garry’s posthaven

I've had one of these for a couple weeks now, and they're awesome. It's a 3rd party external battery that weighs about a pound that hooks directly into your Macbook Pro MagSafe. It also has a USB outlet for charging your iPhone or iPad.

They let me get a ton more mobile battery life on the go -- so no more running out of batteries on cross-country flights and/or at conferences without power outlets. On average I get 8 or 9 hours of charge with my 15 inch Macbook Pro Unibody (circa 2009).

Not sure whether I should be angry at HyperMac for not properly licensing the power connector or Apple for refusing to license it.

This is a shame. But apparently they're being sold for the next two weeks before getting discontinued. If you've ever had problems running out of juice on the go, I recommend picking one up.

A new sharing-oriented economy is emerging. Imagine a world where we don't own 90% of the stuff we keep around the house. Sure, we'll have a TV and toothbrush, but we won't have a power drill. The average power drill is only used for 20 minutes over its entire lifetime. And that's just one of hundreds of things we have lying around the house.

We don't need to own it if we can have instant access to it at all times.

Latitude Research reports that this radical future may become a reality. It's called collaborative consumption and it is becoming a major force in the way we live our consumer lives.

Think ZipCar. Or AirBnb. This is just the first wave.

Hat tip to my friend @krgaskins who also led the report for Latitude!

Thanks so much to Seattle 2.0 for having me here at StartupDay 2010. It seriously was a blast talking to so many excited entrepreneurs and pre-entrepreneurs.

Above are my slides from my talk. It's pretty straightforward, in as few words as possible:

• First, hate the problem. This means you really connect with something that SUCKS A LOT and you know is a real problem. Come on people, we work in tech. There are a lot of things that are terrible. PC LOAD LETTER, what the heck does that mean!?
• Second, ship the solution. The product. Get the smallest possible quantum and don't boil the ocean. You don't know whether your product is goodt il it's out there.
• Third, love your users. If you build it, they won't come. Building consumer web startups is absolutely not like building a car, but that's how we think about building them. It's logistics and technology and mechanisms. No, no, no. It's more like throwing a really awesome party. And nobody throws parties for people who they don't love.

So that's what I got in a nutshell. I can't believe how many people have helped us along the way (and we are so far from done!) but it feels great to be able to give back and help more people get to fulfill their dreams.

Seattle is probably the biggest collection of amazing software engineers and product creators outside of the Bay Area -- but they're all locked up in massive vaults called Microsoft and Amazon. Come on out guys, the water's fine.

Really great deck by Harry Brignull. Interaction design is a human experience, and it turns out websites can sometimes be rather similar to that shady used car salesman with his arm around your shoulder. Ech.

Science is about the external world: measurement, controlled experiment, data collection, empiricism. It tests hypotheses against the hard reality of repeatable experiments with objectively measurable results. Those who practice it are called scientists or empiricists.

Reason, by contrast, is internally generated. It’s building mental models of the world, starting with your internal sense for what is right and pure, from which further truths can be deduced. Those who practice reason are called rationalists.

Adam Wiggins of Heroku breaks down science vs. reason and how it affects business decisions in a startup -- and I was struck by how there are similarly very entrenched camps that are highly product (PG / YC-style / build something people want) oriented vs. highly metrics (Paypal mafia / Andrew Chen / Slide+Zynga) oriented.

When you build a product, you've got to have a worldview on what people want and what is useful and good. That's product sense. But once it is out in the world, you need to iterate and use empiricism to understand how your creation is doing. That's analytics. 

As with science and reason, product and metrics are distinct things that happen to be extra valuable when used in conjunction.

Trader Joe's is no ordinary grocery chain. It's an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience. It stocks its shelves with a winning combination of low-cost, yuppie-friendly staples (cage-free eggs and organic blue agave sweetener) and exotic, affordable luxuries -- Belgian butter waffle cookies or Thai lime-and-chili cashews -- that you simply can't find anyplace else.

Trader Joe's is an amazing place, and with very little coverage. But Fortune does an admirable job of filling us in.

Did not realize that the store had been sold to a German family that is better known for a large German chain of supermarkets. And that they're expanding like mad. Good on them. They rock.

Profound revelation: All humans are WIRED to experience that which they see happen to others, as if they are having the experience themselves.

Dustin Curtis first told me about this concept on a bus ride from Boston to New York two years ago. I was despondent over how mechanistic and selfish neurobiology seems to paint human beings. Survival of the fittest and all of that. From an economic perspective, we all seek our own rational self-interest above that of others. What prevents us all from becoming infinitely bloodthirsty selfish pirates, anyway?

Dustin replied -- well, there's this thing called mirror neurons. He recently wrote about it in his blogazine. Our brains are wired to experience things that we see happening to others. Ultimately that is what empathy is -- being able to feel what others experience. And it comes built in to every one of us, thankfully.

As Jeremy Rifkin explains in the video above, the arrow of human history is really one about ever-increasing levels of empathy. Before we only had empathy for a our family group, then your tribe, onwards to a whole nation state, and so on. Recent developments in the state-of-the-art in empathy has now extended empathy to all human beings who live, and now even the whole Earth and all its creatures. Through this empathy, we are moving forward human capability, creation, love, and ultimately goodness in the world. 

I'm certain we were put on this earth to make other people's experiences and lives better. So by giving into empathy, we can truly feel the same experiences as others and thereby improve them. This affects your life right now, no matter what you do. If you're creating something, anything, you probably want it to be good. You want to solve problems for your customers. You want their experience to be better. That's good for you, but even better for others. And making things better for others is what it's really all about.

This concept of mirror neurons as an underpinning of empathy and society fills me with great hope. We've got a shot, guys!

Point a finger at someone and three point right back to you. It turns out this is not just a childhood adage.

How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are, according to new research by a Wake Forest University psychology professor... They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others.

“Seeing others positively reveals our own positive traits,” Wood says.

The study also found that how positively you see other people shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.

In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. “A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively,” Wood says. “The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.”

...

This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic — or has other negative personality traits.

What we choose to say about the people around us reflects heavily on ourselves -- who we are, what we feel, and what our own personality is like.

See the good in others and they shall see the good in you. And wisely choose the company you keep for they will in turn form who you shall become.