Designing better futures

64GB solid state memory

Samsung is shipping a 64GB "harddrive" for notebooks that is 1.8" inches.  Yes it is too expensive for you and most of your friends.  My guess, is that in 3-4 years it will be standard on laptops and perhaps desktops as the price point per megabyte drops and the extra gigs on your laptop become about as useful as those extra mega pixels on your camera.  Vital for the pros, but diminishing returns for the rest of us.

Hard drives measuring capacity in terabytes will be used in in TiVo equivelants and other devices as cheap ways to manage "broadband" network spikes for video demand across IPTV networks, assuming live P2P isn't up to the job.  That will be about 6-8 years out.  Then things will most likely all be solid state inter connected devices.  Hard Drives will be massive, cheap and used for distributed on demand back-ups and massive databases that don't need to have millisecond response times.   The things closest to us (physically and datawise) will be solid state, the things at the edge of the (anthropically viewed) network in time and distance will still use harddrives.

Again physical devices disappear as "logic and bits take over."

investing in $1,000 genetics ecosystem

I think genetics are going to be huge industry.  Today at lunch I was having a conversation with someone and trying to explain that there are going lots of companies that are "unsexy" but making tons of money when the $1,000 genome threshold breaks.  Here is an example of one of them. Genvault   Storing stable samples may not be cutting edge technology, but is like selling picks and shovels to the sequencers and databanks in the future.

These guys Sorenson genetics may do something interesting in the future as well in terms of growth.   Most likely they will become a roll-up for someone in the personal genetic game. 

My own thesis is that lots of little sequencing and predictive biomarker companies will get rolled up into a massive firm that offers a subscription type service for people who park their samples with them.  The economies of scale and scope will be huge.  I call this firm ultragene.  It will look like a utility for indviduals and provide constant alerts as discoveries are made.  It will also end up housing people electronic health records.  It will be private and very powerful.

backup your immune system.....

We are trapped by our language.  We are trapped by our language and the metaphors we can construct to share our thoughts and ideas.  Thus we will probably be using the terms associated with computers to explain biological phenomenae for some time to come.  Here is a fascinating article about "backing up" your immune system.  Your immune system like your  meta genomic state is in a constant state of flux.  The concept of your body as a single fixed entity  is flawed.  Your body is actually a constantly evolving symphony of components.  Anyway here is an example of being able to capture a "healthy" state of your system and then potentially re-instate that into your body.  System Re-boot anyone?

image source NIH

update on video navigation

last week, I moaned a little about the poor state of video navigation online.  SlapVid has done a great job of making things better.  It still isn't the "scroll wheel" for video, but getting closer.  a p2p java client for content distribution make a whole lot of sense as well.  I think these guys are solving a few very interesting problems.  p2p isn't easy and so it remains to be seen how they handle some of the problems.  But slapvid could be some real players (no pun intended) in this space.

Zillow thinks US prices down 7%...

For what it is worth Zillow, the retail home valuation website is indicating that home prices across the entire US. have declined 7% from their peak 9 months ago.  If true that would represent 7% loss on approximately $18 trillion in houses.  Of course it is just paper.  But $1.26 trillion in paper value is gone according to them.  To put it in perspective the Dot Com bust lost $1.7-$4.0 trillion depending on whose numbers you use.  The U.S. economy is also larger than it was in 2001 by about 30%.  The zillow graph below  just shows zillow's algorithmic estimates.  So take this whole posting with a grain of salt, the next few months will be telling.  Let's hope things stabalize or turn around.

Here is the wikipedia article on the house price bubble.  It is surprisingny thorough and filled with data.

China shares will bust in 8 weeks before Sept 1, 2007

ADDENDUM: since posting this originally, I have gotten some feedback from the Economist indicating Shanghai a-shares are at a 45 PE.  I thus recant my prediction and state it thus.  A 40% decline is possible if PE's get to 70.

The economist made a surprising mistake this week.  The showed this graphic in an article about the potential for a bubble in Shanghai A shares.

The mistake is showing a "bubble" on a straight graph and not a semi-log chart.

The assertion by the Economist is that Alan Greenspan's assertion that china is at risk of a bubble is wrong.

The graph to the left is the wrong "bubble-o-meter"  and here is why.  Bubble are psychological and not mathematical phenomenae.   The ups and downs of a bubble are felt in percentage terms  by the participants. 

The graph to the left tries to articulate with a simple normalized data set that bubbles take  5 years and that the Chinese share bubble is below previous bubbles. 
This is a bogus presentation of the facts.  If we were to pick the lowest trough of the bubble roughly 4 years into the current curve "roughly equivelant to 75 in this chart and then calculate the rise , we would see a  renormalized peak  climbing faster than the nasdaq Bubble to roughly over  500 in  a much shorter time.   Again this would be obvious with a semilog paper and normalized series.  

As they saying goes, prediction is hazardous, especially about the future.  My personal prediction is for a decline of 70% in Shanghai A-shares from sept. 1,2007.  The political fall out will be huge due to the popular participation in the markets. Many "Average" people are now playing the markets and will lose out.  The political fallout may require a bail-out by the Chinese government to quell dissent.  If that occurs, it could require a major sell off of US treasuries held by the Central Bank.  This would cause a slight dollar decline, a potential excuse to let the Yuan rise and potential Rise in US interest rates.

The graph below is not semi-logarithmic, but shows how "normal people" see shares in terms of participation (turnover).  A blog about this is here.

For comparison sake, please have a look at the famous South Sea Bubble as well.

If anyone has recently been to China and has the "cab driver/doorman" with a winning stock tip anecdote as contrarian indicator.  Please post a comment.

video surfing still not there (warning: geek post)

source for image

OK Joost and Veoh are going neck and neck in the PC video wars.  I like the new Veoh download.  They are getting close.  One thing that no one has yet to be done is a good navigation technique for video.  Note I didn't say search.

Search really came into it's own when google realized the value of a millisecond.  They realized that service is about "expectation management"  users expect instant.  People percieve "instant" visual things in the millisecond range.  Google made the smart choice of pending 100X in $'s to store popular search pages in RAM instead of generating them in from a database involving a disk access.  This meant the difference between micro seconds response and millisecond response. To users the difference was huge.  It set the bar for google and the percieved level service very high.  I know the relevancy of page rank was head shoulders above the rest as well.  If you are a big company with a usability lab, try seeing how your "percieved" service, widget, app etc. improves by shaving off the microsecond load and response.  Look before you AJAX.

Nobody to my knowledge has sorted this out in video.  TV's provide almost instant response, but video sites and download tools P2p still aren't there for the navigation yet.  Veoh has made big strides and the latest TV approach is good, interface response is still kind of wonky.  Call me up Dmitry, lets talk about it :)

I think the smart thing for a video site to do would be come with a way of letting people "surf" video the same way they channel surf.  Looking at Still a la youtube etc. isn't it.  Blinkx.com gets some credit for being close, with their wall of video.  My own suggestion for the guys with downloads is to autoload a guide that is a big pre-emptive clipfile with the either the first 15 seconds of each show and the "loudest" assumed most active 7 second segment from that show.  Then come up with a way to surf channels, very quickly probably a combination of buttons and visuals similar to blinkx.  This is easier technically than coming up with the "video" equivelant of pagerank and the evil AI problems of object context recognition that has so many PHd candidates steamed up about being the "Google" of video.

Serve the needs of couch potatoes with a millisecond moving, singing, video surfing experience and reap the rewards.

computation & genomic power in the context of your house

Recently the company nvidia which specializes in making graphics chips for PC and Game consoles got into the super computing business.  Rendering graphics is very computationally intensive.  If you look up the cost of computation on wikipedia you can check out these statistics.

1 gigaflop which equals 1 billion floating point operations per second cost $1,000 in 1990.

That same Gigaflop costs $0.42 in 2007.

The average American home is worth about $200,000.  If your home had undergone the same economic transformation as supercomputing power it could now be replaced for $84.00.   Just kinds of puts the growth in power of computation into perspective.

The same calculation using the human genome indicates a cost drop from $3billion in 2003 to an estimated $1,000 in 2010.  Thus the cost of home replacement would be about $.065  in 2010.

That is a a lot of information power moving at an incredible rate.  Who wins and who loses in that game has huge repercussions.   Check out Ray Kurzweil's book the singularity.

Systemic failure is an ugly phrase

Systemic failure means what it says.  A system filled with complex parts fails.  Most complex systems evolve over time to be robust and contain multiple subsystems.  They may be mechanical, biological or informational.  Think of a an airplane, your body and the internet.

A major system system is the financial system.  Every once in awhile, it faces a serious challenge, not the kind that USA today writes about, but the kind that historical economists study and write about for decades to follow. 

The current hedge fund and debt markets using ever more esoteric instruments deriving value from literally 3 degrees of seperation from their underlying instruments are facing a challenge.  Hedge funds are not huge financially $1.5 trillion under management which in the global scheme of $50-$60 trillion in global fiscal assets isn't huge.  However Hedge rely on leverage and liquidity like you and I use oxygen.  Without it things get awkward fast. 

The most recent CDO issues are most likely the tip of the iceberg.  My past posting on hedge fund risk probably makes for interesting reading about systemic risk and yet more failed VaR models.

property wiki works like wikipedia see video

here is the founder of wikipedia, jimmy wales at the TED talks.  More popular than the New York Times

The wikipedia has 7.3 million articles in over +200 languages all non-profit and contributed efforts.  Property law wiki is going to try and make "processes and procedures" for property holders formal and informal better all over the world.

Period of new interfaces (media)

New interfaces shape media, new media shape experience.  The big new interfaces of today and tomorrow for the majority of us are going to be touch and motion.  33% of households are targeted to get a Wii and very soon we will use touch interfaces much more.  The i-phone which will set new ground in this will push boundaries in 2007-08.  here is a video from microsoft about things beyond that.

and the Wii which is a must get toy.

oh and I almost forgot the Wii bollywood take, it is a multi cultural world.

Internet eats the carriers lunch in 5 years, apple is a small snack

  yes the Apple I-phone is coming and no it won't end world hunger, even though it appears to do everything but walk on water.

I will let you on a well known secret.  Telco services and carrier are going to be seriously challenged in 4-6 years.  Most analysts don't look beyond next quarter or even next year. 

Here is my prognastication and why it is good for consumers.  Ever notice that cell phones suck at everything but making calls.  The ringtones, wall papers, software interfaces, music etc. all are bad.  This is due to one thing.  Your carrier control s your experience. 

Imagine if the electric company could tell you what kind of TV channels you could watch.   Vodafone, AT&T and the gang make big brother look like a scout master.

The i-phone won't change this.  Truly open handset sales and a desperate carrier in each country will. Assuming there isn't cartel behaviour going on ;) 

Basically open phones such as the high end models sold by Nokia etc. allow you to have all of the features you want including wi-fi etc.  Right now open phones represent a small percentage of sales.  Once someone gets it right at the $250 price point, the game changes.  2 years out really.

These "open" devices will open a world of features and integration with your PC and the internet that the carriers don't want you to have. 

My projections for the future.

1. i-phone launches, but big deal, yes it is cool, but no real revolution in terms of openness (yet).  It just pries the door open a bit more for the high end user.  (immediate)
2. Truly open phone sales in the high end migrate to low end reach an interesting percentage of the market (2-3 years)
3. A weak carrier or the FTC forces open IP access for devices.(3-4 years)
4. All carriers acknowledge the just shift bits and open up access (5 years) 

Shifting bits over the air is a commodity function, the carriers will have serious margin erosion once this happens.  Clearwire is an interesting WiMAX bet, but may have the timing too early.  The smart carriers will open up their "billing" and authentication services, but they better do it fast (3 years time at carrier speed), otherwise it will happen at the software level.  Who do you trust more for your e-commerce or small purchase authentication Amazon, PayPal,  AT&T or Citibank?  Bet AT&T didn't show up high in your ranking. 

Who has better customer service?  The carriers stink and battleship AT&T will win some points in the short run with Apple and play the consolidation game with terrestrial cable for awhile.  In the long run 4-5 years, the Software level and the internet wins.  The internet eats everything, even the carriers lunch.

Voice changes things

If you create or communicate, think about the emotional impact.  Here is a great story from wired magazine about a 38 year old video gamer who gets tips from a friend / leader while playing World of Warcraft (a dungeons and dragons type game).  It is interesting to see how getting text advice and tips from a "peer" with experience changes when he realizes after using "voice" that it is an 11 year old.  full story here.

Different media provide different experiences.  Many products and designers need to carefully research the "emotional" impact of a design change.  Adding voice to chat to multiplayer games would intuitively make them "richer" or better.  Maybe not.   

Design is choice.  Choice of color, materials, shape, duration, form, and interface .  If you make i-pods, cars or software those choices will change how people feel about what they are experiencing.  Choose wisely and reap the rewards.   Still waiting to see how the i-phone works out :)

Serious teen plague...

affluenza, it spreads in during the day via text message, e-mail and facebook.  Look out.

personalized medicine marches forward

articles like this about medications prescribed based on Genetic makeup will become a flood in the next 2-3 years.  the diagnostics market for this will be huge.  Ironically the drugs companies lose and gain from this.  One the one hand they lose patients who aren't suited to a drug.  On the plus side they gain hopefully from fewer side effects, increased efficacy and hopefully even tailored dosages. 

The genetic diagnostics market could well become the tail that wags the world's multi-billion dollar pharma dog.

Roche snaps up a small genetics firm

Nimble gen systems has been acquired

Roche to Acquire NimbleGen for $272.5M, Eyes Additional Genomic Vendors
NEWSBRIEF
Genetics suppliers (the shovels) for the genomics and diagnostics business are going to be big winners in the next 3-7 years.  The time to buy for hedge funds or pharma is now.

A moth which has a computer chip implanted in it......

from the times in London: A moth which has a computer chip implanted in it while in the cocoon will enable soldiers to spy on insurgents, the US military hopes  from Ray Kurzweil's blog.  Weird stuff.  Will your next pet have a remote control?  Could people?

the future is finally starting to look like....

Finally the future is starting to look like...the future.  remember all that cool retro future stuff from the 50's? Still planning your holiday on the moon?
Finally a spacecraft made today that looks like the "future"  check out this cool design written up in the times for a real spacecraft.:  No more lame shuttle stuff or even lamer cosmonaut stuff all made in grey.  If I was paying a couple of hundred Grand for a trip to space this is what I would want.  It looks like a kids toy, perfect for the trip of a lifetime.
Eventually space travel will get comodified like everything else.  We will know this has happened when they start putting extra cup holders into space craft.

Give the old man some stick for fathers day

Got my father a tree for fathers from Tree nation here. 

  These guys are going to plant a forest in the shape of a heart in Niger West Africa.

If you want to get someone a long lasting gift.  Plant a boabab tree for them.  It could last +2,000 years.

design is about.....

A great website for design of social networks.

the 5 rules:  visit here for the explanation

• Technology Serves Humans.

• Design is not Art.

• The Experience Belongs to the User.

• Great Design is Invisible.

• Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.

Anthropologists and mobile phones

Stopping a conversation at a cocktail party is easy. Claim to be either an accountant or an anthropologist.  You will quickly find your conversation partner has an urgent need to visit the bar, buffet or bathroom. 

The truth is anthropologists are fun.  We get into things, go native etc.  One of the best technology anthropologists works for Nokia.  His name is Jan Chipchase and his blog is here .

He does great field work and has helped Nokia dominate in the field of phones in India +70% with growth of 9m handsets/month. 
I used my anthropology skills to study entertainment and gaming needs of mobile users in the Middle East in the past.  It was an eye opener.  I still look, learn and study with the eyes and approach of an anthropologist and designer.  For anyone in product design, I have one recommendation, please, please get out of the office.  Visit your customer where they live, then visit them where they work and play.  Then and only then start designing a product. 
Everyone will be a lot happier and have more fun that way :)

On the path to the $1,000 genome

Big news recently,  the $1m mark has been breached for the human genome.  See here,  the funny thing is no one really cares: yet.  The $1,000 genome is going to be the biggest political and business spot in the next 5-7 years.  Smart people should position themselves now.

The original human genome project that took +10 years and $3 billion  now takes 2 years and $1m.  I am still placing my bet on personal sequencing being ready for $1,000 in 3-5 years. 

Before that crude personal haplotypes will be available.  illumina has one of the leading technologies and of course 454 biosciences is a contender.  The data and impacts are not fully appreciated by anyone in the major media yet. 

As my finance professor in Paris said these facts have to pass the inter ocular test before people realize what they mean, i.e. they have to hit them between the eyes.  :)

Here is a scenario in the not to distant future.  Has anyone in your family had cancer?  Would you be willing to pay $1,000 to see if you might get it to?  This could be a big market.  The diagnostics, data storage and services related to the personal genome will be huge. 

I think the next microsoft-google will be a sequencing and storage service in the private sector.  After all who do you trust most, the govt., your insurance company, or the private sector with the keys to your medical past and future?  There will be some unsexy smaller (sub) $50m revenue firms  components to this value chain that get rolled up.   

These will be in the sampling side (think swabs and entothlial cells), data handling, mass CRM components, bio data intergrity and storage arena's.  Even verified sample storage and destruction on significant scales will be viable businesses.  Oh and of course lawyers given the ethical and legal issues there will be lots and lots of lawyers with a sprinkling of politicians and pundits.  Can't have the technology show without the side show tagging along :)

nice slide show of Paris

I lived in Paris for 2 years during Grad School at the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussees.  I earned an MBA with a focus on hedge funds and technology. Good international school with a great engineering tradition.  I also took up smoking and hanging out.  I quit smoking a while afterwards, but still like to linger around beautiful cities :)    I really became an architecture fan here.  Here is a slide show I found online.

making property law wiki real

some ideas on making property law wiki come to life. feel free to critique comment and help me improve this project.

Great Product Service Design Book: Sketching User Experiences

Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

This is a great book, for anyone involved with innovation, product management, communication of new ideas or product development.

Bill Buxton has put forth some great examples of what a Sketch is how it is a prelude to a prototype and how to "create" the future cheaply for testers and user groups to experience things with in expensive and fast tools.  The idea is to create rapid examples of future good and services to see how well they work. 

As Buxton mentions in the book, fail fast and early, learn fast and early.  Redesigning a product or relaunching one is very expensive.  This is a great read and deals with products and services in their "wholistic" setting.  A new idea exists in a context and that context determines its success or failure.    I would strongly recommend you buy this book or e-mail me and I might just lend you my copy.  I keep only 1 of 10 books I read, but this one I will be holding onto or lending out.

Some fun quotes from the book:

Tell me and I forget, Show me, and I may remember.  Involve me, and I will understand. Confucius

And a personal favorite of mine from an anthropologist:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.  Margaret Meade

Also from Buxton himself:  Innovation in process trumps innovation in product.  The idea is that corporations that innovate processes or better yet internalize innovation as a process will win hands down over those focused on tweaking a product.

And finally Buxton closes the book with a quote from T.E. Lawrence:

All men dream: but not equally.  Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. 

Buxton's last words are:  May you dream in the day.

This isn't your average designer hand book and if you want to be an above average creator this is a powerful tool. 

A link to one of my own personal dreams

good DNA visualization video, especially replication process

Wow, great video.  www.EyeonDNA.com a  highly recommended blog comes through again for finding this one.  The helicase component of the video is amazingly cool.

If you have time here is a great interview with Charlie Rose interviewing E.O. Wilson and Watson.  They have an amazing regard for Darwin and his work.  The Origin of Species is a great read if you have the time. :)  It is a chance to see that the best "revolutionary" work is usually plain spoken and carefully thought out in conversational tone.

New Coke 2.0 Nutella changes oil....

Hey remember how well New Coke went over in the 80's.  My wife and I were hanging out with our euro sauvo friends Ludwig and Silvana last night when we realized that the jar of Nutella that they had used Peanut oil.  The new Nutella uses Palm Oil......Hmm.  Probably a good thing for those with peanut allergies.

Ray Kurzweil is a great editor among other things.

Ray Kurzweil does a great job of finding the most interesting things that will shape our lives in the future.  I have subscribed to his e-mail list for a long time.  If you are interested in the future read his books.  Ok I am a little wary of the article promising room temperature superconductors.  Weren't they supposed to be here already ;)

Today his list e-mail items was particularly good.  Go to Ray's site  and sign up KURZWEILAI.NET NEWSLETTER 

6 Billion Bits of Data About Me,Me, Me!
New York Times June 3, 2007

Soon we will all be able to
decipher our own genomes for as
little as $1,000, scientists...

Eating Radiation: A New Form of Energy?
Technology Review May 29, 2007
*************************
In a bizarre alternative to
photosynthesis, some fungi transform
radiation into energy to use as food
for growth--with the role of
chlorophyll taken by melanin, a
chemical also found in human skin.
The fungi might be used as a biofuel
to be grown in high-altitude...

*************************
See-Through Transistors
Technology Review June 4, 2007
*************************
Researchers at Purdue University
and Northwestern University have
made flexible, see-through
transistors using zinc-oxide and
indium-oxide nanowires. The
transistors could be an important
step toward bright, flexible, and
completely see-through...

40% efficient solar cells to be used for solar electricity
Physorg.com June 1, 2007
*************************
Scientists from Spectrolab, Inc., a
subsidiary of Boeing, have recently
published their research on the
fabrication of solar cells that
surpass the 40% efficiency
milestone—the highest
efficiency achieved for any
photovoltaic device....

*************************
Single spinning nuclei in diamond offer a stable quantum computing building block
Harvard University Gazette May 31, 2007
*************************
Physicists at Harvard University
have found that individual carbon-13
atoms in a diamond lattice can be
manipulated with extraordinary
precision to create stable quantum
mechanical memory and a small
quantum processor, also known as a
quantum register, operating at room
temperature. The finding brings
quantum information systems into the
realm...

*************************
Forget the Big Bang Theory
On Point Radio May 31, 2007
*************************
Renegade physicists are making a
new case that there is no beginning
and no end to the Universe....

Switchable hologram promises memory boost
NewScientist.com news service May 31, 2007
*************************
A device that stores holograms
using a liquid crystal film
controlled electronically has been
created by researchers in Singapore.
They hope that future versions could
be used to store large amounts of
digital data in small areas, for
rewritable memory, or to manipulate
living cells with...

*************************
Embedded nanowires could control tissue growth
NewScientist.com news service June 1, 2007
*************************
A new way of embedding silicon
nanowires in cells could one day
allow scientists to control how
living tissues grow using electrical
stimulation. If the technique works,
it would represent a new way of
controlling differentiation of stem
cells to form specific tissues and
inserting genes into specific
organelles within the cell....

*************************
Chassis chief predicts 'plug 'n go'
trucks in near future
Trucking Online May 28, 2007
*************************
Medium-duty work trucks powered
mainly by electricity may be only
five to 10 years away, with the
development of more efficient and
cost-effective battery storage....
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=6864&m=21949

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Discovery raises hopes for levitating trains
Toronto Star May 31, 2007
*************************
University of Sherbrooke physicists
have discovered a "quantum
oscillation signature" that may be
the key to figuring out what causes
electrons in some special metals to
switch to superconducting behavior.
With that insight, they expect to be
able to tweak the structure at the
microscopic level to trigger
superconducting at room...

something very interesting about time travel

Ok,  when I worked at Starlab on the Sr. Management team in Brussels we had a physicist on staff working on time travel.  I had to explain this to cynical VC's.  For any of you who have pitched an idea to a sceptical VC you can imagine the sell was tough.  Here is a video which highlights some work being done on building a time machine.  If the device works, it may be able to retrieve information from the future.  Have a cup of coffee then watch this, think about it.  Go for a walk, then watch it again.  To paraphrase the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, "If you think you understand the implications of this, you haven't probably understood it at all."

framing a problem

OK, my skills are limited, so I use PowerPoint and windows MovieMaker.  Here is an attempt at communicating about property law wiki.  The objecitve is to solicit interest in property law wiki.  If you can improve this please send suggestion or make a film and send it to me.  plw (at) gogerty.com

Here is the source material Download simple_property_lawfilmv1.0.ppt

Social media becomes more important

among the interesting facts here:  China will become the world's largest English speaking country...

networks presentation and charity

I am trained first as an anthropologist, that means listening and looking.  Networks wether bio-chemical, biological or digital are fascinating.  Social networks are the Mot du jour.  Here is a nice presentation about them. 

I have written a few posts on a few books I have read about networks, see the math or books section of this blog. I am currently working on my property wiki charity which is trying to use wiki's to solve a super-ordinate problem of making property law more effective and simple for people.  I have been thinking about the problem since 2oo1 and slowly putting together a solution.

project from the past Hispanic Phone company

In life you should never stop learning or trying.  A few years ago my wife and  anI spent a significant amount of time together researching the female Hispanic phone market.  We put together a plan and this presentation.  Like an architect, most buildings never leave the paper stage.  A creative entrepreneur launches many a powerpoint company.  Here is an example of the collaborative work both of us did.  Everything from market sizing to Venture capital pitch.  Practice makes perfect...

pictures from Sweden

My wife and I spent a summer in Sweden with the Hybrid State team, Paula Welen and Andy Wilson.  Paula has a great photographic eye for Swedish nature.