Known Implementations: None
Putting Together Salons (Automatically)
When I refer to a salon, I mean the concept of the salons from the 1800s. Salons were held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. (Thanks to Steve Sanderson for suggestion of that term to describe what I am talking about)
The concept here is that you would like to get groups of people together to talk about a particular topic. So you put in a topic and a seed group of people. You also put in the necessary parameters that would be needed for a meeting to occur…# of people, time, place, location. So maybe you have a pool of 8 people who like to talk about startups. You could set up a meeting of 3 for Thunderbird Coffee, Thursday, September 23, at 9am. When the scheduler wakes up, it picks three random people from the seed list for the group and it sends them an email with a 24 hour expiration date. The email has a yes/no/don’t bother me link. If you get 3 Yeses, you send an invite to the meeting and it’s established. If you get 2, then you send a message to one more person until you get another Yes. Then, send the invite. If you cannot achieve a meeting of 3, you send an email to the Yeses and you say I’m sorry, we could not make this meeting happen.
Post-Meeting Follow-Up
At the conclusion of a meeting that was supposed to have happened, you send a message to each participant.
You ask them to fill out a short survey:
- Did you attend the meeting?
- How would you rate the meeting (1-5)?
- If you could invite one more person to the meeting, who would it be?
- If you did not really click with someone at the meeting, who was it?
The system would use the intelligence of these surveys to make future meetings better by pairing people who seemed to work well together and not pairing those who don’t, etc.
The system would allow a person like me, who often wants to get people together for various reasons, to build small topic-focused interest groups, but also assist me in improving the quality of the groups over time. The randomized nature of it is kinda fun. It’s like a jury summons but without sitting in court. The automation allows for the potential to scale the regular meeting of small focused groups. The seeding is important, but hopefully the continuous feedback from the surveys would help guide group progress going forward.
Notes about this idea’s history:
- It was formerly called the cron society. A mysterious and geeky name, but I like the term salon to describe what this enables better.
- It was expanded during a brainstorming session with Hayes Davis back in March of 2010 on the patio of Thunderbird Coffee)
Many people listen to music these days with the help of the web. Services like Pandora and Last.fm to name two. So our preferences are being recorded already. One problem though is that we may not use the same service so it’s not necessarily easy for me to see what you’re listening to if I use Pandora and you use Last.fm. So we build an app with the APIs of the services to aggregate those. Secondly, there’s a social piece where once you’ve entered your id for the various services, you post to Twitter to invite your friends to this site to hook up their preferences so you can share tastes. Once they click the link and add a service, by virtue of the fact that you are Twitter or Facebook friends, their musical tastes automatically start influencing what you see in your home screen. You should also be able to disable the influence of a particular account or maybe even say “i don’t like this song” and eventually you build up new intelligence about their musical tastes that is original data. Every song should ideally have a playable sample and be linked to one or more sites with an affiliate link. I think it should be like a nickel a song if someone buys, if I remember right. So hopefully, if enough people start using it, you would eventually have more than two nickels to rub together.
If you’re interested in hearing more about this idea, send me an email at ideas –at– damonc dot -com.
Have you ever paged through Twitter friend pages? They use cursors in the URLs for better scalability.
It sucks for two big reasons:
- they only show 20 at a time (with no other options)
- If you go to http://twitter.com/followers and click ‘Next’…then hit ‘Back’. FAIL! The page is blank.
It might be hella useful to have a Gigantic friend (or follower) page which would display up to 5,000 friends at once. Then, implement a bunch of features like Follow, Block, Report for Spam, which lists are they on, add to list, pic, bio & location, etc.
If you need to link in a person’s current avatar in your web app, @raffi added a neat little trick to pull in a couple different sizes. Very handy!
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/damon?size=mini
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/damon?size=normal
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/damon?size=bigger
It does a 302 to the current avatar image file on S3.
An open space to meet Austin entrepreneurs and investors
First Wednesdays – Jo’s Coffee* on 2nd St – 7:30-9:30a
The time for this has been adjusted, please see the reboot post for more info!
While reading through David Walker’s Born Entrepreneur blog recently, I noticed a old post about the Open Coffee Club Movement:
The idea is simple. Events are arranged on a set date in a set location. Entrepreneurs and people interested in the industry come along to chat, discuss their ideas, and build relationships. VCs also come along and entrepreneurs have a chance to pitch their ideas to them – and discuss whether they might be interested in funding them etc.
It’s such a simple and obvious idea, I thought that surely Austin must have one and that I just didn’t know about it. It turns out that Bryan Jones and Nick Ducoff did actually start and run one in 2007 when the idea first surfaced, but they don’t meet anymore. I’ve spoken with Nick and he was quite supportive of starting this up again.
When I first raised the idea, I was given various pieces of advice which largely centered around who would or wouldn’t come to this kind of thing. I like the idea of a consistent meeting time that has no set agenda, no politics, and no real structure. It’s open and that means that quite literally anyone can come by. Sure, there may be some bozos from time to time, but in general I think we’re at a point as a larger entrepreneurial community where we could stand to get to know each other better in an informal setting. So walk up to Jo’s, grab a coffee, and find someone interesting to talk to. And for heaven’s sakes, please be interesting! 
The recent AustinStartup article Wherefore Art Thou, Austin Investors spawned a lot of varied commentary, but not much real understanding about the investor perspective. I hope that if we can attract quality entrepreneurs to meet up and connect in this open space, that we will also attract some open-minded investors who will join us and share their unique perspective with us. There are benefits to both sides to be more open with each other and a cup of coffee seems like a good place to start.
We are going to meet on First Wednesdays at 7:30am in downtown Austin:
Think you can make it to the first open coffee this Wednesday? If so, click “count me in” on the Plancast site to show others that you plan to attend.
If you want to keep up with the event as we forge ahead, you can check out the Open Coffee Austin web site for updates.
Look forward to meeting you!
*Good news about the parking situation. Jo’s can validate your City Hall parking spot!
In the early days of a baby’s life, both baby and parents need to get their rest any way they can get it. A baby swing is often used as a baby sleep aid and when it works, it’s pure magic.
There are a couple of issues with the basic designs today:
- They are often battery powered. This is pretty senseless. Just offer an A/C adapter already!
- Probably because of the battery, they are “programmed” to have their white noise/music run for 30 minutes and then stop. This can be a problem when the baby isn’t quite asleep yet or they wake up at the slightest change in environment. Some babies are just like that.
- They are quite manual, mechanically. You set a speed and that speed does not change until you come and turn the knob to some other setting.
So a first step forward is to just alleviate these problems by offering a wall outlet plug, music and white noise settings which do not cease until you tell them to, and offer sequences (perhaps fast at first to put them to sleep, and then slower to keep them relaxed and out). These would be great improvements.
However, being an engineer, I have something a bit more advanced in mind. And in a programming sense, it’s really not that advanced, but it’s way beyond the current state of the art in baby products. Ideally, we would design a smart baby swing.
The Components
Aside from the frame and seat, the swing would also have a microphone, a speaker, a computer chip, a Flash drive or CF card, and a motor for doing the swinging.
The Software
The software would be a genetic algorithm (or any kind of optimization approach, really) with a goal of silence. The software would listen with the microphone for distressed crying (and it would ideally be able to distinguish real crying from talking and cooing) and it would develop an initial pattern of sound and swing speeds. It could measure and store persistently a Time to Silence, date & time, coupled with the sound/swing pattern used to achieve it. The optimization the swing would be trying to achieve would be the lowest possible time to silence measurement.
The ultimate goal for this product would be for a parent to set their child in the swing, turn it on, and walk away…letting the swing figure out which stimulus the baby best responds to, to achieve rest. Obviously, you still need to care for your baby and listen to him/her, but this device would hopefully free you up by trying variations on a theme to smartly relax the baby. If the baby wakes up mid-nap, the swing would automatically react to the sounds by repeating the same process that it initially used and adjust its behavior accordingly based on what is working.
Update: Had another thought while working with my baby in the swing this morning. Offer a hackable swing with an open interface, such that programmers could write their own logic for the motors and sound playback!
Known Implementations: None
