Traveling Geeks

MBA or Not in the New Digital Age?

The Wall Street Journal has a great piece that suggests an alternative route to the traditional MBA. In other words, imagine that you have the option to go somewhere prestigious on paper, such as Harvard or Stanford for your MBA and can spend time with other go-getter types among ivy-covered buildings and high-powered faculty for a couple of years.  

Photo credit: Brian Stauffer
Yet, after you’re out the door, who would a progressive CEO rather hire? the candidate who built a profitable business in two years, or the candidate who sat in lectures? They suggest that a ‘smart investor’ would skip the MBA candidate.

The piece suggests that what matters “exponentially more than that M.B.A. is the set of skills and accomplishments that got you into business school in the first place. What if those same students, instead of spending two years and $174,400 at Harvard Business School, took the same amount of money and invested it in themselves? How would they compare after two years? If you want a business education, the odds aren’t with you, unfortunately, in business school. Professors are rewarded for publishing journal articles, not for being good teachers.”
Read the original article here.

The Pain of Upgrades: Migrating from a Lenovo to a MacBook Pro

My laptop is dying a slow horrible death. The fan
is howling and all sorts of unknown noises are coming from in its hardware
interior.
It’s a Lenovo, my second over an eight year period. We all knew the
day was coming.
“We” is anyone and everyone who has stopped by my
office or seen me using it at an event. They’d hover over me and remark: I can’t believe how slow your machine is, yowsa – how do you get anything
done?
The thing is…I’ve only had it for four years and it’s been on its way out
for half of those four.
It seems as if I grew up in a world with
different standards. The thought of a piece of machinery you paid $2,500 for with
all the bells and whistles dying within a few years wouldn’t be acceptable…it’s absurd and yet we’ve all been brainwashed into thinking it’s not.

Manufacturers and reviewers alike are both to blame for creating such a consumable world where
we’re constantly shelling out more money for more reliable hardware, which it should have been reliable in the first place.

My refrigerator didn’t cost that much nor did the stove in my kitchen
and yet both have been purring along for more than a decade. I paid $300 for a
car once that lasted longer than my laptops do today and it’s likely that some
old guy somewhere in Maine probably is still using it for trips to the grocery
store.
When someone sees my two year old iPhone, they look at me as if
I’m as outdated as the guy who’s driving that old Oldsmobile. A few friends
are trying to get me to upgrade my four year old 24 inch Samsung flat
screen monitor when it works perfectly fine.
Call it old fashioned wisdom of sorts, or just common sense, but
who said, “if it works, don’t mess with it?” Oh yeah, that was my
grandfather, not Winston Churchill or Steve Jobs.
When I ask “why upgrade?” I’m told there’s better
pixels, faster speeds or I’m bound to have compatibility issues.
While Windows 8 is now available, consumers are forced to pay an
extra $100 for Windows 7, now outdated. It’s the exponential growth thing
haunting my every day, the pressure of keeping up with the speed at which
technology is accelerating not to mention the pressure we all have financially
of trying to keep up with it all too.
Silicon Valley tells me to ‘get over it,’ and just upgrade, but
Silicon Valley doesn’t live in the real world where salaries are one fifth of
what they are elsewhere in the country and that’s if you aren’t one of the 20 something
year olds who made an exit from a not so innovative of an app that got
sold to someone with more money than brains.
eMarketer made a 2012 tablet sales prediction of 81.3 million
tablets, up from 15.7 million in 2011, and Gartner estimates that sales will
multiply to 54.8 million in 2011 and more than 208 million by 2014.
Forrester numbers have laptop sales continuing to grow from 26.4
million in 2010 to 38.9 million in 2015, however, while desktop PC sales will
decline from 20.5 million in 2010 to 18.2 million in 2015. Mobile is hot and we’re
all moving to smaller form factors – the trends make sense.
Take a look at research firm Canalys figures: they have
vendor shipments of smartphones close to 489 million smartphones in 2011,
compared to 415 million PCs. Smartphone shipments increased by 63% over the
previous year, compared to 15% growth in PC shipments.
While mobile will win at the end of the day, the need for laptops
and in some cases desktops isn’t going away tomorrow, although some will argue
they can do nearly everything they need to on their iPad. While I use one,
particularly when I travel, my efficiency on the thing is less than half what
it is on a power laptop, even my poor dying Lenovo.
While many of my laptops over a decade have died a slow horrible
death, some of them still turn on…..they’re just not usable. As I took a
hardware account, I was shocked by the list, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been! Two
HPs, a mini HP, a baby MSI wind notebook I bought for a trip to Africa, a
Toshiba, an Acer, two IBM/Lenovos and a partridge in a pear tree. 
  

The power chords are out of control because none of them are
compatible with each other, even the ones made by the same manufacturer. The
result? A digital me and a digital life that doesn’t make things more efficient and yet productivity is the #1 thing I need these devices to deliver me and my
business.
The advancements in the last decade are remarkable. For those who
argue that the Singularity isn’t on its way, they might want to pause and
reflect on just how fast things are moving and that it’s more difficult than
ever to keep up with the advancements being thrown our way.
Clearly I’m not a luddite and I love shiny new cool gadgets and
toys as much as much as my fellow geeks; remember that next week I’m off
to CES for the umpteenth year in a row.
Yet, we need to remind ourselves that technology is an enabler; it needs to enhance our lives not be a hindrance to a more fulfilling
life. Dealing with technology glitches, whether that be hardware or software,
is something I deal with daily and these issues increase in less than a year
after purchasing a brand new laptop. Shouldn’t we demand more from the hardware
manufacturers?
I’m about to switch to Mac and while the artist in me is thrilled,
I worry about compatibility issues and the learning curve to get me to
what people say, will be a ‘simpler life.’
That said, the decision is final. I finally made the plunge and as I write, there’s a Mac
Book Pro on its way to me directly from Apple.
While there’s no question, I’m a power user, I decided not to
order the ‘very top of the line’ since it offers more than I’ll need. Did I mention that the price is nearly double what I’d pay to get the ‘same specs’ in a
Lenovo or an equivalent? Additionally, these beautifully designed machines are heavy,
roughly 30% heavier than had I gone for the latest Lenovo or
Toshiba.
While I’m eager to start my ‘simpler technology life,’ I have my
doubts. For the Apple fan boys who claim Macs are perfect and problem-free, I’d
love to know why I own five iPods and only two of them actually work. My iPhone
hasn’t given me any issues so far nor has my iPad, but I haven’t put it through
the ringer by loading hundreds of apps like I need to do on my laptop.
While many of you may be okay with upgrading every piece of hardware
we own every two years, should you be? How thin do we need our phones to be? How
many apps do we really need? How many pixels do we need? How much memory do we really
need? If I hear one more person insisting that I spend an additional $500 for a
solid state drive, I’m going to scream. These are the same people who will
insist I upgrade to an even faster solid state drive in a year and spend $500
again.  
It’s no wonder we keep spending to keep this senseless pattern
alive. We get dished language that goes something like this: 
For the
new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, it’s the screen — all 2880 x 1800 pixels
of it — that will leave others scrambling to play catch-up. Of course, to push
that many pixels you need serious horsepower. And the next-gen MacBook Pro
(starting at $2,199) delivers just that with a quad-core Core i7 processor,
Nvidia Kepler graphics and super-fast flash memory. Did we mention the MacBook
Pro is only 4.5 pounds and is nearly as thin as the Air? 
Manufacturers stick together, use glossy language to woo us in and build in the same obsolescence. When the industry and consumers comply, no one can complain since they all seem to die a slow horrible death much
faster than they should given how much we spend. (see blog post entitled the iPad Mini: Why Apple Thinks You’re an Idiot).
But alas, a dozen blog posts from now, I’ll be on a new machine, a
Mac Book Pro, and hopefully in some magical way, my technology life will be
transformed for the additional $800 I’m spending.
While I’m looking forward to what the Mac Book Pro will deliver,
sometimes I want to just toss all of it into the ocean, or give a little pain
back to the hardware that has cost me so much value time over the years, not
that I’ll ever have the courage of course. That said, it appears not everyone
shares my constraint.
 

Also refer to two posts I wrote a year or so ago on digital personas and digital ‘silence.’ Here’s a blog post
on social media turning you into a low confidence anxiety-rich freak.
Photo credits in order of appearance: A mashup created with
Webdoc, Scott Kline, CoolGizmotoys.

Mobile Loco Brings the Best of Advertising, Geo-Location & Branding to the Mobile World

Held last week in San Francisco, the MobileLoco event merged the best of geo-location, advertising, branding and the mobile world.
Run by serial marketer Mark Evans, the event aspires to dive into the brand, advertiser and mobile convergence in the context of the Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) marketplace.
The discussions revolved around what this convergence means for big brands, consumers, SMBs and the mobile and location industry.  
On-stage, we heard from the likes of Andrew Mason of Groupon, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley, Banjo’s Danien Patton and the Mobile Engineering Lead of Airbnb Andrew Vilcsak.  Other voices included Bloomberg TV’s Cory Johnson, Google’s Don Dodge, Nextdoor’s Nirav Tolia, Postmates Bastian Lehmann, Foursquare’s Holger Luedorf, Micello’s Ankit Agarwal and others. 

Above: Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon
Client inTooch partnered with MobileLoco so users could easily and seamlessly exchange contact and social network information on the fly. A free mobile app for iPhone and Android, attendees could network that much faster and more efficiently using the app rather than have to exchange business cards or manually add Twitter and Facebook ‘handles.’

Above: Steve Brehaut, Renee Blodgett, Julien Salanon

Since geo-tagging is built in, the inTooch app tracks where connection requests are made and will link all connection requests to the location, in this case the Mobile-Loco event in San Francisco, CA. When users browse through their connections, they can see all the connections they made at Mobile-Loco. 
There were other cool products there too. A group out of Japan from Daq was on-site showing off their creative iPhone and iPad IRUAL cases.  I find that most cases are pretty bland, come in plain colors or are frankly too tacky. Then there are those specifically targeted to the 13-18 year old market, but what happens if you don’t fall into any of those categories? I loved their designs specifically aimed at women – from soft and feminine to daring and electric.

Then, I had a demo of DigitalGlobe, who apparently did a deal with MapBox on the same day. Mapbox, which is a provider of open source solutions for designing and publishing maps via the cloud, chose DigitalGlobe as their commercial and earth imagery provider.
Users can now incorporate DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution satellite imagery as their maps’ base layer for added quality and rich detail. The result can be quite beautiful, especially compared to the bland offerings today.

Then I went back in time to my speech recognition and natural language processing days. I saw a nifty demo from a group who call themselves SpeakToIt. What they do? Develop talking personal assistants.
The SpeaktoIt Assistant is a virtual buddy for your smartphone that answers questions in natural language, performs tasks and notifies you of important events. The Assistant is meant to save you time and make communication with gadgets and web services easier and less stressful. 

All photos by Renee Blodgett.

Cormac ConroyVP, Engineering, Products, Qualcomm
David Staas, President, JiWire

inTooch Teamed Up With MobileLoco: Users Can Exchange Data On The Fly

inTooch, a mobile application that supports both Android and iPhone, easily and seamlessly allows you to
instantly exchange contact and social network information on the fly.
inTooch teamed up with San Francisco-based Mobile-Loco this past week, an event that explores the convergence of brands, advertising and
mobile.   
Attendees were encouraged to download the free
mobile app, so they could quickly exchange all their contact information or a portion of it with new
people they met at the event, including their social media network data. 
Whenever you meet
someone you want to stay in touch with, you simply call the person, the app
detects that you have called them for the first time and prompts you
automatically to exchange your contact information, giving you the option to
exchange your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn details as well.
Since geo-tagging is built in,
the inTooch app tracks where connection requests are made and will link all
connection requests to the location, in this case the Mobile-Loco event in San
Francisco, CA. When users browse through their connections, they can see all the connections they made at Mobile-Loco.  After the event, inTooch will also send an email to each user
who sent a connection request during Mobile-Loco with the list of all the
contacts they met at the event, resulting in a more efficient way to follow up
and turn contacts into relationships that matter. 
A useful augmented
reality feature, which is popular for personal encounters, is a report that
informs you of all the things you have in common with that person
(friends, places you visited, music, movies you like, social network info,
check-ins, interests you share).
Unlike most apps, inTooch works regardless of
whether the person you just met has it on his or her cell phone, making it the most natural, straight forward and easy
way to share your personal or business details.  inTooch is
available for download at http://www.intooch.com
and is free for users. Currently, inTooch works with both the Android and the
iPhone, with support for other platforms and mobile devices coming later this
year.
Photo above is of inTooch’s CEO Julien Salanon on the MobileLoco stage. 
Disclosure: I provide some consulting to inTooch.

Mobile Loco on Dec 11 Explores Brand, Advertiser & Mobile Convergence

For all things mobile, mark your calendar for December 11, 2012 in San Francisco. The upcoming Mobile-Loco conference will be held at Mission Bay Conference and we have been offered a special Magic Sauce Media discount for Down the Avenue and We Blog the World readers. 

Mobile-Loco will dive into the brand, advertiser and mobile convergence in the context of the Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) marketplace — exploring what this convergence means for big brands, consumers, SMBs and the mobile and location industry.  
Executives from Foursquare, Google, Airbnb, Groupon and other leading brands and investors will address these topics and discuss where the market is heading. Learn from brands how they are taking advantage of today’s new technologies and solutions to build durable brand engagement, relationships and presence in a chaotic and noisy marketplace.

It’s not news that if you’re not on mobile or have an integrated mobile strategy, you’ll be left behind quickly. Apps in this space are enabling hyper-local and real-time personalization, rich content and engagement, and ultimately more bricks-and-mortar transactions. At Mobile Loco, you’ll learn from the leading developers and enablers in this space.
Click here to register and receive a 25% discount off current registration rates.

Thought Leaders, Technologists & Academics Re-Imagine Global Health

I’m a huge supporter of TEDx events given their goal to make the world a better place and because I know how much time and effort goes into each one since I’m a co-curator myself of the annual TEDxBerkeley  event. 
Organizers need all the help they can get since the success is based on the work, effort and love from volunteers…in other words, everyone works around the clock without getting paid.
TEDxSF (San Francisco) recently had their event in conjunction with UCSF, around health, a critical topic on everyone’s mind in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Their theme was 7 Billion Well: Re-imagining Global Health.”
They brought together thought leaders and emerging pioneers in academia and technology to discuss the latest multidisciplinary ideas around the most pressing health issues of our world today. 
Christine Mason McCaull, Kunal Sood and their team did a smashing job with an incredible line-up of speakers, which included more women across the board than any other event I can think of outside of BlogHer. Hear hear. It’s also Christine’s last year curating the event, a huge loss for the TEDxSF team. 
Speaker’s topics included the Bay Area as a Global Health Hub by Jaime Sepulveda, issues around bleeding from Suellen Miller, embracing your children from Dr. Shefali Tsabary, investing in health markets from Yasmina Zaidman and corporate games for change from Adam Bosworth. (below) 

Dean Ornish (below) always has such a wonderful presence on stage. He shared his take on Dis-Ease and how lifestyle, diet and mental attitude is critical to avoiding disease and reversing problematic issues in order to bring the body back to its natural state.   

Jess Ghanamm addressed global health psychology and David Ewing Duncan (below) gave an amusing talk on aging. It may not surprise you but not everyone wants to live for another hundred years. 

Ankur Jain and Vinod Khosla took on investing to expand health globally, Sam Hamner talked about 1000 knees, Piya Sorcar addressed the tough issues around HIV education, and Patrick Lee explored primary care and what the U.S. can learn from Liberia. Yes, Liberia.
Then there was Kumaré, a film which also played at the recent SAND Conference (nonduality – where spiritualty and science meet) which I attended recently.  

Director Vikram Gandhi (above), who grew up consuming equal parts ancient Indian mythology and American movies, was incredibly amusing on stage as he uses satire to talk about his journey as a ‘false prophet’ to shoot the movie. 
We then dove into the mobile world with Sandeep Sood, Montana Cherney, Michael Blum and Jeff Tangney and heard from David Bolinsky, an all time favorite, who never falls short of presenting beautiful information in a way that is both compelling and moving. (below)

Fang “Jenni” Fang, Michelle Goodwin and Priyanka Jain spoke up for women, their stories tearfully inspiring. 

Then there was a treat…a very special treat. Lebohang “Levo M” Morake from South Africa flew over to sing a song he arranged for the infamous Lion King: He Lives in Me.

This song is not a favorite of mine, but for anyone who has lost someone in their life, the words will resonate with the pain you felt when you first realized the moment that you called upon your deceased loved one for guidance and comfort.
In other words, the spirits of our ancestors watch over us, protect and guide us on our life journey.  Did I cry? Yes. It was truly beautiful as was meeting Lebo after his performance.
See the videos I shot of the performance (Part I) and (Part II). Follow insights, passions and event info on @magicsaucemedia and @weblogtheworld. All photo credits: Renee Blodgett.

Sprinklr’s e-Book of 30 Essays on "Social at Scale”

The folks over at Sprinklr recently created an e-book collection of short essays on the theme “social at scale.”
The eBook provides advice from social media leaders on how to scale social media in the enterprise world.
I was invited to participate with 29 others, including Rohit Bhargava, Mitch Joel, Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Joseph Jaffe, David Meerman Scott, David Armano, Peter Shankman, Mack Collier, Michael Brito, Jay Baer, Edward Boches, Nilofer Merchant, Ted Coine, David Weinberger, Shelly Palmer, Mark Earls, Augie Ray, Brett Petersel, Ted Rubin, Sarah Evans, Jeff Bullas, Amy Vernon, Matt Dickman, Thomas Baekdal, Venkatesh Rao, Richard Stacy, Hugh MacLeod, and Doc Searls. Sprinklr termed the group the “Social Media Dream Team”. Go figure.
Aside from insights, there are also tips, useful checklists and a “readiness assessment.” Download the ebook here. 
 

Now in its Third Year, Tech4Africa Hits Johannesburg Next Month

Now in its third year, Tech4Africa is a premier mobile, web and emerging technology event held in Johannesburg on October 31-November 1 at The
Indaba Hotel, Gauteng.
The theme is “Unlocking the next billion consumers” and sessions will be focused around mobile
and content, the enterprise opportunity, entrepreneurship and financing, social
business and innovation.
The Developer Day and Hackathon on the kick off day includes three tracks: a day on Agile
software development, a Hackathon with sessions on Ruby on Rails, Python,
Raspberry Pi, PhP etc., as well as workshops for social media marketers on apps
ecosystem and monetization.  
Keynote speakers include IBM’s Tom Rosemalia and Ralph Simon of Mobilium,
with other speakers being Amolo Ng’weno, MD of Digital Divide Data in Kenya;
Neal Ford, Director, Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks; Vérone
Mankou, CEO of Way-C in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Emma Kaye, CEO of
Bozza, Josh Adler, social entrepreneur and others.

IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme has been brought into the Tech4Africa 2012
agenda and Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director at IBM Venture Capital Group, will introduce GEP and an
award programme. Tech4Africa 2012 will also be running Ignite again – a
start-up workshop and pitching competition, which is being run by AngelHub and
Deloitte.

A Google G+ Hangout will be held live at the conference so that tech hubs from
around Africa can be part of the conference and so that delegates can interact
with a panel, asking questions and finding out more about what is happening on
the ground in Senegal, Liberia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, Congo and other
parts of Africa.
Disclosure: we are a media partner of the event.

Is Social Media Turning You Into a Low Self Esteem Anxiety-Rich Freak?

A University of Salford in the UK conducted a story which indicates that social media contributes to lower self esteem and higher anxiety.
Roughly half of the survey’s nearly 300 participants, reported that their use of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and others reduces the quality of their lives.  
Confidence is affected, they say, self esteem is lower they say and two-thirds claim they find it difficult to relax or sleep after spending time on social networks.
This isn’t rocket science. Ask anyone you know who spends a lot of time in front of a screen, glued to online games, social networks, management platforms like Hootsuite or sites where they’re engaging in any way.
Roughly a quarter cited work or relationship difficulties due to online confrontations and more than half of the participants say they feel “worried or uncomfortable” at times they are unable to access their Facebook or email accounts. I have seen anxiety arise around me when people can’t access their worlds online, including something as small as a Foursquare check-in.
Spend more time in an always on digital world and of course you’re anxiety will increase. This isn’t rocket science. But people are so hooked into the notion that it connects us ‘more’ that they don’t look for the obvious negative side effects.

Sure, I can meet new people across the globe if I am constantly glued to my Hootsuite stream, and given that I run a travel blog, there’s a lot of pluses to that, but bottom line, it takes us away from real human connections – there’s only so many hours in a day.It doesn’t help that tools like Klout, Kred, PeerIndex and others assign us grades on a daily basis that encourage high school “who’s the popular kid of the day” behavior. Offline for a day or a week and your Klout score goes down.
The tools are so one dimensional and dare I say “unheathily addictive” that it keeps you drawn into a social media online game you can never win, particularly if you want to have healthy relationships offline. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains doesn’t lie. Not a new book, but the behavior shift is real whether or not you agree with everything in the book. Also see my post from last year on multiple digital personas.I find it ironic that a post entitled: How Social Media Makes Romantic Relationship Thrive is immediately above a post entitled: Social Media Fuels Low Self Esteem & Anxiety on Mashable, where I originally learned about the study. Here’s a link to a video reporting some of the results.
People I talk to seem to be fighting to get quality time with their other halves and the main culprit in the way? Mobile Devices and their PCs. Enuf said.
 

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