Gripes and Grins

Grin: Revisiting Incentive Learning & a Recap of Grockit 2011

About a year ago, I moved from Outspark to Grockit.  I remember joining the team knowing that the product had a ways to go, but the people are outstanding. 

A year later, we've done some amazing things in terms of furthing social learning: Grockit for Good tranformed Grockit into a 1-for-1 company; Grockit Answers uses video to make asynchronous social learning a reality; Grockit in Facebook lets you create private study rooms with friends; Grockit SchoolMatch helps students find the right schools for them; and Grockit is working very closely with Georgetown University to provide students and alum with online test prep. 

And, the team at Grockit has grown and proven to be more oustanding than I first understood.  Together, we've attracted another round of financing, launched an open-source project to improve our adaptive learning algorithm, and partnered with Startup Weekend and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create StartupWeekend.edu. 

Grockit has a lot in store for this year, including working with some high-profile private K-12 schools to provide more data points supporting Grockit's efficacy in social learning.  And, I'm totally loving my work. 

Recently, I was approached by a Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow researching incentives-based learning.  Peter was an investor in Gazillion's Smartycard, a founder's fund investment. Working with the Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow has been very stimulating.

Over the last month, I've spent several hours discussing and rethinking the lessons learned in nearly two years of working on SmartyCard as a game division, and then as a potential "spinout" of Gazillion.  The mental exercises have really reinvigorated my thoughts about incentives and payments in educational games, sites and services. 

There's a real opportunity to create an incentive structure for learning in high school.  But increasingly, I'm convinced the application context in which incentives are provisioned needs to be viral -- somewhere like Facebook.  And, incentives need to appeal to ego -- the developing super-id that feeds off of social reward and "knowing" and "helping". 

Finally, I've come to realize that friends are an acceptable currency for millenials.  Offers are too.  There's one other currency that people are starting to understand -- user-generated-content.  There's going to be a beautiful little collision at that intersection, I'm looking forward to seeing it happen.

Grin: AT&T Uverse

It's been several months since we moved our home from Comcast to AT&T Uverse.  Aside from the phantom charges, pricing and lengthy outages, I really didn't have any issues with Comcast.  I wanted to try Uverse because I'd never really tried another bband digital TV solution.  My initial experience with Uverse is definitely a grin.

Even tonight, after AT&T Uverse needed to reboot before each NFL game, I was still pleased with the recovery and support experience.  The support experience in particular is nice. 

Two days after the unit was installed, the hard-drive was borked when the box failed in the middle of an upgrade.  I suspect the unit lost power in the middle of a major upgrade and literally forgot where it was, what it was doing.  A quick swap fixed everything.  I'm sure that box was wiped and reinstalled somewhere else -- I don't really care.  The point is that my wife explained to support that the box needed to be replaced before a sporting event the next day, and so a Uverse truck showed up at 6:30pm, a nice guy swapped the box, tested the remote box and disappeared quickly.  That's the kind of TLC I like. 

At a feature level, the AT&T Uverse IPTV STB is light years ahead of the crappy comcast Motorola DCT-series.  The content is IPTV, not digital cable, which is better.  But, the user experience is much better.  The Uverse GUI, multiple tuners and local hardware mean that the overall user experience is modern, relatively feature-rich, and hardware is responsive to the remote IR commands.  It makes Comcast feel appropriately last-century. 

So far, I'm a fan.  But, I'm worried about the outages I saw tonight -- they remind me of a common issue in all broadband services.  What happens when everyone in your area are using the Internet AND watching TV at the same time?  If you're using IPTV, where the TV signal and the Internet are connected to the same pipe, something is going to give.   I'm worried about the Olympics, Election night, World Cup, Final Four, Oscar night... I'll be watching, tweeting, and sharing my experiences.

 

Gripe: GenX is sick of your bullshit

I've been suffering blog fatigue.  Mostly because Grockit has been so damn much fun and so intense for the last 9 months.  But, with our recent funding event and recent momentum, I was ripe for a "Gripe", and today I'm sharing a fellow Griper's Gripe from Tumbr -- Generation X doesn't want to hear it, which also ran under the title "GenX is sick of your bullshit" in Gizmodo.  That's right.  Gizmodo.  You probably won't read this post or Gizmodo if you're 20 anything or 50 something.  

To summarize the entry, Mat Honan has crafted a timeless rant on mainstream media and generational perspectives that stacks up to "F@!k the South" and other blogging milestones of the last decade. He basically reminds the world that the mainstream media is about as tapped into reality as it's readers.  Which is to say, not so much.  And, he subtly notes that the media basically chases demographic bubbles and completely ignores the marginal demos, because, we are by defintion, outside of the mainstream and, to generalize, more difficult to aggregate for ad dollars and (to the point of the blog), long suffering in the personal economics sense. 

 The last paragraphs are pitch perfect -- I can say this here, because no boomer or GenY reader will read this post beyond the 3rd paragraph.  Like Honan's post, this blog is for readers with attention spans.  It makes no appeal to adrenal glands or prurient interests, nor does it doggedly reinforce positive self-image.  It's what my mother-in-law calls cynical because she confuses that word with sarcastic.

I finished Honan's quick read and immediately relived a last year full of ridiculous personal interactions with the idiot-generation immediately north of my age demo.  Honan's post tapped into that odd surrealistic feeling I get after any interactions outside of my generational bubble. 

There are times, mostly around the Holidays, when I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  That's not snarky, that's tragic.  For Xers, life can take on absurdist warpings, wherein the outlandishly unaware and narcisistic temporarily inhabit your time and space to remind you of your own humanity through egregious displays of self-unawareness. Like an entire house full of Zaphod Beeblebrox. 

For example, a particularly douchy boomer chastised me last Christmas for not subscribing to physical newspapers, again.  It was like the third time I heard this, and because my wife had denied my very specific request for permission to break his jaw (it's really a very easy thing for me to do because I look like a clean-shaven yetti), I decided to quietly enlighten this snarky little fucker with a few app installs.  And, so, I grabbed his fucking precious new iphone to install InstaPaper, NYTimes and other assorted news sources only to discover the asshole didn't even have an iTunes account set up?! Yeah, I know you need a minute -- either you're an Xer crying or giggling, or you're only casually following and not yet seizing on the ridiculousness of it all. Go back to the top of the paragraph and read it once more.

Why do these specific interactions make me want to laugh and lash out at the same time?  As this instance happened, I poured some wine and said nothing, told no one, stealing knowing glances with my children, quietly shaking my head.  Until just now.  That whole episode just fell out of my suppressed memory bank just now.

Sadly, that kind of stuff makes me miss my Grandparents.  I miss the way that my Grandpa used to just sit and stare at his kids like they were a bunch of dipshits, and steal knowing glances with his grandkids.  All except his oldest Son, whom I'm pretty sure he treated just like his brother.  My wife's grandfather did that too.  He was an admiral in the Navy.  He wasn't an idiot, nor was he an asshole.   He even gave me a knowing wink and a nod one time -- as near as I could tell, he had similar instincts about boomers. 

Now that I think about it, I can remember a lot of older folks grinding their teeth and whincing at their boomer children.  I bet they passed around flasks and had a lot of inside jokes.  I'm sure they'd have blogs if the technology was there 20 years ago. 

Someday the human race will discover that irony and self-awareness are linked to a specific gene that skips generations.  A recessive gene no doubt.  Maybe they'll name it after Alanis Morisette.  Finish that last line for me.

Grin: My new favorite thing is studying leadership

I used to joke about leadership books as I strolled through the Red Carpet club or Borders Books.  I used to joked in a snide, all-knowing twenty-something manner, with just a hint of trademark Gen-X apathy. Obviously, I didn't go to business school.

The ironic thing was that I was actually studying leadership, I just didn't know it yet. I was comparing startup culture leadership to college and professional sports.  I just had no idea what I was processing, certainly I didn't appreciate leadership or processing leadership at the time.

When I was in my twenties, I worked at WebTV for Steve Perlman. I was early too.  A lot of good mid-level managers one pay grade above me struggled while working for Steve.  I loved working for Steve.  I managed to forge a fast mutual respect with Steve that even now persists, despite the fact that I see Steve very infrequently, usually at an event or in SOMA. 

Recently, Ashlee Vance from BusinessWeek reached out to me to comment on Steve as a leader. It started a retrospective that fits within my current leadership study of Roy Gilbert, Grockit's CEO.  The two are very different.  The two are very different from another great founder-leader I worked with, Raymie Stata, now the CTO of Yahoo!.  In fact, there are very few similarities between all three.

The thing I learned most from Steve was how to learn in a founder culture.  Skepticism is a good thing.  But, in a functional top-down organization, the follower has to work at listening, internalizing founder thought processes and have the ability to suspend disbelief at times in order to achieve goals that seem unrealistic.  Steve taught me all of that.  That's why I chuckle when I see or hear someone quote Perlman disbelievingly or disparage Steve's hyper-distilled skeptical comments on "laws" of science and technical limits.  Sure Steve believes in himself.  But, he has earned the right to believe others will follow him too.  It's not ego, it's knowing what works, for him, and everyone that is willing to listen and believe in him.  That's  how top-down management succeeds, IMHO. 

Now, there's a lot of people that get religious about bottom-up startup culture.  But, in my experience, that's a harder culture to create and sustain, very fragile, and exposed to external factors and internal employee dynamics. I believe that if you are to succeed as a key contributor, you have to be able to take direction and collaborate with top-down managers.  I may be wrong, but that's my experience talking.

What I'm living now -- it's different, and fascinating all at once.  Grockit is a truly interesting and an inspiring place to contribute and cooperate.  And, after all of the pre-Grockit hype I heard on Roy Gilbert, I have to say that he is an impressive operator.  In my late 30s, having developed the ability to recognize leadership and acts of leadership, my life and work have become so much more interesting. 

Here's the really interesting thing: My leadership style hasn't changed all that much.  But that doesn't mean I'm not learning.  Studying leadership is engrossing.  I hope everyone takes the time to observe their manager's leadership style. 

Grin: BUMPNRUN productions

While I'm taking a little time off to play with the wife and kids, I've been tracking down old friends from Stanford u-grad class of 1995. Here (http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/54k1) are two of the funniests humans alive, on or off of Funny or Die, Branyon Davis (B-Luv) and Kevin Garnett (KG) with their latest, a spoof of Dos Equis ads, featuring the one and only Billy Dee Williams (see FunnyorDie embed below). 

You have probably seen BUMPNRUN work before, as I get a steady stream of updates about humorous ads they've created.  The name BUMPNRUN is a reference to a football defensive coverage technique, where the defenders on wide-outs get in the face of receivers and distrupt their progress up field before they can get into route.  That style of play is tough, it's physical, it's persistent.  That's how these two played, and, fittingly, that's what is required to get your brand of humor some visibility in Hollywood. 

I'm really happy for these guys.  Branyon was the first person I met at Stanford. He started off as a receiver and converted to defense, and because were hobbled with injuries for much of our freshman year, we spent a lot of time wise-crackin, sampling underground rap, and playing tunk. 

KG and I spent a little too much time on a pleather couch one Palo Alto summer, along with Craig Thompson.   We would watch crappy TV with the volume down and do voice-overs to entertain each other.  Trying to make he most out of basic cable, we'd make spoofs, and establish foolish positions, like computer generated images should be outlawed.  That memory is funny when considering all three of us would soon be working in Television -- Craig and I first at WebTV, and now Craig has been at Comcast for over ten years.  KG went right to the content side and never came back.  He is really good at what he does -- follow him at http://bumpnrunproductions.com/

 

 

The Most Interesting BLACK Man in the World part 1 - watch more funny videos

Grin: The most interesting news in media today

I received an email from John Young this morning containing a link to some very interesting news -- Endemol is creating games.  This was amazing timing, because I just yesterday told John Young that this was probably going to happen very soon.

John and I were Microsoft contemporaries years ago, and we recently  worked together at Gazillion.  John and I met for about an hour yesterday morning.  He was showing me his new startup concept, which is all under "frieNDA", so I can't say much more. 

But, for a breadbox description, let me just say that John is working on something very interesting in terms of understanding the intersection of social and gaming, and I'm not describing the simple "nurture-wither-grow" tricks you see in SNS games today.  The study of human and social psychology is a vast science.  That science is just at the beginnings of application to SNS games.  In the coming weeks and months, the games sector will see  a new depth in game mechanics for SNS games enabled by folks like John Young and the legendary Scott Orr, creator of Madden Football at EA.  On that last point, I wish could say more, but I'm sworn to secrecy by another FrieNDA. 

Grin: YouTube movie trailer

As far as parody goes, this is good.

Grin: Marvel Super Hero Suad MMO

People used to ask me what "Gazillion" does.  I really couldn't say for the longest time, aside from SmartyCard.  Here's the answer:

Gripes: To media vampires, leave Edward Cullen alone

American women love skinny English actor nonces.  This is a well-known fact, and I've not the time or inclination to argue such facts with the extra-chromosomal-types that would ignore the long-standing tradition of week-in-the-knees reactions to pretty, sometimes androgynous English actors and singers, from the hundreds-of-millions of American female gentry.  The media love these actors because women are the driving force of consumption in our economy.  It's not complicated.

The average American male age 30-and-older is completely numb to the persistent media attention given to any shaggy, diminutive Brit that manages to hold Hollywood's attention for any length of time.  For the most part, we feel not threatened, and the nauseating effects subside after a time -- sorta like motion sickness or learning to chew smokeless tobacco.  Below 30, the American male is generally miffed at attention given such girlish figures, and completely out of sorts thinking that relative machismo is of little value in sexual conquest.  Like I said above, it's not complicated.

But, in my line of work, I have to read what the media is manufacturing, usually a few days in advance.  I subscribe to a number of safe interfaces (newsletters, RSS feeds, wikis, etc.) wherein writers, producers and editors are "seeking sources" that will validate their minor points in pop-culture "trend" pieces for mainstream publications and broadcast programs.  And, for guys in my line of work, we've seen poor Edward Cullen exploited to no end.

The travesty of Edward Cullen is that the character and the actor Robert Pattinson produce a never-ending series of angles from which to develop absolutely ridiculous stories leveraging sex.  Here are two entries from today's well known HARO (Help A Reporter Out).

Summary: Has Edward Cullen wrecked your love life?

Querey: A 50-year-old woman recently wrote to an advice columnist that
she was depressed because she wanted to be loved like Edward
loved Bella in the Twilight series. Women of all ages are
enthralled with Edward Cullen, but how many women are in therapy
because of it – or should be? Is Twilight creating more
unrealistic expectations than usual in women? I am researching
the real effect that this fictional vampire love story is having
on adult women longing for the perfect relationship.

If that didn't make you want to puke, read this.

Title: Moms obsessed with Twilight and other teen or tween programming or stars

Query: For a story on mothers obsessed with teen stars or movies or tv
shows aimed at teens or tweens, I'm looking for: mothers (and
their kids) to interview. Massachusetts moms only, please. I'm
also looking for nationwide experts to talk about why adult women
find teen shows or stars interesting.

Here's the problem as I see it.  Because my job requires that I determine what is appropriate for SmartyCard tweens, I've screened the romantic episodes of much of the Twilight series before making them available as rewards.  Granted, I know I'm not the appropriate audience, but Twilight is absolute drek and really not that imaginative.  Just like the media stories supporting the Twilight phenomenon.  In an age where twenty-somethings are forcing ad-supported media and brand marketers into honest seductions and "authenticity", Twilight and poor Edward Cullen have bucked the trend to become the most un-apologetically exploited literary character since Holden Caulfield (how is that for irony, ya fonies!?). 

Seriously, we're going to look back on these dreadful pop-media Cullen pieces and make comparisons to embarrassing late-century-micro-trends in media and marketing, like Acid-Wash denim fashions, the launch of new Coke, the inexplicable popularity of Air Supply, or "The Superbowl Shuffle". 

The media and publicity vamps are draining Edward Cullen of whatever literal value he once possessed.  Not that I give a shit, but the waning moments are almost too nauseating to witness.  I wish someone would make it stop.

Grin: Mocking Glee

The media industry is a self-propelling, derivative-based industry. Therefore, nothing succeeds like making fun of success. Glee is the bane of man's existence right now. It's a musical television series focused on teens in Ohio.  Yeah, I know, it's like the producers were high and playing madlibs when they wrote the treatment.  Glee is proof that even the jackasses that produced "Cop Rock" can have a second act. 

When she can wrestle away the remote, Glee is the uber-annoying alternative to reality TV franchises in my house.  I don't want to throw away more cut-rate snark on this series, but maybe I'll throw a few brain-dead insults in Glee's general direction.  The cast of Glee is a waste of blood.  There.  That's all you're going to get from me. 

For mankind, the only upside to Glee's success is the mocking of Glee via the Interwebs.  Enjoy, men.  Enjoy.

http://www.babelgum.com/5001744/glee-60-seconds.html

Edit note: Sorry for the link, embed broke.