Josh Maher's Blog » Entries tagged with "Innovation"
measured and actionable life
Tweet Measured life is worthless if it is not actionable when you need it to be… Yet most of the measurement tools that have been built have been built only around measuring. This is great and leaves the measurer the opportunity to analyze the data, combine it with other data, and gain a deeper understanding or a different perspective. What if we did the analysis though and helped the person measuring themselves without their input? A text at lunch with a restaurant suggestion If you have been tracking your food, your workouts, your sleep etc. Wouldn’t it be nice as your usual lunch time was approaching if your weight management system sent you a friendly text with a link to a dish at a healthy restaurant that has an ingredient/calorie profile that fits your weekly limits? A … Read entire article »
Filed under: Innovation, Technology
Mentoring and Experimenting
Tweet This is on the heels of an analysis over at RWW on the success and failure of technology startup accelerators and the subsequent post on Forbes about job creation being the success story in startups even if we can’t easily quantify their success. The key takeaway for accelerators is that they are becoming the university system for tech entrepreneurs. There are a few tiers of accelerators, the top ones have better odds at setting the participants up for immediate success with more exits and successful startups being built from these top tier startups. There are a larger majority of lower tier accelerators that don’t show this same immediate success for the participants. I would bet that just like community college, the participants learn what they need to be successful they just … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investing, Startups, Technology
Making Noises
Tweet I remember when I was young and I would lay in bed staring at the ceiling and compete with my brother for who could make a continuous noise come out of our mouths. We would do this for hours and hours… and it wasn’t just once, we did this over and over, year after year. We thought it was so much fun to compete with each other on this important quality of making noises that we would see how quiet the noises could be (we tried loud once but got in trouble). It was a lot of fun though and one of the memories of my childhood that I cherish. Now as a father, the only time I think of meaningless play it relates to my kids. We make up songs … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Startups
The Goal of Productivity
Tweet I recently finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow – by Daniel Kahneman and got to thinking about how we try to supplement the mind’s ability to transfer deep experience and knowledge to gut reactions and instant decisions. In general I am thinking about things like the existence of graphs to represent data sets and how the invention of the concept of graphs created a situation where people could quickly analyze a data set and make decisions based on that analysis. Now graphs have been around for a long time, but KPI dashboards with red, yellow, green are a little newer but were created out of the same need to transfer the information from a larger dataset into a view that can be digested/acted on quickly. These aren’t inclusive of all … Read entire article »
Filed under: Innovation, Technology
Web and Mobile Platforms
Tweet The quiet innovation that took all web platforms by storm was the bar – not the Google or Bing bar that is annoyingly installed with applications that I keep yanking off my father in law’s computer – the thin little bar (or in Bing’s case the rather large side bar) that allows the person interacting with the site to get to other similar properties related to the platform. With WordPress I have a little bar at the top of my screen now where I am typing. I can get to details of WordPress.com, I can get to my own blog, I can jump to my other blogs so long as they are hosted on or running wordpress software, etc. This same bar pops up when I read other wordpress blogs … Read entire article »
Filed under: Innovation, Technology
100 Years of Turing
Tweet Tomorrow Alan Turing would be 100 years old if he were still alive, I type this on a computer that is the result of his genius and ability. I wrote a piece on Mr. Turing five years ago (around his 95th) and wanted to bring it back up for everyone. As you write words of love and hate on your computer think about the impact this gay man has had on our world and society and who you would be if he didn’t exist. Follow the link to find out who Alan Turing was and what he has done for the world and in the second while the page loads ponder how computing affects your life. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Technology
Most Influential Failure
Tweet Well we’re back from Greece, it was amazing to see the ancient and future history at the same time. I also see that GeekWire has announced the continuation of the Seattle 2.0 awards (I won an award at the first Seattle 2.0 ceremony). I helped in judging this round and am excited to attend the event next week. I hope that you can attend as well. Reflecting on the categories after spending all this time in Greece, I am a bit sad that we don’t have a category to honor the lessons learned from failing to build a successful startup. Failure is something Greece has never looked at critically in their culture and increasingly it is something that we in the U.S. are failing to appreciate. Failing at things happens! As a father I can … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Innovation, Lunch20-Seattle, Startups
Thoughts on the Seattle Startup Ecosystem
Tweet Just realized that I never actually posted this from last November – good post though I recently spoke with Laura Rich from Fast Company about the local startup environment. She is doing a piece on startup ecosystems and has spoken with Fred Wilson, Jeff Bussgang, Brad Feld, Andy Sack, and is making her way around the country to find the things that are special in the growth of startup ecosystems. We talked about the changing startup environment in Seattle that has grown over the last decade. It was interesting to reflect on the role of Microsoft which has had a major presence in the area as well as our major university in town (UW) and how these have played different roles over time. Some thoughts that I left with her was that our community … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, NW events, Seattle, Startups, TechCafe, Technology
