This week the Next Web conference is taking place in Amsterdam. There’s a contest where startups who want to attend can make a movie pitching their concept and the best ones get a free ticket.
So if you like it and want to help us, you can vote for us at pitchstorm.tv. There’s a poll on the page but you can only vote after you register in the box on the top. The registration sends a confirmation mail which can take some time. Once you get that, you can login and cast your vote.
I have been known to claim that aside from the Cryptography and Artificial Intelligence fields, the net effect on the state of Computer Science as contributed by the academic world is effectively zero. For example, there are hundreds of User Interface Design faculties all around the world (such as My Alma Mater!) and yet the frontrunner in modern Computer-related design doesn’t get any of their UI knowhow from any sort of academic influence. They do not participate in research programs. That’s very odd.
An example has come along to test this observation. If you so happen to be a technogeek or a programmer, you must have been hiding under a very large rock if you haven’t seen this amazing “Content aware image resizing” demo: (If you’re impatient, jump to the middle and end of the video. The shiny stuff really starts when there’s 3:25 left on the clock).
Clearly this reeks of academic involvement. It’s actually mostly an in-house development from MERL, The United States R&D branch of Mitsubishi. However, for arguments sake, let’s say this WAS in fact developed entirely in the research department of some university or other.
Normally this would be PhD material, if you’re lucky enough to find an open minded professor. However, no amount of forward-thinking in a professor is going to allow you to present that one 5 minute demo along with a software program as a thesis for a PhD, eventhough clearly they speak entirely for themselves and is vastly more worthy of PhD status than most actual PhD theses. In other words, in order to turn this brilliant piece of software engineering into an actual CS PhD, the unfortunate authors would have to bunker down for 6 months to write an enormous paper. In CS terms, 6 months is a virtual eternity.
Instead, they released a youtube video. Effects:
over 300,000 views, presumably focused primarily around programmers and tech people. I have yet to see a research paper other than the one about the RSA asymmetric encryption algorithm that has generated this much attention in CS. That’s crypto which I already excluded from this observation.
One of the two authors got instantly hired by Adobe because they want this stuff in their next photoshop release.
From photoshop this technology will see exposure far exceeding the 300k viewers it’s already received. I wouldn’t be surprised if content-aware image resizing shows up in FireFox next year. Give it another year or so to trickle down to the rest of the population, which gives us the sum total of 2 years for a completely new piece of technology to become as standard as bread and butter in the CS world.
All by writing some software, crafting a shiny demo, and posting it on youtube.
Even if this was a university effort and there had been a large thesis to go with this video, the thesis part would be unneccessary and wouldn’t have added anything. The authors would have been better off going their own way.
I can’t prove it, by my instincts, and vast amounts of recent Computer Science history, tell me that this pattern repeats for virtually every CS improvement (outside of Crypto and AI) ever. So, for those of you still making the mistake of getting a CS degree:
If you have balls, quit the moment you have a good idea. Universities are not capable of nurturing it anyway.
In the last few months my mind has been filled with some stories by Reinier and Alper about what keeps them busy. I’m especially interested in two of their topics, namely their problems with salespeople and the dead/rise of functional programming.
As some of you might know I have been a salesperson for 5 years at various stores and I think this gives you a different perspective whenever you walk into a shop and encounter some problems. For example, I am way more understanding when store personnel is unable to help me because of my inside knowledge of how shops (or franchises in particular) work. I explain more about this in this comment on a post of Alper. On the other hand I’m easily annoyed whenever a salesperson is unable to communicate with me on a normal personal level.
I had this problem here in the UK when I wanted to get a UK mobile SIM for use in my Dutch mobile phone. I know that my phone is SIM-lock free so I just walked into a Carphone Wearhouse (a.k.a. Phonehouse) and asked them what my SIM-only options were. The lady asked me if I wanted a phone, but I clearly stated that I just moved into the UK and already had a phone. Imagine the surprise I had when I asked her why the SIM did not work in my phone and she answered, “Oh, you need a UK phone for that SIM!”. The simple inability to think along with a customer and try to clarify some constraints had lead me to ever want to buy anything at the Carphone Wearhouse anymore.
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.
Which one is it going to be? Well, no matter how good you are, there’s always a serendipity factor, and thus it’s an unknown. Unknowns are scary.
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.
Has convinced a good friend of mine to spend a year managing a student society, and has convinced my dad to switch jobs. As an aside, both are very happy about their choices.
