garry’s posthaven

Rebecca Saxe delivered this fascinating speech at TED in 2009. She has discovered the one part of the brain that gets engaged when we are evaluating the intentions of other people. 

Of note:

• Children don't develop a sense for morality and evaluation of other people's consciousnesses and intention until after age 5.
• Using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Saxe and her researchers were able to disrupt this part of the brain and that it has a significant impact on the ability of people to make judgments about other people's intentions.

This seems to have wide-reaching impact for product designers. Designers must spend time inhabiting the consciousness of others -- to feel their pain and empathize with what they would feel at any given moment in an interaction. 

I would suspect the overdevelopment of this part of the brain is one of the key differentiators between designers who make things pretty and designers who make things well.

Skype is pretty good for talking with people. Due to schedules these days, it's almost the only way I can meet most of the people who want to meet with me. It works relatively well. It saves everyone travel time. But it doesn't work perfectly for the simple reason that the Internet doesn't work fast enough. For a while I thought Facetime would be the thing that brings us to the telepresence age. Now I'm not entirely sure, though I wait with bated breath hoping that Apple releases better presence indications and multi-party calls for Facetime. Well, any update would do, really. 

Telepresence is a tremendous holy grail for computing. What's better than email? What's better than screen sharing? Actually being able to look into someone's eyes and trusting them, and making a deal. 

In order for it to really work, it has to be:

• Ubiquitous - like Skype, or better than Skype. This means it has to be a desktop and/or mobile software play. Hardware telepresence works really well today, but only for the well heeled. 
• High Quality - I mean, the point of telepresence is to have a personal experience of meeting someone without actually moving the atoms there. So 720p HD seems like a reasonable goal. Uncompressed 720p is about 100 megabytes per second, and compressed Bluray is about 15 megabytes per second. The real effective optimized HD telepresence codec of the future I suspect will be someplace in that range of 15 to 100 megabytes per second. 
• No skips - not even a little bit. This means the bandwidth needs to be overprovisioned... possibly by a lot. You need bandwidth headroom to absorb spikes. 

My guess is Skype or Facetime will be the software/mobile platform for it. Unless some intrepid soul comes along and shocks us all, which I very much hope will happen. Apple may yet amaze us. Skype is useful and probably good enough, but not great.

So then the question basically falls to point-to-point bandwidth. To avoid skips, you need a lot of bandwidth. Especially if you want high quality. Uplink speed on the last mile will be the constraint, since that's typically the slowest link. Modern online speedtests (e.g. speedtest.net) indicate average broadband speeds are coming out to 2 megabytes per second (~15 mbps). Eesh. My Comcast cable modem in California seems to rate limit me to a dismal 500 kilobytes per second.

Randall Stross recently wrote that you can buy 1000 megabits per second broadband for $26/month in Hong Kong. That is awesome! Perhaps telepresence within cities will be viable on a much shorter time frame, a matter of years. The same article mentions Google will be experimenting with gigabit within cities too.

If you wanted to know when real telepresence would really disrupt business travel and be a viable replacement for face-to-face communication, you'd need to do a forecast on broadband speeds. My uneducated guess: anything above 5 megabytes per second bi-directional cross country (e.g. SF to NY) for regular consumer broadband would be the point where you'll start to see technology massively shifting society.

At current rate of broadband speed improvements, it might be a while.

An audience member at WWDC in 1997 trolls Steve Jobs in front of everyone, but Steve responds with grace. (Bold emphasis mine.)

Hat tip Dharmesh Shah at onstartups.com and Vic Gundotra's Google Plus

October 1, 1932: Third game of the World Series, with the Yankees taking on the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two strikes, two balls. The Cubs are one strike away from stopping the greatest slugger who ever lived.

Babe Ruth points to centerfield. That's where the ball was going to go. The pitcher grips the ball, winds up the pitch and fires a curve ball. With a swing and the crack of the bat, the ball sails in that direction. Going, going, gone. He homers the ball 440 feet into centerfield, just as predicted.

--

CONVICTION

This is possibly the finest example of conviction ever displayed. Babe Ruth's conviction is illustrated in two parts -- telling people you're going to do it -- then doing it.

This should mean a lot to you if you're a startup founder. That's because telling people you're going to do it means believing it and getting others to believe. If you are hiring or looking for a cofounder, my number one advice is to look closer at the people you already know and trust. Few teams seem to push on this nearly enough. 

It seems as though people are afraid of transferring their idea into other people's brains. But that's the entire point of what we're trying to do -- when trying to put a dent in the universe. People close to you are always the best people to try to recruit. As an added benefit: If you can't get your best friends to join, maybe you actually are crazy or wrong. This is your best way and sometimes only way to tell. 

I know you are thinking... people have their own stuff going on. Close friends have jobs and sometimes their own startups. But let me tell you -- if you really know this other kind of world that you have in your head is going to exist, then you are doing them a huge disservice not to tell them about it.

If you can infuse your belief into others, then you will succeed. We all know that true believers can move mountains. Small armies of true believers can conquer mercenary armies of any size. This is why small teams of half a dozen people can take down goliaths.

OBLIGATORY STEVE JOBS REFERENCE: Steve Jobs has called himself a recruiter in interviews. This is not surprising. Everything past the first earliest stage of the garage is about care and feeding of the organization. The company. Steve Jobs is a master at making true believers, and true believers can do truly great things.

As for Babe Ruth... I consider him one of my most revered startup heroes.

Friday night, Steph and I were hanging out with good friends in downtown SF... ironically enough, watching blockbuster car heist movie Fast Five. Around midnight, we headed back to our car and found that our car had been burglarized... both of our laptops were gone, along with a number of other random things the thief must have thought were valuable or resalable. No sign of forced entry. The police mentioned that Honda Accords were often burglarized since thieves sometimes use a 'master key'  that unlocks all doors for a particular car-- they case the area and strike.