Even Keeled

Very interesting (and long) NYT Magazine articleon how mobile technology is changing the face of local economies throughout the world.  The piece is channeled through the eyes of a Nokia “cultural anthropologist” who travels the world studying how people use their phone. 

Two small nits, though overall a pretty interesting piece.  First, using “cellphone” is really dated.   In almost every corner of the world the general term is just “mobile”.  Second, the true democratization is just communication and information exchange, facilitated by the mobile phone.

I find the “family” stickers that people put on the back window of their mini-vans and SUVs really arrogant.   The cutesy stick figure imagery just intensifies the annoyance.    I get it, you can screw w/out birth control.   I’m going to get the version below made into decals and maybe even T-shirts.  For those of us who are interested in keeping the population under control.  Maybe I’ll even get the condoms in “green”.

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Found a great interactive chart that details how the US Govt budget is allocated.  

Looking at this chart, it’s very useful to identify spending areas…but what I find exceptional frustrating is trying to infer second levels of data.   Are we over budget in some areas?  How fast is spending increasing in each segment? What metadata can be extracted to allow our elected officials to better manage the country?

One idea I had which I would still love to dedicate time to is called “Dashboard for America”.   Getting a quick snapshot of the key metrics of your business fundamentals is all the rage in tech companies (as well as the Fortune 500 I would think).  Why can’t we start an initiative to do the same for federal spending?  It would serve the dual purpose of accountability (for politicians) and sense of ownership/responsibility (for citizens). 

Eventually, I’d really love to see something similar on a local level for every city/county in the country, that rolls up to the state level.  Will be my next gig…either that or my Denim-Wine-Coffee bar.

One of the great things about (re)starting my blog is I can post about things that honestly, I don’t have any specific area of expertise or vested interest.  Just ideas or thoughts that cross my mind.  So I was at a party last week, talking to a few friends who were all ex-SUN.  They were bemoaning the completely lifeless stock, but still held out hopes that some day the company would turn things around and go on another run.

Honestly, I just laughed.  No way is SUN going to turn that sinking battleship around, unless they do something completely drastic.  Which got me thinking.  Why not just focus a significant portion of the company on a completely new (ideally growing) market? Like, I dunno, solar technology?

So here are 8 reasons why SUN should shift gears and throw their hat into the solar tech ring:

 1. My non-engineering mind thinks solving complex processor cooling issues can probably be leveraged to develop some type of solar panel with incredible performance gains.  Its all silicon and energy transfer.

2. There has to be substantial operational effeciency in the manufactoring centers SUN has developed over the last 20 years which can be re-tooled for solar. 

3. Employee inspiration.  Take 5,000 of the best engineers, industrial designers and product managers and challenge them to develop the world’s best solar infrastructure.  Give them 5 years and guaranteed employment for the duration.

4. LAMP is going to overtake whatever architecture, servers, OS, your working on anyway.  Maybe not in 5 years, but absolutely in 10. 

5. JAVA is cute, its not an industry.  The debacle created in mobile with J2ME is a perfect example.  Yes, some carriers use it, but honestly no one starting a mobile company now says “Yeah, I’m psyched about porting my app to 19 flavors of J2ME and then regression testing every update across 304 devices.”

6. Karma.  Just getting the project going will bring some positive energy to the rest of the troops and maybe lift the stock price 10% too boot.

 7.  The country, and world, need someone to take leadership and just GSD with this whole energy/oil issue.  Google is probably using more power per day than most countries.  No reason why y’all can’t do this and restore glory to technology!  Driving your bike or Prious to work doesn’t count either.  

8.  Your company name rocks it.  Hard.  No one can top that.  It is your destination.

I’m sure there are more reasons (as well as clarifications to the ones above).  But screw it, I don’t need to know what I’m talking about right?

Palabra.