I've been working for a while on trying to develop a toolbox for the Suits I meet to understand the Geeks I work with.  One of the most common process problems I've encountered in a mangement culture is a complete and total misunderstanding of how tech works, what motivates technical people, and the value that technical teams bring.  The reverese is also completely true.

Ask any developer what the non-technical people in their organization do, and usually you'll get an answer like:  

"There are non-technical people here?"

"The have meetings?"

or "I have no frigging clue."

I'm designing a series of surveys (non-scientific) to suss out the nature of the most common problems and possible solutions.  If you're a Geek, a tech person, a designer (still on the technical side of Suits versus Nerds) please help me out and take the survey.

Nerds Click Here

If you're ALL Business, please help by taking the Survey for Suits!

Suits Click Here

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I've had a long running mental list of things I want to eventually do, but I thought it might be fun to post a few examples.  This is only an "includes but is not limited to" sample, my list is pretty much endless, No order of priority implied:

• Learn to fly a plane
• Get reasonably good at Parkour
• Visit Antarctica
• Vist Tibet
• Go flying in a wingsuit
• Become competively good at Chess
• Get a Phd in Physics
• Go on a non-religuous service mission
• Release a Musical Album that sells at least 1000 copies
• Publish a fiction novel that sells at least 10,000 copies
• Visit the great wall of China
• Perform a life saving feat in a medical emergency
• Learn to Wind Surf
• Go Skydiving
• Free Climb a 100 feet vertically (just enough to be life-threatening)
• Learn how to do Yoga Breakdancing.

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I love Xpath.

 It makes XML easy to use and easy to query.  Gone are the days of parsing things with a SaxParser unless you're really hard up for control of you text.

Also, I love the Ruby Nokogiri Gem.  

XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

- Nokogiri docs

But I do have to say that there is a lack of good examples and documentation for anything particularly advanced.  I found a working solution to my issue, but thought I'd paste here what I wanted to do versus what I ended up doing.

Given the following XML, 

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<Container>
	<Set >
		<RecommendedCoverSong>Hurt by NiN - Johnny Cash</RecommendedCoverSong>
		<RecommendedOriginalSong>She Like Electric by Smoosh</RecommendedOriginalSong>
		<RecommendedDuetSong>Portland by Jack White and Loretta Lynn</RecommendedDuetSong>
		<RecommendedGroupSong>SoS by Abba</RecommendedGroupSong>
		<CoverSong>Kangaroo  by Big Star  - This Mortal Coil</CoverSong>
		<OriginalSong>Pick up the Change by Wilco</OriginalSong>
		<DuetSong>I am the Cosmos by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansen</DuetSong>
		<GroupSong>Kitties Never Rest by Rex or Regina</GroupSong>
	</Set>
 </Container>

I'd like to grab two elements that include "Cover" in the tag, and then operate on each of them.

Nokogiri's use of Xpath easily allows the first query expression like so: price_xml = doc_xml.xpath('Container/Set/*[contains(name(), "Cover")]')

I've selected all the elements (using *) in Set, and then used an Xpath Expression function:

contains, in order to specify that Adult must be in the name.  This returns two Nokogiri XML Nodes in Nodeset.

What I wanted to do was then select one of these elements based on a pattern in the tagname use my favorite tool, Xpath.

But I just couldn't get Nokogiri to give it to me, and several solutions ending up selecting way more than the 1 element I wanted. (Because the nodes in the Nodeset still contain relationships with their parents)

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songtypes = ['Cover', 'Original', 'Duet', 'Group']
songtypes.each do |song|

	node_xml = doc.xpath('Container/Set/*[contains(name(), "Cover")]')
	#I wanted to be able to do the following
	#
	FavoriteCover =  node_xml.xpath('./*[contains(name(), "Recommended")]')
	RegularCover  =  node_xml.xpath('./*[not(contains(name(), "Recommended"))]')

	#or
	FavoriteCover =  node_xml.xpath('*[contains(name(), "Recommended")]')
	RegularCover  =  node_xml.xpath('*[not(contains(name(), "Recommended"))]')
	#But instead I had to resort to a Rails solution

	RegularCover  =  node_xml.find{ |node| node.name !~ /Recommended/ }
	FavoriteCover =  node_xml.find{ |node| node.name =~ /Recommended/ }
    
	#Do something with the songs here 

end	

I'm cross posting this on StackOverflow as a question, just in case any Nokogiri Xpath enthusiasts want to recommend a solution that doesn't resort to find()

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rake -T or bundle exec rake -T

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Google is rolling out its experimental Gigabit Broadband Fiber  networks across the country in lab like experiments.  One of the early locations is Kansas City and Think Big Partners, a local Incubator that has sponsored a Business Plan competition worth $100,000K.  The Gigabit Challenge.

I'm honored to be a part of the judging panel with some very esteemed folks from  both local KC Enterprises like the Kauffman Foundation, and National players like Silicon Valley Bank.

I happened to be visiting KC for 2 weeks a few months back and thought: "Surely there's a co-working space in town, or maybe even an incubator."  After all,  I've recently discovered very vibrant startup scenes and incubators popping up in various parts of the Midwest and hinterlands of America.  (Take Note Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach there is an engine of innovation and aspiration all across this great big country).  I stumbled upon Think Big via their relationship with Startup Weekend.  

The first week, I ended up working with a resident freelance designer on several projects and eventually spent some time talking with Herb Sih (SUPER COOL & INSPIRING guy), managing partner and co-founder of the incubator.  He turned me on to just how involved and important these local incubators can be to local business and entrepeneur communities.  While Tech Stars really has changed the way everything in Boulder Colorado works, I can't say that YC or 500Startups have had much impact on their local communities.  That's not part of their mission.  But when you're dealing with cities that are more regional and less "National" cities, the impact can be huge, and the presence, strength or lack thereof for a Local Incubator can make an enormous difference in a community's business culture, economic health, and overall quality of life.  I have a lot to say on this subject, but this post is actually about the Gigabit Challenge and not local Incubators.

I have 10 of the 100+ entries to score and I'm both delighted and disappointed.  

Disappointed:

Of the 10 I'm scoring, only 1 really focused on the Network, and what opportunies Google's Fiber creates.  Of course, I've advised startups to enter as many competitions as they can in their early development phase so I suspect many of the entries are just entering a Startup Contest, and not really thinking about the specifics of this challenge, and how they can take advantage of new capabilities and access to consumers/businesses via the Hi Speed network.  I was also disappointed to see that a number of local startups are suffering from the same Think Small mentality that seems to be frothing the pool of Tech Crunch lately.  Little Bets! Build a feature/app that makes only incremental changes and keep iterating until you go viral.  Hooey, Hogwash.  That may be a successful project management strategy but it is fundamentally incompatible with Vision.

Excited:

Kansas City has been known for 2 major technical areas, healthcare IT and Telecommunications.  I was excited to come across several companies working in Medical Data (I don't think I can talk about the companies until after the competition) and it's companies dealing with Medical Data that have the strongest fit for doing something interesting with Really Fast broadband.  update: after finishing my judging scorecards, I have to amend my excitement to Super Excited.  There were at least 4 companies in my batch that really targeted the opportunities for extra bandwidth.  2 were in municipal and government services arena.  2 were in medical data/video/imaging, and I'm really hoping these 4 companies make it to the semi-finals, and regardless of whether they do or don't I'll be writing more about them, and their community changing vision(s).

Apologies:

To any panel judge I've ever slagged or insulted for being clue-less in the past, I'm sorry.  I didn't realize Judging Startups and Business Plans is hard work, and trying to find a way to provide meaningful critique without being a jerk requires a lot of effort.

Best of luck to all the entrants, I look forward to getting a sneak peek at the Semifinalists to be announced next week.

UPDATE DETAILS

One of the reasons I encourage startups to enter as many "contest" environments as they can comes down to the "Take it where you can get it" philosphy I have about bootstrapping.  Any amount of 'extra' runway you can get is usually worth it, and Gramercy Private Equity from SF has really jumped in here to lend a hand to whichever startup survives the semi-finals and wins the Gigabit Challenge.  They've announced a 250k convertible for the winners.  

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Every now and then I look at meaningless numbers posted from Alexa.com about Travel companies and user growth etc.

But I always love the descriptions provided:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hipmunk.com

 

Statistics Summary for hipmunk.com

Hipmunk.com has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 15,128, and approximately 62% of visits to this site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). Visitors to the site view an average of 1.2 unique pages per day. The site is relatively popular among users in the cities of San Francisco (where it is ranked #1,325) and Seattle-Tacoma (#3,117). Compared with internet averages, Hipmunk.com appeals more to Caucasians; its audience also tends to consist of childless, highly educated men earning over $60,000 who browse from work.

 

 

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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> > > > > >

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With all the talk about the Startup Bubble, one thing that is commonly lost is that we are MEASURING the wrong thing.  If we're talking about the Startup Financing bubble, then by all means, it's likely to peak, or even pop, and soon, for sure.  But today's startups don't require the same amount of capital to get going that the 1st DotCom Bubble's startups did.  It's easy to bootstrap with low cost Cloud Computing, Software frameworks that let developers get apps or sites up & running in 1-3 months, and a new clean startup philosophy to focuses on Customer Development and Iterating (pivots) over large scale tech investment.  These days, you never hear the phrase "If you build it they will come".

Now I'm glossing over an important point: which is

Nevertheless, the global economic slowdown, which already has begun according to America’s recession arbiters, will hurt sales at companies both large and small.

There is a lot to be said for this theory, but when you're labor costs are 1 developer, 1 business development/sales guy, and 1 designer (most of whom are under 25 and don't have families) then it doesn't take a large amount of Revenue to keep the growth going strong.

It's true folks, there is less money being sloshed around today than there was a year ago, and that's going to have an impact on your next Round.  Blogger's typical end this kind of post with "Better go get that money now!"

I'm with Fred Wilson.  Pay less attention to the money issues, and go build your damn product.

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Do you really want just "anybody" contributing your crowd-sourced FACT based repository of Knowledge?  I know it's a bit out of fashion these days, but when I was growing up, it was okay to differentiate between folks who were a little bit smarter than other folks.  We had "Gifted & Talented" programs in public schools (horror!) and we played soccer matches where ONLY THE WINNERS got Medals.  Such programs are now referred to as Elitist, which is true, they seek to identify the Elite, which in my day was something you wanted to be.  I remember winning a speech at the Rotary Club on the topic: "Expect the Best, Be the Best".  When I won, I felt Elite, and it was a good feeling.  Anyway, that's another story.

I recently saw a piece about Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.  The piece was about how Wikipedia was struggling to retain users, and Jimmy was musing on how to make contributing easier.  The part that struck me was this quote from the piece:

Over the years, Wikipedia has often been criticized for having a very convoluted and technically complex way of editing articles that doesn’t just involve learning the arcane markup language the site uses, but also navigating the politics of editing on the site. For beginners, this is a very high barrier of entry that some earlier projects were supposed to fix 

What????  So wait, I know I'm techincal, but look, it's GOOD that some things are difficult.  If Heart Surgery was easy, then just Anybody with no real discipline, no significant intelligence, or worse, no commitment to quality, and effort could become a Heart Surgeon.  Do you want your Heart to be operated on by the same quality of person who is mostly qualified to be a ditch digger?  If you do, that's good for you.  But I prefer my Martini's to be made by someone who knows how to make one, and I prefer my community sourced Encyclopedia of Facts to be written by people who can at least spend 15 minutes to learn: ==Section headings== or ''italicize text'', or '''bold the text'''. 

I'm saying that a standard that requires contributors to understand that entries need citations, or that "opinions" are only allowed when referencing a controversy and only then by citing an establsihed source?  That's not too high a requirement, that's just enough.  How is this any harder than expecting high school student to learn the 5 paragraph 3 topic essay format?  If they can't do that, I'd prefer they don't contribute to WIkipedia.

Making Wikipedia as easy to post to as Facebook is, that's a recipie for WikiSpringer.

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(Ego-driven LinkBaiters who trick you into generating traffic for their websites)

Respectable Folks who otherwise tweet links of their tweets are total jerkwads in my opinion.  It's the ultimate untrustworthy act in an activity  stream (twitter) whose primary purpose is link sharing.

Credit for Photo & Insane Project goes to http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/relativity.html 

It's almost as annoying as the way those content farms {i.e. low wage content creation and editing geared only towards quantity} (Demand Media's EHOW, etc) have littered the web's search engines's with great topic titles followed by a single paragraph of worthless jiberrish. 

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I find it odd how few people know that Hitler was in the Art Scene before he was in the Evil Monster Scene.

All architects should spend a summer as a brick layer or an electrician or roofer or some such so they cam gain an appreciation for the army of sweat working craftsman who will bring their genius creative master pieces to life. Concrete, they should spend a month pouring concrete.

Most Chefs appreciate this principle most of them have worked as Dishwashers. Most will still pull such a shift if the need arises.

All dad's should pull at least 1 2 week solo shift in the first 3 years of their kids lives, and another during the ages 9-12.

Every VC should spend a summer trying to raise Money from people who have never heard of them.

Every programmer or web designer should spend a few weeks work as a car salesman, or benefits manager or better yet in a technical support call centre.

Know the shoes your colleagues work in. Appreciate their craft, and be grateful.

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Insert your wife's face into these memories, try to imagine all the sides of her personality, all the shades of her colour in all the different glimpses of light.

Visualize the memory: the hike she didn't take with you that August, 2 years before you met her, up to the top of Mt Baker, the romantic picnic she wasn't there for, the lake skinny dipping in the moonlight that wasn't with her. The nerdy girl in 6th grade who held your hand in the dark at the planetarium.
If these all feel right, if she fits, if she could have actually been every woman you've ever loved, then you've found your soulmate.

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Now If only mobile OS developers would add an 'undo' function.

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