’m going to have a robot neuroscientist make the whole experience a time to learn. Ok, what I’m actually going to do is use two robots (or automated technologies) to do the following: find me the hottest article of the week among the world’s leading neuroscientists online and then read it outloud on my phone while I walk the dog. Here’s how I did it: First...
The Surprising Power & Challenge of Saying Obvious Things
You’d be surprised what uses of social media seem so obvious to some of us with just a few years of experience that they don’t seem worth articulating – but that aren’t intuitive to other people. Maybe they just aren’t obvious at all and it’s a sign of immature communication skills when we (I) think they are. For example, our fabulous mentor Vidya Spandana asked me last week why one of our customers ran reports in Little Bird on their target markets and I said, “well, because when the most...
The value of listening vs broadcast in social media
I finally wrote my first post on our company’s new blog yesterday, The true value of online influencers: It’s not about parroting your messages. I hope you’ll check it out, find it valuable, share it and join us for discussion in comments. The post is a response to my frustration about the limited imaginations I see too often with regard to so-called “online influencers.” What do you do with them? Not just spam them and hope they’ll retweet you! But learn from them, build relationships and...
Introducing Little Bird, the Best Way to Find the Key People Online
I’m excited to announce this morning the unveiling of the startup I co-founded, left journalism to do and have spent the last year working with my team to build. It’s called Little Bird. Little Bird automates the discovery of community-trusted topic influencers and experts on any topic. You can find the best sources of information online in minutes using Little Bird. Once you find them, we’ve got a whole bunch of very cool tools you can use to leverage their collective knowledge. Yesterday...
5 Unique Ways to Win Friends & Influence People Online
I keep reading articles about how to build influence online, because they get a lot of traction on social networks. Most recently, 35 experts weigh-in: How we create influence on Facebook, an article I thought I’d read just to see if there was anything unique about the Facebook angle. There didn’t seem to be. Most of these articles can be summed up like this: be consistently useful, generous and interesting. That’s good advice! I think it’s possible to discuss some more tactical methods,...
Meeting Prep, on Your Own Time: A Template Google Doc
After feeling frustrated that I wasn’t prepped as much as I wanted before a meeting called by one of my co-workers at Plexus Engine, I came up with the following Google Doc template to capture all the info we needed before meeting with someone from outside our company. I really like this system and thought I’d share it. The procedure we’re experimenting with is to create a copy of this Google Doc, edit it to fill it out, then paste the URL to view it inside our company calendar listing for...
The Google+ Power-Up Button
I’ll confess, I’m a regular user of Google+ but I haven’t played around with a lot of the features to really figure it out that much yet. This week I’ve been experimenting with a paradigm I’ve used with RSS and with Twitter, but in Google+ and I’m seeing some awesome results. It’s this: set yourself up to be disproportionately likely to see content from the most high-priority people in your network so that you’re more likely to engage with them. I didn’t know you could do this with Google+,...
Blogging is alive, well and very inspiring
Above, WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg speaks to a full house at WordCamp Portland. I posted this photo on Instagram along with a note about how publishing used to be the exclusive domain of those who could afford to own a printing press. I’m attending WordPress Portland for the first time in years today and it’s really inspiring to be here. The room is full of self publishers, new voices online, and more than 70% of them identify as developers. So they create in words, images...
A List of Checklists for Startups
tl;dr: Checklists for Startups I’m falling in love with checklists. Specifically, a new service called Checkmarkable, which makes it easy to create re-usable checklists for any purpose. My Daily AM Checklist is proving super effective in helping me change my habits and maximize my productivity. I fill it out every day before jumping into the unique tasks of the day. Checklists mean you don’t have to spend mental energy remembering the details of a complex workflow, they are all just right...
We’re entering a golden age of news geekery
Jason Calacanis announced a new proof-of-concept site called Launchticker today. At first glance it’s just an overloaded Google Doc with a bunch of tech news summaries and links streaming down the page. Look at the blog post explaining the site though and you’ll see there’s a lot more going on here. It’s an attempt to improve on the fabulous half-human/half-machine edited tech news site Techmeme. Specifically, by limiting the areas of editorial coverage to startups, technology and features...
What a tech blog post about a startup should include, according to me
I just read a really good post about a startup that felt unfinished, because there was no mention of critiques of the company’s product or business. I’m not blogging about startups these days, I’m building one, but in the bloggers’ spirit of telling other people how to do their jobs, here are some things I believe every post about a startup should include, if possible. Info about the founding team’s relevant background. This is something Michael Arrington taught me was an important part of...
Is Google Glass Bolder Than the iPhone?
Google Glass could be understood as a new form of search, but the most important part of the tech – its information consumption capabilities – have not yet been demonstrated. Tim O’Reilly said on Twitter yesterday that he suspects that Google Glass could be a tech milestone that surpasses the iPhone. What do you think? The main objection seems to be that mainstream people won’t wear something so bulky. I actually think they are pretty unobtrusive and maybe they’ll grow even more so. So far...
Apple’s new Podcasts app – my review
Apple’s promised stand-alone app for Podcasts went live in the iTunes store today. I thought I’d post a quick review of it, because I love podcasts. They are an incredible example of the opportunity for new voices to self-publish and distribute multi-media content; they are a core part of the Web 2.0/social media revolution. Podcasts were also my introduction to this world, years ago. I’ll never forget the day I was at my University work study job, reading Newsweek and came across a profile...
Great Designers vs Data Specialists: Which is Harder to Hire?
Data geek Soren Macbeth (now at Yieldbot) and I met over tea several months ago and he said something to me that I have thought of many times since. He said that though data science is getting all the hype, great designers might be even harder to hire. I was just thinking about that again this morning and thought I’d ask on the Twitter. Below you’ll find the interesting conversation that emerged in response. I’d love to know what your thoughts on this are. Of course the best of both worlds...
marshallk - posted on 4/5/2012
Cinch Feed For mar...Delicious Founder Creates New People Search Engine, Skills.to
Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills. The site is just beginning. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go next," Schachter told me by Twitter DM today. What's the core idea...
Marshall Kirkpatri...Delicious Founder Creates New People Search Engine, Skills.to
Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills. The site is just beginning. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go next," Schachter told me by Twitter DM today. What's the core idea...
Things I wish were easier to do with RSS
I’m having a rough day with RSS feeds today, but there’s SO much potential there still. We should all give thanks every day to Dave Winer and the other geeks who helped build RSS into what it is today. I just wish I could do more with it. I met with one of the biggest tech companies in the world last week and they too said they live on RSS feeds and love them. These are the things that I’m crying about today and have found myself upset about again and again. Programatically look at a list...
Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market. Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just...
Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market. Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just...
How Two Startups Use Games to Beat the Developer Crunch
"You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes." Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too? Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their developer shortage problems are travel photo network Jetpac and app search startup Quixey. Both used contests and games to overcome their challenges and...
How Two Startups Use Games to Beat the Developer Crunch
"You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes." Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too? Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their developer shortage problems are travel photo network Jetpac and app search startup Quixey. Both used contests and games to overcome their challenges and...
When Bots Go Mad
There may or may not be robots that are truly "good" someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren't already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars. For example, you can't buy a used copy of Lee Betteridge's book "How to Survive Personal Bankruptcy" on Amazon today for less than $2.3 million. (Unless you...
When Bots Go Mad
There may or may not be robots that are truly "good" someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren't already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars. For example, you can't buy a used copy of Lee Betteridge's book "How to Survive Personal Bankruptcy" on Amazon today for less than $2.3 million. (Unless you...
Amazon Launches Cloud-Based Business Process Automation Service
Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a service. "This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both)," writes Amazon's Jeff Barr. SWF can also work across mobile devices. The...
Amazon Launches Cloud-Based Business Process Automation Service
Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a service. "This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both)," writes Amazon's Jeff Barr. SWF can also work across mobile devices. The...
Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys
Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on conversations and information available online. The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI...
Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys
Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on conversations and information available online. The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI...
Why Talent Management Tech is Super Hot and Bound to Get Hotter
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of the hottest companies in the world. Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal...
Why Talent Management Tech is Super Hot and Bound to Get Hotter
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of the hottest companies in the world. Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal...