New Year’s Resolutions and Plans for 2012

This morning on the way into the office I listened to a podcast from Harvard Business Review on How To Keep Your New Year Resolutions. If one of yours is to put more good in, why not listen to podcasts while your in the car. You can find HBR Ideacast here.

So yes, I had resolutions. I’m not going to share them with you here, but so far I am keeping them and I intend to have an awesome year, which I am going to put a massive effort into. Of course I have broken that down into many parts with goals and plans. I am very much into using technology, particularly in the area of lists and plans, time and people management. That’s what I wrote about in my book Unleashing The Road Warrior. The technology has changed a little since I wrote it, I now have an iPhone and iPad instead of a Palm or Windows Mobile, but the principles are the same and even the apps are still very similar if not more visual and a larger form factor.

Anyway, I was working through how I can improve my productivity and one of the things I realised was that in some cases I am a good multitasker, but in general by personality I am a sequential operator and that’s what I do best. I raise this partly as a note to self, but also as something for you to think about. Do you know how you function best? How you get the best results out of the day? Do you know what time wasting activities you get yourself bogged down in? In NLP we learn about different types of people and even school teachers are taught about whether people are tactile, auditory, kinetic etc. I’m a mixture of all of them, which is perhaps what makes me a good connector, but I digress.

I have always thought of myself as a good mutlitasker and in some cases I am. For example I am a songwriter. When I perform my songs, my left hand is up and down the fretboard, my right hand is picking or strumming, I recall the lyrics, sing them and engage with them, I monitor the audience and engage with them, I listen to make sure I am in tune, I make sure I’m breathing from my stomach and so on. That is multitasking. But it is something I have trained myself to do since the age of 9.

I can’t tell you that I can hold a phone conversation, read and comprehend an email, sort out files on my desk and monitor my websites concurrently. I can’t do justice to more than one thing at a time, especially as I get older. But the other thing I have done very well probably also since around the age of 9 is do many things sequentially and to a pattern. For example I have always read 3 or 4 books plus a few magazines sequentially, but effectively at the same time. I read a chapter out of one, then a chapter from another and so on. The same way that many of us today look at web sites, but what I do is give my full attention to those things at the time. I have intense interest but a low boredom threshold. I need stimulation.

What does that mean to my resolutions and plans for 2012? I am going to use my strengths more effectively. I am going to create a list (I like numbered lists) of things I want to achieve every day in business and in my personal life. There will be many but they will be achievable. Some will be repeated several times during the day such as

1. Calling clients
2. Contact people in my networks
3. Meeting clients
4. Calling potential clients
5. Checking Emails
6. Managing my social media accounts
7. Managing my blogs

But others will be things like

1. Take a walk
2. Think of something or someone I am grateful for or to
3. List 5 daily goals for the next day at the end of each day
4. Look after my health
5. Enjoy my family
6. Remember that the quality of my life is determined by the quality of my thoughts (I borrowed that one from someone else who had a list of 35 tips.

I will end up with a list of perhaps 20-30 things that I will read every day. They won’t be long winded, they will be practical. At the end of this year I will have had an extremely productive year in many aspects of my life and next year you can ask me how it went. Maybe I will share some of it on my blog, but this blog is normally about technology and the future rather than more personal information.

My question for you is how are you going to make this a better year for yourself, your company, your network, your family and the people you care about?

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The power of other people’s opinions or bias

I had the opportunity to attend the Time Convention in Auckland, New Zealand today, which was a great opportunity to step out of my normal day and have time to think. I didn’t learn much, but it did remind me about things I know I should be doing, but don’t spend enough time at. I used my Blackberry to take notes which I emailed to myself, as it doesn’t have a notepad or Word application, as my trusty Windows Mobile and Palm handhelds used to.

The final presentation, that I very much enjoyed was from Kevin Billett who, while promoting a 2 day seminar for next week, came up with some thought provoking concepts about taking responsibility for attitudes and accepting experiences that you allow to have control over your life expectations and achievements. This set me to thinking about aspects of my experiences, particularly as a child, that have I have allowed to hold me back in some of my endeavours, but that’s another story.

He raised a topic that has interested me for many years, which is the effect that people’s expectations or opinions about other people, influence them in many ways.

There are countless examples. John’s Hopkins researchers recently found that many physicians had negative attitudes to patients with obesity problems, which negatively affected these patients to the extent that their problems worsened.

There have been many studies that show that a teacher’s expectations of their students, irrespective of any basis on which those expectations were founded, had a significant impact on their results. I recall being told, although I can’t site the source, of a university study that proved this point. If you know of the study, please share it with me.

A group of students of equal ability were split into two groups. The teachers were told that one group was of above average capability and the other were below average potential. The groups were taught the same lessons by the same teachers. Their results were consistent with the information the teachers had been given, those who they said were above average, performed above average and the others under performed.

The world of elite sport is often built around belief that people of the right proportions can become medal winning athletes, even if they have never participated in that sport before. Sir Steve Redgrave has selected people based on height, with a view to having them represent their country in the 2012 Olympics. For rowing, the expectation is that tall people have powerful levers suited to the sport. One would not think that this alone could not be enough, but combine that with the positive expectation that they will become medal winners and history has proven that this can work.

The same occurs in gymnastics, where girls are headhunted at an early age based on being short and enjoying sport. I’ve seen from personal experience that girls who are told they can do things, outperform girls of similar strength and flexibility who are told that they aren’t good enough. What I saw was the same thing, girls over whom coaches had high expectations performed confidently, had less injuries and ended up on elite squads.

Psychology 101 has always featured nature and nurture. In any country where people are to some degree living in communities featuring high proportions of particular minority ethnic groups, there is a tendancy for them to be poorly represented in professions and overly represented in menial work. Students’ expectations in these areas are low, often fostered by teachers who have low expectations of their wards.

I won’t go on with this topic. I would appreciate your opinions and experience. Have you seen this happen first hand?

Seth Godin on Kindle

It’s a shame that Seth doesn’t support direct comments on his blog, but maybe that’s because he wants us to read what he writes rather than the huge numbers of people who would want to comment on his blog.

I won’t paraphrase his blog about the Kindle because I think it’s worthy of your time to pop over to his blog and read it for yourself.

I have promoted eBooks for a number of years including writing one myself, Unleashing the Road Warrior, which you can buy from many sites including the new eBook site ReadingIt which I am involved with.

I also wrote a FREE Whitepaper which might add to the story called Are eBooks Ready to Come of Age, which has been used as readings in a number of universities.

The key things that I totally agree with Seth on are:

1. eBook prices are crazy. Why should you pay a similar price to a hardcopy book? The cost of publishing is tiny in comparison to printing on paper. It is more sustainable as trees don’t need chopping, retailers don’t need huge margins, so someone is being greedy. Readingit.com is a startup founded on the concept that the writer should enjoy the majority of the revenue from their professionally edited book.
2. The Kindle is easy to use, you don’t need to be a technology buff and with good internet access downloading new books is easy. It’s about reading not about technology.
3. The Kindle display is more like paper and therefore doesn’t give you the eye strain that I have suffered from on many longhaul flights because of the backlighting, just the same as when you are at your computer too long at a tme.
4. The Kindle doesn’t give you the same fuctionality that I wrote about in Are eBooks Ready to come of age. In Palm and Windows Mobile devices and others, you can highlight, annotate, bookmark, draw and other features which mean that you can readily access information you want to revisit and you don’t ruin the book with lots of scribbles and ear tagged pages. Like Seth I have several thousand books and it isn’t easy in a hurry to find the book you wanted and which of the many post it flagged pages you wanted.
5. While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

   Thanks so much for your support:)

   

Haptic Virtual Reality Suits

Lots of people escape the world through the internet, some with games, perhaps web environments like Second Life, but what’s happened to Virtual Reality that promised so much so many years ago. From what I understand the only thing really holding things back is the cost.

One thing that I would love to see is Sport VR. Imagine if you could don a suit and be your favorite All Black or soccer star. You could see what they see and feel (desensitised off course) the tackles and the thrill of the game.

There are already a range of body suits such as the Inlabs Motion Capture Suit that can be used to capture body motion data for a variety of purposes. These can be used for sports medicine, training and biomechanical research. Forms of this technology have been used to help develop movie models for animation, allowing models to look like they are real by taking motion information from people.

VR is used by the military to train pilots and the US Navy has VR parachute trainers so that they can experience everything, the visuals, the thump when the chute opens and the harness touch points grip your body.

In the future VR will support remote medicine using robots to perform surgery. In some cases the surgeon will be there, in other cases it might be through telemedicine where experts can influence or control surgery remotely from anywhere in the world with reliable broadband connections. Micro surgery is already taking place today which is far less invasive and allows recovery to be much quicker than normal.

VR would make a lot of sense in remote and dangerous locations, for example space exploration. There are major issues with space travel where the distances, event to other planets in our solar system represents years in each direction. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the dexterity (or better) of a human without having to actually send a human to Mars.

Virtual Reality is a natural progression of technology that we have already become used to. Look at the number of phones inlcuding iPhone and Windows Mobile devices from brands such as HTC which have gyroscopes that recognise which way the device is facing and automatically change the screen format accordingly. Wii fitness has become incredibly popular, combining a video game with exercise has rapidly propelled Nintendo back into leadership in the TV games world.

Worlds like Second Life, using VR could mean that the avatars become totally lifelike and the whole gaming world is in for a shakeup. Imagine all the action games where you are actually running and shooting, driving and crashing cars and feeling all the bumps and hits.

Of course the more fun this becomes the greater the risks that people will prefer VR to real life. In Japan there have been problems for a number of years where children prefer to stay in the rooms every day just living on their computers and don’t want to go into the real world. They are known as hikikimori. People like that are now appearing around the world, where virtual reality is preferable to real life.

Of course there are those who are elderly or severely disabled where VR could give them some semblance of normal experiences that they otherwise wouldn’t. Imagine being restricted to your bed or a wheelchair, but being able to experience the sensations of walking or running, or even sex.

I won’t delve too far into this, but the ultimate in safe sex could be VR sex. People who are severely disabled, or who find it difficult to find partners could have their experience without risk. It appears that they haven’t yet been manufactured in a form that is safe, but it is coming. Michael Anissimov has some good ideas and I will leave the last word to him from his accelerating future blog.

 

Is that a Blackberry in your pocket or?

I’ve spent the last 3 days at the GeoCart’2008 Conference. It was an academic conference with speakers and attendees from all over the world. The content was excellent and I found it fascinating to see not only the results of academic research in the modern world of geography, location based technology research and web mapping, but also some of the great products that have and are being developed. But this is not what today’s blog is about. Perhaps more on the conference in the next few days.

I was an exhibitor at the conference and during the quiet times, was checking my phone for messages and emails as the Internet services at the venue at Auckland Univesity were shocking. I was in a building next door to the Auckland university IT Campus and the best local internet I could get was 128kbps. This morning I was listening to a podcast while I was in the shower about Internet services in Mali and how their pipe was only 2Gbps. Being landlocked they have to rely on other countries for access to the submarine cable. They would be horrified at the speed I got in Auckland, but I digress.

A number of people asked if my phone was a Blackberry and how did I like it. My answer was, yes, indeed it is a Blackberry, as issued by my company. Do I like it? I intensely dislike it. I’m a power user of mobile internet, after all I wrote the book, Unleashing the Roadwarrior and I taught companies how to improve efficiency in the field using mobile and wireless devices. Unfortunately I no longer walk the talk.

You see, to me mobile and wireless computing is about efficiency and touching things as few times as necessary. I’ve come from the world of touch screens and along with the book, published texts including Mastering your Palm and Mastering your Pocket PC.

For people who only use the phone ‘killer apps’ of voice and text, the Blackberry is a wonderful device. It has a qwerty keyboard so if you don’t use txt abbreviations, you can type your messages without having to remember the buttons and as a phone, it is perfectly adequate. If you are a Baby Boomer, the ability to do these things as well as read, send and receive email is wonderful. Attachments are another story, but you can send and receive email and you can do it securely through your MS Exchange Server which makes the IT Department happy. It does also synch wirelessly with Exchange for my contacts and calendar, but that’s pretty much where the fun and utility ends for me.

Here’s what I did with my Blackberry over 3 days at the conference. I sent and received a couple of urgent emails. I sent and received a couple of Twitter messages (which all but exhausted the ability of the browser.

Here’s what I could have done if I still had a Windows Mobile or Palm device. Actually I do still own old models, but they are old and I don’t really want to carry multiple devices anymore, although I could possibly consider a new Windows Mobile, Palm or iPhone, given the right opportunity, especially since there is now an iPhone Reader:)

I could have made lots of notes using handwriting recognition on the touch screen. I can write Graffiti or block characters without having to look at the device, so that I can concentrate on the speaker. These would have been written straight into MS Word, so that I would have them available for other purposes, such as copying and pasting into my blog. Instead I used scraps of paper, one of which I have already misplaced.

I could have taken photos of exhibits, slides and delegates for future use and reference.

I could have beamed my digital business card to others who used similar devices.

I could have shown off some of our mapping technology on the IE browser, even richer if the phone also had GPS, which my Blackberry doesn’t. (Mine is probably 2 years old) Relevant given that I work for a mapping company, specialising in web mapping API’s, routing, tracking and car navigation.

I could have quickly referenced web sites discussed during the papers and bookmarked them on the spot for future reference and integration with my favourites on the desktop.

I could have drawn mind-maps to enhance my note taking.

I could have read one of my eBooks, after setting up and while waiting for the delegates to arrive in the morning, or checked the daily paper.

I could have made audible notes and embedded them into an email, or even recorded segments of a presentation.

I could go on, but if you want to know all the other things I could have done, read my eBook, which you can purchase at ReadingIt.

It’s about efficiency, about touching things once but having access to them in lots of ways. It’s about being able to combine real time research with the discussion on the browser. You see, we can think and take in a lot more in the time that a presenter speaks, and in terms of our points of reference. It’s about then being able to access any of those pieces of information, communicate them and collaborate with other people.

Instead I have a few pieces of paper that I hope I won’t lose.

I guess this is about the dichotomy I live and work in. On the one side there is an infrastructure designed to keep data secure and cater to the lowest common denominator, for the most of whom, without training and motivation, even a Blackberry is overkill. On the other side, a busy person who wants to make the most of the information, people and media available at any given point in time. To leverage it.

The conference providers gave the delegates a CD with copies of all of the presentations, which was great. But it is pretty analogue and although I am very interested, I will probably never get around to looking at it. I will hopefully get to some of my notes, along with notes from other events that I havebeen to recently, scribbles on pieces of paper or the backs of business cards.

Then of course there are podcasts. I am big on maximising my time and whenever I am in the car, walking, exercising or doing chores, I am connected to my iPod.

So, yes it is a Blackberry in my pocket. Would I recommend it to anyone? No. Not unless all you want is a phone that does exchange / text email really well. That’s all it was designed for. I want more! I’m a busy person who wants to multitask. I want a touch screen, preferably multipoint. I want efficiency.