garry’s posthaven

Went over to Dave McClure's Startup2Startup event tonight. The main event was Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis head-to-head debating the evilness of Apple. Guy is one of our investors and Jason is also a Posterous user, and somehow Posterous got around 4 or 5 blatant plugs. Talk about great Posterous evangelists, both of them. ;-)

I'd never met Jason in person before, but he came over and invited me to come by Sequoia Capital tomorrow for his weekly show. If you haven't seen it yet, above is a recent episode with Jason and the CEO of BillShrink, Peter Pham.

Watch it at 1pm PST at http://thisweekinstartups.com/ -- and maybe call in too. There's a great call-in segment for entrepreneurs.

Lookin forward to it guys... see you tomorrow.

Cynics will roll their eyes, but there are some really interesting stats in this video.

Is Social media in 2009 = Multimedia in 1993? CD-ROM's were big and new then. Siliwood, or multimedia gulch, they called San Francisco. People were going nuts about interactive video. There was real tech behind it. There were cool new user scenarios and experiences unlocked before our eyes. Interact with a movie? Tell stories in a whole new way? It was a veritable boom.

We don't talk about multimedia anymore -- but maybe that's because the boom fulfilled its promise. Here's hoping social media can overcome its hype curve as well. And we're on the front lines. Damn, it's an exciting time to be alive.

Even if you can't remember a specific Reading Rainbow episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head: Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high, Take a look, it's in a book — Reading Rainbow ... Remember now?

Shouldn't this wildly successful franchise just RUN ITSELF? What about DVD sales? Anything? How is it that PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can't pay the several hundred thousand dollars to renew the broadcast rights?

The current VP of children's programming at PBS says that funding has shifted from children's shows like Reading Rainbow that foster a love of reading to shows that teach reading fundamentals and phonics. I sure would love to see the research that backs that up.

The truth is, a love of reading jumpstarts a life-long virtuous cycle of curiousity and mind expansion. Love of reading is something that supercedes any particular skillset. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for the rest of his life.

But in this particular case, focusing on individual skills is like teaching a child to fish when they don't even know they need to eat food!

There's an online petition. I signed it. If you loved Reading Rainbow the same way I loved it, so should you.

This 2 hour talk is basically the essential primer/guide to product management. I have never seen a single deck/resource be nearly as comprehensive. This is so incredibly essential, I think anyone who is even remotely connected to building products should sit down and at least flip through the slides, if not watch the whole thing.

It took me 10 years of working on product of all kinds (web, desktop, mobile, consumer, enterprise) in all kinds of roles (engineer, designer, PM) to come to understand the concepts explained in this deck in 2 hours.

This is my favorite slide out of this whole thing. There's a lot more to designing products than the visual aspect. There's much more, and it's all connected.

Dave McClure's fbFund is bringing together some seriously valuable startup knowhow and resources.

In 86 slides, Stephen Anderson explains why it's impossible to separate visual design from the core of the product. You can't just make it pretty later. Visual design has to be baked in from the beginning.

Visual design and understanding of gestalt give you the tools to realize your intentions. Interaction design is knowing what a user should be able to do on a given step. Visual design is making something that allows the user to do it, quickly, efficiently, easily, and all the while feeling good about themselves.

In consumer products, how the customer feels when using your software is make-or-break.

Striking example of a remarkable redesign for the most iconic brand in history. Get rid of the bubbles, the drop shadow, the embellishments. Unclutter. Simplify. Reduce.

Do less, be less, and end up with more.

The actor Sharlto Copley (Wikus in District 9) makes a great appearance in here too. You can absolutely see how the concept built out in this short 6:30 piece was just born to be created into something bigger.

There's a political message in here too. The footage of South African locals talking about aliens was actually footage of director Neill Blomkamp interviewing Soweto residents about other Zimbabwean and Nigerian migrants.

Kind of an obvious allegory going on here-- aliens being a stand in for the 'other,' even among South Africans who suffered under apartheid.

District 9 was mind blowingly awesome. Can you even believe this is Neill Blomkamp's first feature film? I'm blown away, impressed and inspired.