TheNyeLabs.com

Mothers day

To my mama – thanks for all the science experiments like dissecting rats to see how they work, for making us sing show tunes while we cleaned, for teaching us how to adventure and find forts, for enforcing manners on us, helping us make hockey pads out of magazines, for the food fights, and spaghetti dinners, for packing 7 kids into a Chevy Sprint to go for the impromptu road trips, movie nights on the lawn, dinner with strangers from the street, weeks of work that were given as service – cause it’s not about money, gleaning tomato fields in the fall and canning sessions that ended in wonderful tomato fights.  From the waterfights in the house, to the waterfights in Busters hills, for the mountain climbs while your back was broken, to the great long hikes that made up our days, for the dressing up like people we didn’t know for floats in parades, for the stories you’d read us that taught us to love to read, and the years of enforced volunteering at the library to teach us how rare it is to have that appreciation.  For the hidden snacks on long trips, and the long talks when things ain’t going so hot.  For being the ultimate defender of our rights, the pointer-outer of opportunity and our loudest encourager to take advantage of every opportunity we came across.  For the frugality of going without, the understanding of true wealth, and the joy that comes with an eternal perspective – I owe it to you!

Love you ma, happy mothers day.

A case for Shark Tank

So let me preface this a bit, I am a big fan of Jason Calacanis’ spinoff “This week in …” show called This Week in Startups, and it’s not for the obvious reason of humorous floating appendages (guests often wear black and the backdrop is black giving a floating appendages on screen feel), though I do genuinely enjoy a good floating head, but that’s not it.

The reason I love this show is because as you listen to the ideas that budding entrepreneurs come up with on the episodes, and add to that seeing Jason and the guest take that idea and tweak it just a bit to the point where they (and you) get excited for the entrepreneur, it serves as a personal catalyst for ideas. I often find myself mimicking the exercise Jason takes guests through with my own ideas and thoughts to get it to a point where it’s a bit more marketable or ‘pitch’ ready after watching a few episodes.

This is interesting to me because the creative process isn’t really something you can teach, but it is something you can learn. As you watch the methodology take shape, and the different questions asked you start to develop a sense for ideas, and a sense for identifying opportunity, and when you start to take notice, it’s pretty dang awesome. But in my experience, this only comes after being around creative people, or via the beauty of the interwebs, watching creative people work through the process time and time again. This is why this show is so valuable to me.

Which brings me to my next point, Jason does a shtick on the show called Shark Tank where entrepreneurs call in and pitch him their idea. A great section of the show that’s a parody of sorts of ABC’s show Shark Tank, but before every installment he does two things: first, he relives the painful memory of how he was not picked to be on Shark Tank which ends with a spirited assault on their (the show producers) mental capacity, and second, a comment on how bad the show ended up becoming and how glad he is that it’s canceled. After these are done, he moves into the pitch and we go on. So here’s my thing, I’ve watched every episode of TWiST (33 and counting) as well as every episode of ABC’s Shark Tank and the reason for doing so is because when you hear ideas people have, when you get the luxury of being walked through how they identified an opportunity and built a product or service around it, it rubs off on you a little bit, a priceless side effect.

Well after one season, ABC canned Shark Tank, never to be seen again, a fact that frustrates me just a skosh. Our country needs to be taken back to its roots of innovation and creativity, that’s where the ladder out of this economic mess we’re in resides, and the fact that we had a show around entrepreneurs and startups during prime time was a win for all things creative. Granted the entrepreneurs-in-residence that sat behind the huge desk on the show were a little ridiculous (Jason makes good points around their treatment of entrepreneurs), and to his point with the addition of Jason to the show, we would have at least been more entertained, the fact that America wasn’t interested enough in the creative process to support a single show through more than one season saddens me.

So to Jason, I say first, thanks for doing your show, I used to not see myself as an idea guy, I was the manual labor, but over the course of about a year of concerted effort in identifying opportunity and trying my ideas against the process I’ve picked up from different shows like this, now I’m totally the idea guy. But secondly, Jason quit disparaging efforts, no matter how meager they are, to invigorate creativity and ingenuity in America, cause right now any effort in that respect is much needed.

So honestly, I’ll miss the prime time venue, but if you’re interested in entrepreneurship I highly recommend you check out Mixergy, both great assets for ideas and, like I said, learning the process.

Christmas experiment…. books for kids?

So I tried something new this year for Christmas.  I have 20 some nieces and nephews and am the sole remaining single uncle, so there’s a bit of pressure on me to be the cool uncle each year.  Traditionally, I’ve given nothing to these wee little kids during the holidays because a gift to one would require a gift to all, and I’m not made of money you know.  But as I’ve been around the family a bit more the last year and a half, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend…. Nintendo DS.

As kids turn 7 it’s some kind of a rite of passage now in school, kids get a DS.  Now we had gameboys back in my day, but it wasn’t anywhere near this bad.  I swear these kids can sit with the head crooked at a certain angle staring at a 3×3 screen for days, and when they finish their game they are no better or more interesting than 3 days ago when they started.  So as their uncle I decided I had to at least try something.

I invited the older kids on a date with the uncle, borrowed the sisters suburban and piled in 7 kids over the age of 8 with the oldest being 13.  We stopped into Burger King for a dollar menu dinner and then went down to the KC plaza and we walked around to see the lights.  That was pretty fun, but then we got into the Barnes & Noble on the plaza.  This was actually a really fun experience, being 3 floors high, we worked through floor by floor with the kids seeing the most books in one place they’ve ever seen (excluding a library, well maybe not, this is Missouri)  The rule, they had  a cap of $20 to spend on their Christmas present and it had to be a book.  I could have given them a gift card, but I wanted to ensure it got spent on a book, and not a game or a poster or whatever else they could find, I wanted them to read a real live book.

So?  It mostly worked.  The younger kids (8-10) ended up missing the point a bit.  They saw it as a value game, ie what’s the most expensive book so I can get to get the most out of my $20 rather than what book do I want to read.  Also, puppies on the cover were like kryptonite to the girls, and removed them from being able to follow my perfect logic of why they should get a nancy drew book.  But the older kids (11-13) hit the nail on the head, they got excited about the books, the genres, Sam was wowed at the coffee table books about WWII, Annie found a collection of Jane Austen books in a collectors edition and ooogled at it, and on it went.  As an uncle, I was in heaven watching the older kids pick out their books, I felt like santa.

By the end of the night, I was out maybe $150 bucks, but I got all the kids a present, and a present that would actually excite them about something worthwhile.  The side benefit is with some of them I now have more to talk about as they read through some of my favorite books from my childhood.  So the verdict is I’ve found a new tradition.  They loved it, it was cheap, and anything to break that Nintendo DS stare is money well spent in my book.  Thanks B&N, I’ll see you next year

The payout - kids reading after presents

Cruise went well :-)

Had an epic adventure, my good friend Geoff here wrote a masterful report, I encourage you all to read it and give him comment love.  I hope you laugh a proportionate amount to how much we laughed through the experience.

Link – http://theshippinglane.blogspot.com/2009/12/cubans-on-hot-tin-roof.html

Ode to Canada and the good things thereafter

Alright, so let’s get started. June ’08 I took a good job with a great team over @ Symantec corp obtaining one of my favorite titles thus far – “Senior Principle Partner Manager” it was glorious and grand. Really it was a tough job, but I made some great friends while I was there and it was in Orange County, which was interesting as well (I’ve posted some about that). Well they moved me to Boston so I could take over some eastern responsibility and after a big drawn out move on my part, I settled in, spent 4 days total in Boston before I got the axe from them. It was a pretty sudden move, but with 3 prior RIFs I wasn’t completely shocked, just mostly.

I took some time and went a traveling a bit, then came back, packed my car up, and moved up to Toronto with my ole boy Dave Mifsud. An old mission buddy of mine and we decided to start up the businesses we’d been meaning to do for a while.

Blood shot eyes and cheesy grins

We did, we started EnviropureSolutions.ca with friends Ken and Robin, which is a great little venture that cleans and deodorizes using ozone. It’s an easy product to get behind because it takes care of mold, mildew, etc, and it’s quick and painless. Simultaneously we did Steadfastwealth.ca around Dave’s end goal of doing finance full time. We also started some database projects that are still in the works, and then lastly we did a quilt shop.

What’s that you ask? A quilt shop? Why of course, and when you look at me the first thought you have is “this man’s a quilter” I mean at 6’7” and an IT extraordinaire what else would I be? Actually, no, I’m no quilter, but this has been a fun project to do and I’ll tell you why real quick.

I started it for a good reason.

Dad works for the newpaper industry and the writing can’t get much bigger on the wall, they’re running scared and his job ain’t safe. So me and my sister went in on a building on the main drag of our small town of Hamilton, MO. Which reminds me of another reason I’m doing what I am; this town is dying slowly, and it’s obvious as you walk the streets, people are leaving in a vintage French flee-the-farm-for-the-city fashion, so that’s the other benefit – our community is excited to see something created…. and have that something working out. It’s encouraging to see that not everything is failing.

The shop a year ago

That was one year ago we bought the building and opened up this little shop.

MSQC 1 year later

So while in Canada, Dave and I decided to help juice up the Missouri Star Quilt Co and built the site Missouri Quilt Co using some work from a Ukrainian (those language skills are so handy sometimes) developer we sourced with, then the rest was me and Dave, 20 hour days, and 24” monitors.

This is my favorite because it’s an industry I knew nothing about, not a clue, and a demographic I was not necessarily in tune with, and in the course of about 7 months we have really been able to close that gap. Our first iteration of the site was a flop, no sales after 1000 page views, so we did a revisiting of the design, and it got better, then again, and again, and again. As we work with my sisters and mom on understanding the culture/demographic/preferences of the industry, we continue to customize, SEO, innovate, and implement, and the best part is the results are instant. We can see what the effect is if we change a header in a matter of hours. Also we’ve found that a lot of the tribal knowledge from other industries has an application in every niche, it’s just a matter of learning to apply it. So now the shop employs about 7 women in our community and our post office ladies, Christy and Betty, are in love with us (more-so when we started printing our own postage)

See the world… via cargo ship?

Cargo ship travel takes you around the world

I want to do this…. and bad.  The depressing thing is I’m crazy enough I might just try it.  Anyone want to spend 45 days in a dirty room eating stew out of a can and stopping at every port up the yellow river, or hitting every island in the south pacific?  Let me know if you want in, I’ll work you into the itinerary.

Let’s catch up

I was talking to a buddy of mine, Josh, from Hawaii the other day and we were catching up just over the course of the last two years and when I got done he asked “are you blogging this anywhere, I’d love to read along with the story” and honestly, I’ve been so busy with life, I haven’t bothered. So for my one dozen fans out there, I’ve decided I’m going to catch you all up on life in a quick series of posts that will pick up roughly 2 years ago as I finished school and detail my journey thus far.

Be prepared however, as I begin to blog again, I may catch the bug…. I hope I do anyway…. and I’d love to hear how things are going with you, so either comment here or drop me a line – billnye [at] thenyelabs.com

Let's get caught up

Making the jump – Leaving the iPhone for a BlackBerry Tour

I’ve decided to make the jump. I’ve been on the iPhone for two years and have loved it really. I’ve really gotten used to some of the great features of the iPhone but in the end I was excited to move to a BlackBerry Tour with Sprint, so let me give you the good the bad and the ugly and explain this rationale.

First, why leave the iPhone?
My reasons were varied. I actually really liked the iPhone. The keyboard was easy to use for me (I know this isn’t always the case) but to me it seemed intuitive. Ease of use and stuff like that, the iPhone had it all. It set itself up for disappointment though, because it did so well, it made me want features out of it that it was never intended for. It became a full featured computer to me, I wanted to be able to leave my laptop at home and just work out of the iPhone while traveling. All I would have needed was a Bluetooth keyboard (and not one that’s been preordering for the last 8 months) and I could have rocked. Also, I was on a gen 1 phone, and it had grown painfully slow after two years. I’m not used to my phone needing a fresh install to be running smoothly, nor can I flush it out regularly and keep going, my life is on that sucka. Lastly, it started giving me delays in receiving messages and voicemails and the like, which AT&T blamed on apple (after several resyncings and updating network codes blah blah blah) and Apple of coursed blamed AT&T. The woes of an unsanctioned marriage I guess.

And the BlackBerry?
Well let me be candid… I hate the freaking wheel. After using screen gestures, the wheel feels like I’m stepping back in time. But I decided I’d use my iPhone like a touch (err, minicomputer) and just sit it by my bed or on the couch and cruise internet over wifi, listen to my music and podcasts with it, pretty much just turn it into an iTouch, because if you remove the phone features, I’m still quite happy with it. But the BlackBerry has keyboards! w00t! Beyond that, they are work horses, and so for an IM / Email / Internet / Phone machine, this will work great.

How’s my experience been so far?
I really hate the wheel. It just seems so stupid to me. And then trying to click with the wheel if I have a finger bigger than a 7 year old, I’m button mashing. The iPhone keyboard made me feel like it knew what I was going for and would give me credit, the bb just gets frustrated with me as I get frustrated with it.

BlackBerry email for a Gmail power user is an absolute failure. If you can’t figure out Gmail and everything is in a huge pile in your inbox, the BlackBerry email works fine. If you’ve discovered labels and filters, you end up getting half your messages. BlackBerry’s solution is to get the Google app. Fine, but it’s not nearly as well integrated as the native email app (obviously) and for this, I blame BlackBerry. People say the iPhone used a web based email yada yada, which is bologna. It’s straight IMAP just like BlackBerry and if bb can’t figure out how to let me choose the home folder I want (all mail) I want to live out of, they should put a freaking developer on that 6 lines of code and let me choose my dang folder. Also the app store…. I didn’t know how good I had it. But I never paid for an app anyway, I just used free ones and as such never really felt like I ran into an amazing app (tower defense excluded), just the shopping experience was so much more intuitive. The problem lies in the fact that BB should be sponsoring the app store, just as Apple does theirs. Could you imagine if AT&T had to do the app store? Yeah, we got a Sprint app store here. Ugh.

The other side of the coin is for 900 Minutes, 1000 text messages and the data plan my bill was 90-100 dollars and if I used up my minutes (happens sometimes) it would shoot to 150-200 that month. Moving to Sprint I got a family plan, with 1500 minutes and unlimited data and messaging (remember, I can call ANY mobile phone and its seen as mobile to mobile, regardless of carrier) and since no one calls land lines anyway, I’m comfortable putting 3 phones (got 2 more buddies to go in with me) on this for 149 a month. Split 3 ways, I’m paying $50 bones. That’s what put me over the top. I had to get something that was reasonable price wise. And $100-150 for just me, for just 900 minutes, and text message plans that were built to get me over the limit, I was gone.

So, I am gone, and coverage was never even an issue, I have great coverage out here. So Apple, I’ve forsaken you due to your friends. Guilty by association – I hope you both get your act together.

I’m off to play with my wheel like a 2 year old, but I’ll have a phone that works.

Ahhh freak, no visual voicemail. Yeah, that too. Who dials 1 for their VM and listens to them all. Breathe slowly now, I can get through this…

FUNEMPLOYMENT

So I picked this (article here) up off Digg several months ago and wanted to comment on it then, but ironically I’ve been far too busy to touch it till now.  It’s an article all about ‘Funemployment’ which defined in the article is “A period of joblessness that you actually enjoy — maybe you get to lay out, sleep in, work out, read up. It helps to have savings, severance, or an unemployment check to help pay the bills. We’re hearing this word used more and more, especially as people realize they may not be able to find a new job right away, so they might as well try to enjoy the time off.”

I think there is some merit to what the article goes after and particularly the phrase ‘funemployment’.  There is a crowd of 20-30 somethings that are realizing that life isn’t as cut and dried as they’d planned and find themselves in an interesting place.  Imagine the confusion if you’ve been told your entire life to get good grades so you can get into a good university, so you do.  Then it’s work hard and take on internships and extracurricular activities so  you can impress an employer and get a good job leaving school, so you do.  Then after you’ve done all this, you find yourself out of school for a couple of years and back at square one wondering where you went wrong.  It’s a common theme amongst many of my peers, as being jobless isn’t something that the ambitious, passionate folk I sometimes associate with have thought about enough to handle.

That being said, once found in a position of being jobless after only a few years on the market, you go through this phase of identity crisis.  You weren’t in the job long enough to tag yourself as a ‘finance guy for the restaurant industry’ because honestly, you were only there for a year or two, so do you want to do that again?  Or do you find something a bit more fulfilling?  If you want to look elsewhere, what do you look for?  For that matter, how did you get tied into the restaurant industry in the first place? And on and on the questions go.  It’s so easy to get stressed out by the needs of life when a major piece like employment is missing, that this article makes perfect sense to me.

It talks about how people are sometimes reacting with going into a mode of “I’m gonna relax, I worked my tail off all through school, all through college, right into my job, but now, the bills are getting paid, let’s do book clubs and lunch dates and take a break.”  Or even better, actually getting out traveling, or volunteering, or doing any of those things you always wished you had time to do, because right now, at the peak of a recession, time just needs to be used up, not slowed down.  So they do.  I do.

From my personal experience, I haven’t taken to lounging and drinking my juice box as I watch Dora the Explorer in my parent’s basement, but I do more of those things I never could before.  I travel more; I work from my laptop on projects I’ve wanted to explore for ages, so I do.  I pack everything up and hop in the car for a weekend road trip, then work the next week from a friend’s house in Utah while we mountain bike in the evenings, or head back to DC for the week to visit the girlfriend while I tour the capitol building and the white house.  I now take on projects for charity and friends because I finally have time to squeeze other things in.  It turns into a very glamorous and fulfilling life style.

The article goes into more detail on some people who have tried to do nothing with their lives (see the dora example earlier), but I haven’t seen this to be the rule.  Most of the people I know who have been cut up in this wave of economic drama have responded as I’ve described.  Filling their time with meaningful things that they always wanted to accomplish which can be a bit dangerous.  I’ve seen more great pictures and stories told from activities enjoyed in this quasi hiatus in the working life than I’ve seen in a while, so the drive to get back into a cubicle somewhere may not be all that enticing.  Of course, unemployment checks don’t last forever, nor will magical stimulus money keep making it last longer, so something has to give in the end.

I think this is a good experience to have though.  I remember reading a book a few years ago about the rock climbing movement through the 70’s where people would just show up at Yellowstone or other good climbing spots, setup camp, and live there all year, then work 7-11 to make money during the winter to come back and do it again.  The book glamorized the lifestyle, but I see it as kind of a waste long term.  But the stories and experience from a year or two of that would be great to have, and sometimes if you don’t have the guts to drop everything and go do it, life fixes that for you and pushes you out the door towards some great adventure.  Just make sure you come back in the end, cause no one wants to be that hippie uncle.

I only wish I’d taken my full unemployment instead of living off of the savings.   Indonesia with Dan could have been a reality….

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Next make project

Love this – http://littlegreatideas.com/steadycam/

This guy is brilliant, take a look at some of the examples?  Same guy that came up with wii remote head tracking and honestly, he’s just does it for the advancement of the tech.  I love that he just gives away his ideas so people can do more with it.  Great approach imo.

So anyway, I’m making one, anyone else want in?  Should be fun