I came across MyHippocampus.com in a post on the Google Widget Toolkit newsgroups. This is not your ordinary webapp - so let’s have a closer look:

The basic idea of myhippocampus is mindmapping; a way to dump everything you’ve ever seen, read, learned or thought about into a website, so that you can search through it, visualize the evolution of your experiences, yadayada. When you see or read something new, you add the info to the site, and you’ll get back related thoughts and materials you’ve entered before, to give you some perspective.

That’s a tough pill to swallow though; “everything ever seen, read, learned or thought about” covers rather a lot of material, and it’s rather a lot of work to write it all down, so the ‘payoff’ - the ability to visualize it all, has to be large to even try. With this much info its also difficult to come up with useful visualizations. Still a closed beta, but fortunately there are screencasts to gawk at.

Remember the xkcd comic with the map of web communities? That same kind of interface is what MyHippocampus uses to map your life:

Nifty, and on a technical note, impressively done without flash. You can zoom in and out as if it’s google maps; the more you zoom in, the more details appear. The basics of usability are there as well: simple full-text search at the bottom, and an index ‘glossary’ of sorts as well.

However, I wasn’t convinced this might just work until I saw the ways you can visualize your experiences. For example, I currently don’t track the books I’ve read nor the movies I’ve seen because writing it all down and coming up with interesting visualizations of the data is too much hassle. However, this timeline feature, which can handle as many ‘islands’ (like a tag, really) as you like, seems useful:

The app also tracks where and when entries are made, comes with bookmarklets (think del.icio.us but with a world map visualization representing your tags and your bookmarks), and automatically links any content you focus on by giving you ‘neighbours’ in the dimension of time, location (in real life), location (on the map), and stuff you manually linked.

It’s certainly hip, but will it catch on? I don’t know yet. The biggest problem as I see it is difficulty in importing stuff you’ve already written down; some import wizards to grab your delicious bookmarks and e.g. amazon book lists would be a big help. There’s also no social aspect to speak of; it would be interesting to browse mindmaps of friends or people with similar tastes, for example.

You can see some screencasts here.

If you listened to any of the tales of riches and fame, spun by the golddiggers of the first internet bubble (from 1995ish to 2000), you may have caught one persistent theory:

The micropayment story.

A seminal paper written in 1995, called the Digital Silk Road kicked off a veritable zoo of startups intent on making micropayments work: Facilitating payment on the order of 5 cents to less than a tenth of a cent for near trivial content. Back then blogs weren’t hip yet, so the usual suspects back then were online newspapers and web comics. This list isn’t exhaustive:

FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, BitPass
Source: Clay Shirky

Any of those sound familiar to you?

No, me neither - and I’ve had an interest for small payments for quite a while now. All of them failed. All of them failed quickly.

As you may know, three of the four current fourstarters are involved to some degree or another with a new payment-based startup: Tipit.To. I’ll let the homepage of tipit explain what it’s about.

So, why mess with small payments when they don’t seem to work? I found a few articles which explain the reasoning better than I can - saner souls who have made some very logical arugments as to why the original idea of micropayments can’t work. Fortunately almost none of the arguments actually apply to tipit - on the contrary, most of them actually mean tipit is going to work.

Around 1996, Nick Szabo posted, as far as I know, the first serious argument against micropayments (The Mental Accounting barrier to Micropayments) which argued that there’s a fundamental flaw in micropayment reasoning: Either the payments total up to insignificant amounts, but then there’s not all that much money to be had, or they do tally up to significance, but in that case you can’t claim that the cost, ‘micro’ as it might be, is accepted without much thought. There’s more to it than that, but that rung particularly true for me: even 5 cents is far too much if you’re supposed to pay that much multiple times a day, every day.

Couple of years later, Clay Shirky got in on the micropayments game, torching the viability of the whole idea by highlighting that Free content works already, and works better for handing out fame - which is what bloggers and the like are after far more than money. He argues that, in fame v. fortune, fame wins. And that means micropayments lose. Clay went up against Scott McCloud who locked a comic away behind BitPass, for 25 cents.

Recently, McCloud relented and released that comic for free, causing a revisit from Clay.

Like a breath of fresh air, this post started off a fresh discussion about how to make things better. Nick highlights one form of micropayments that do work: iTunes. Brian Will pointed out his idea for what is essentially tipit, which he described in some detail here, and Nick reviewed the tipit concept!

As far as I know, you pay a network a set amount of money per second to air a given commercial in a given timeslot.

That doesn’t strike me as economically optimal, though.

People zap away during commercials, but I doubt people zap away during a funny or catchy commercial that they haven’t seen before. If it’s funny enough, they won’t zap away at all.

A very annoying commercial, like this one (turn your speakers off - some screaming zombielike thing pops up midway - people with a weak heart should probably not watch it at all) will immediatly get people diving for the remote to turn the volume down. And once you’re holding the remote, zapping is that much easier.

On the other hand, anytime an ‘apeldoorn’ advertisement (like this one) comes along, I’ll keep watching, even if I’ve seen them before.

Thus I’d argue the cost to run an ad on a tv network should be not just a function of duration and timeslot, but also of how long its been running (how boring it has become, basically), and how ‘funny’ it is, though how you’d rate that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Even without the networks creating incentives for companies to make funny or intriguing advertisements, the internet’s always a help: interesting ads tend to see lots of free publicity once the youtube video gets posted.

For example, I thought this mini pie catapult was so funny, I just had to write an article about it. Talk about viral!

A long long time ago, I managed to find an IBM ViaVoice edition at a fleamarket, for one guilder. (It’s voice recognition software).

I was working on an assembler project back then, which has a very simple and small instruction set. I had a whacky plan to use the ViaVoice software to allow me to program by speaking, instead of typing. I honestly thought it would be able to program faster, it wasn’t some sort of noble goal to help programmers around the world suffering from RSI.

I guess my younger self wasn’t all that smart.

The project failed miserably, as customizing the dictionary wasn’t really possible, and you type something like MOV, or 0xFF a lot faster than you can say it.

Vista ships with a notorious and tempramental voice recognition module. Hmmmmm…. perhaps almost a decade of software improvement has brought programming-by-voice closer to reality?

Let’s check it out! (YouTube video)

“Funny” doesn’t cover the half of it. I practically fell off my chair.

NB: the sheer level of frustration reminds me of the Custom Super Mario level from Hell (swearing abounds, careful if you’re at work).

All kidding aside for a moment, the performance really isn’t that bad, and perl isn’t exactly the most natural language; it’s closer to cartoon swearing. If the software knows about the grammar and syntax of the programming language, this almost looks like it might work. The one time I ever got serious RSI indicators is when I tried to teach myself dvorak, but, certainly, the number of programmers suffering from RSI out there should be large enough that there just might be an interesting market for creating voice recognition software for programmers. I know, I know - there are far more ideas out there compared to entrepreneurs, but this particular idea should be just perfect for a Master’s thesis at my old alma mater, Media and Knowledge Engineering at the Delft University of Technology.

I’ve been watching at least one TED talk every day for the past week, and in general they are very impressive. Most talks from 2005 and 2006 can be found At the TED talks page.

While many of the talks are excellent, one stood out to me as something to watch to improve your own presenting skills. Let me highlight what I mean for a moment: There are certain ‘defining’ presentations that show off a particular presenting style, and these are very well known. For example:

• Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture
• Dick Hardt - Identity 2.0
• Steve Jobs - Keynote Macworld 2006
• Michael Wesch - The machine is us/ing us

In case you don’t recognize some or all of the above, I recommend you watch them. Entertaining and usually not that long (Except Jobs, that lasts more than an hour) - but most importantly they highlight a particular presentation style. You learn something new that you can apply to your own presentations.

There are more presentations out there that are equally good, but those four were the most iconic, and/or the first (famous/accessible) one, and thus they have become somewhat of a legend amongst presenters.

Dean Kamen’s talk on the segway and his ideals behind its development (Feb 2002) should probably also be in that list. He uses no slides and only one prop, manages to come over as unhurried and casual (unlike just about every other TED presentation) yet he speaks relatively quickly anyway (interesting example of Alper’s previous post’s comments on presentation pacing), seems to be speaking in a stream of consciousness manner, as if he’s just talking to you without having prepared anything, and yet everytime a relevant statistic can be quoted, he quotes them.

As far as presenting naked goes, I nominate this talk as the iconic example.

Some things to watch:

He gets out loud laughter from the audience a couple of times but he never uses a punchline. He just trails off an anecdote and lets the audience ‘get it’ on their own time. This both strengthens the effect of the joke and offers a convenient ‘out’ if the audience doesn’t like the joke. With a punchline, if the audience doesn’t respond, you look like an idiot, and you’ll need a lot of cohones to continue your speech unfazed by the bombing the joke. Imagine for a moment if Dean’s jokes didn’t elicit any laughs. It wouldn’t have been very awkward. ‘hard jokes’ shouldn’t be in presentations unless you know what you are doing, but you can’t really overdo the ’soft joke’ - lacking a punchline or a dedicated ‘insert laughter here’ moment.

He engages the entire audience very well. It helps that he can just ride around the podium, but without slides, moving around is not very distracting and can even help keep the focus on you. So, if you’ve settled in for a bit of storytelling and turned off the projector, start pacing!

Where you make an unlikely claim, back it up with a number. You don’t need to delve into quoting sources, (but expect questions and have a file ready to quote sources when challenged) and you certainly don’t need to highlight it on a slide, but it does convey a sense of professionalism, a sense that you know what you’re doing.

Remember that this speech was given 2002, before the Segway’s less than stellar impact on humanity has become apparent.

A long time ago, when I was still a little squirt, I was just as stubborn as I am today, but somewhat less sure of the notion that the status quo is not a lofty goal to aspire to. Of course, now, I know better - the life blood of the entrepreneur is to know that there is always a better way, of course.

Fortunately, there was the notion of ‘homework’ to help me to understand this notion early on. In The Netherlands, starting at my first year VWO (For the americans in the audience: That’s Junior High), homework became annoying. Very annoying. There was lots of it, parents got mad if you didn’t do it, teachers assumed you were an idiot with nothing better to do. And yet… it was boring and hardly effective.

Then, two years later, I moved to the United States, where I enrolled as a freshman (that’s 3rd year VWO/HAVO/MAVO for the cheeseheads), homework grew from an annoyance to a full blown nightmare: Whereas in the Netherlands (at least at my school) your grade was principally decided by test results, in America, at just about every high school, direct grading of homework is such a large part of the final grade that even just skipping half is more than enough to get you an F.

Thus my cynicism about what passes for ‘didactics’ at mainstream education, whether in the Netherlands or (perhaps especially) in the United States, arose primarily due to homework.

This article by Alfie Kohn pretty much kills homework as an academic tool. Scratch that; it utterly obliterates it. So why don’t schools and universities fix this? In theory they ought to like academic research proving a point, don’t they?

Homework’s only function, seemingly, is to allow the thinking man to come to this important conclusion as soon as reasonably possible:

Never let your schooling interfere with your education. — Mark Twain

There’s got to be an easier way to impress this little gem on impressionable minds then homework. The problem is in the word itself: learning dressed up as a work, as a chore. That’s retarded. The human psyche is fundamentally instilled with curiosity and the desire to learn. The moment learning becomes work, you’ve failed completely.

For an encore, allow me to draw a connection to presentations. It is often said that all presentations sell something, but I assert that a significant amount of presentations also try to teach something; even if only the notion that your product is better than everything else.

So, give people the tools to learn: Give a live demonstration, take a 5 minute break and let people tinker with your product or your idea. Don’t spell it out, manipulate the curiosity of the audience and steer them towards the conclusion. I’ll leave the specifics over to more capable teachers than I, as this idea is the essence of the teachings of Presentation Zen - which, I might add, generally teaches you presenting by showing you good presentations, and urging you to experiment with techniques. No homework. Just nifty tricks you try because you think it’ll be fun!

Startups are ipso facto a high risk but high reward setup. This isn’t entirely obvious to the world at large just yet - inquiries into whether I drive a Mercedes S class or a BMW series 7 when I mention I’m building a web startup are still common. Late echoes of the heydays of the web 1.0 bubble, I guess.

Thus, startups form a big unknown. You could in theory be driving around in a McMerc releasing tons of funding off the street cred that comes with selling your first startup for big bucks, building every great idea you’ve ever had….

… but things sometimes turn out differently.

It’s not only difficult to convince yourself to take that risk, but often family and friends think you’ve got a few screws loose. Annoying, and my guess is that a lot of that hesitation and reservation stems from a basic fear of this unknown factor. After all, if the success story hypothesis is a virtual guarantee, there’d be a lot more people in this business.

Thus, we come to the gist: A way to turn that ‘fear of the unknown’ thing around to help you move in the right direction. It can help convince yourself and potentially much more useful; It helps get friends and family on your side as well, and it goes a little something like this:

If I don’t give this a try now, the opportunity will not rise again, and for the rest of my life I’ll be thinking about what could have been. If I do this now, even if I fail, at least I’ll know.