International Space Apps Challenge - After Action Report!

This past weekend, StartupBus joined over 100 other government agencies and organizations all over the world by participating in the first ever International Space Apps Challenge hackathon.

http://spaceappschallenge.org/blog/2012/04/23/results-international-space-apps-challenge/

 

The numbers really speak for themselves:  8 government agencies and 103 organizations, 25 cities, 17 countries on 7 continents... 2,083 people working on 71 challenges, producing 100 solutions in 48 hours.  I'm very proud to say that StartupBus NYC successfully executed in the New York location for the event (with about 1/8 of our alumni participating) and ultimately the participants working at our host venue Pivotal Labs created 5 fully functional products that will truly change the world and disrupt the status quo, per our mission.  We secured sponsorships from Twilio, Perky Jerky, and VitaminWater to support the event with food & drink, and worked with the NY Tech Council to organize event logistics; it was a fantastic and unique event, an unprecedented opportunity to communicate and collaborate with people all over the planet, and show everyone just how awesome the New York tech scene is! You can see the five projects created here:

http://spaceappschallenge.org/location/pivotal-labs

And it's not over yet - two teams were chosen in New York for global judging by the international organizers - excellent products that will get further scrutiny from a worldwide community of scientists, activists, and business and government stakeholders: 

C.E.R.E.S. - created by a team with alums David Kay and Dunja Saleh-Zaki

http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/commodities-pricing-tool-rural-communities/solution/89

ExoAPI.com - created by a team with alums Marissa Lerer and Rob Hanley

http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/exoapi/solution/86

All the work done during this past weekend of international collaboration was documented on collaborative tools like Etherpad and on github, and everything was developed under open source licenses to further the causes of the advancement science and space exploration and the betterment of humanity - check the challenges on the space apps site for more details.  Please join me in congratulating these alums on a job well done, and wish them luck with the global judging!

I hope I speak for many of the participants in New York when I say that we were grateful for the chance to make a contribution of time and effort for the greater good, working to provide real solutions to real world problems! Many thanks to the ISAC coordinators and to the sponsoring organizations and agencies and everyone else on the team for organizing an incredible and truly awe inspiring global effort and giving us the opportunity to participate!!

Get Onto The Bus!

Last year I participated in what was, for me, a life altering experience: I got on The StartupBus, a hackathon and road trip from New York City to Austin, Texas, arriving in time for the South by Southwest Interactive conference. Along the way teams of strangers formed at the start of the trip conceived, built, and pitched a startup, entirely from scratch... on a moving bus.

On Teaching And Inspiration

Several weeks ago I decided I would try to piggyback on the "codeyear" movement that's received so much momentum and attention since the start of this year. It's actually something I've been wanting to do for some time myself - to teach a really basic workshop for beginners on programming concepts and the principles of computer architecture (which is just a fancy way of saying "how computers work"). When I saw the numbers (up to a quarter of a million people on Codecademy now?) I knew the time was right to throw my own hat in the ring and make a start at teaching.

I have always believed that people are capable of so much more than they think they are, and I believe this is especially true when it comes to programming. It seems to me that a big part of this lack of "technical self-esteem" comes from the fact that our public education system is a complete failure when it comes to preparing children for their futures, particularly in the areas of science and technology. The American educational system is lacking so much in this department that nearly all of our population is practically to the point where they believe that computers are magical devices (something our friend Steve Jobs was always fond of saying about his "innovations"); but in fact they're really nothing of the sort.

Another part of this "fear and loathing" of computers and programming seems to come from people already in the know perpetuating straight-up elitism, and yes, even issues of class and, dare I say it? Gender and race. People truly believe that they need to be some kind of wizard to comprehend anything to do with programming, and all the language of computer professionals supports this - and to some extent, it's somewhat warranted, because knowing how to program empowers you. I know this because that's how I've lived for the last 20 years; I've had the confidence to work with any kind of computer system anyone throws in front of me because I learned over time that they're really not that complicated, and that there's a process to solving problems with computers. When you work with something long enough, you become an expert at it, and that's the simple truth; no one became a wizard overnight, or started off with any kind of innate ability to program or otherwise work with a computer. Every computer expert has spent years and years making mistakes, doing research, experimenting, and otherwise finding various ways to learn everything they could about these machines and the languages used to program them.

As with any other skill, mastery comes with practice. Every artist starts with stick figures, every potter starts off making a simple bowl, every athlete starts off with simple exercise routines - and over time, with patience, determination, and practice, they all become experts in their fields.

Communicating this to my students was one of the critically important things I hoped to accomplish in my first workshop. I also wanted to give them a sense of ownership over their ability to learn about technology, and give them them a sense of power over their computer that they might not have thought was possible.

So I have to say I'm very happy about how the workshop went. I received a great endorsement on Skillshare and was given some extremely moving sentiments from students when the workshop was finished - one of which is still really sticking with me at the very moment I'm typing this out: "I never thought I could actually learn how to program, but you've helped me over the mental hurdle, and now I think I can actually do it."

I just can't tell you how much this means to me, that I actually got someone to this point. There's only so much you can do in a five to six hour workshop; I never expected people to leave there fully ready to write programs on their own. But I can say with complete confidence that I have started people on the right path. And I couldn't be prouder or more inspired or more motivated to take this teaching thing as far as I can. I want to make a difference, and I now know that I can do just that.

I probably should have started this teaching thing a long, long time ago. :D

So, in order to fulfill this lofty goal I have of teaching as many people as possible how to program, I'm making what I've developed for my curriculum available to everyone under a free culture, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. You can find the presentation I give at the beginning of the workshop on the history and concepts of computers online at Prezi (a terrific site for making killer presentations) and you can also download the notes packet I hand out in the workshop, complete with the slide notes, code, and other tips for getting started with programming.

I intend to continue teaching the workshop, because I think there's still a huge value in being taught in person in an interactive, hands-on workshop setting. There's plenty more that I discuss and digress about that isn't included in the materials, but the gist of it is all there for anyone who isn't near the New York metro area or doesn't have the money to take the workshop with me. Our culture is our future, they both should be open and free; and we can all be free in the future if we empower ourselves and take programming into our own hands.

Why Google Has To Be Evil

Everyone's seen it coming, doomsayers have been heralding it since Google's founders first uttered the words... and now we've come to the end of "Don't Be Evil" and the beginning of a new era for Googlers and for most of the (non-Chinese) users of the Internet. Unless you've literally been disconnected for months, you're likely aware that Google has made sweeping changes across all the products it makes available, for free, to Internet users.

Since the inception of Google+, we've seen a fundamental transformation of every product line coming out of the $200BB company. Over the course of the last year, design changes have streamlined the "Google experience" into a uniform set of interfaces, new and more useful features have been rolled out, APIs and products that no one is using have been eliminated - these are all things that have been simultaneously lauded and criticized by the legions of people utilizing these services; but I think it's hard to argue that these are all things that smart and successful companies do: they cut out the waste and improve the product. They're trying to evolve to meet the market.

But the critics have now begun to claim that Google is doing things that it should not be doing. They're saying that the company is ignoring its fundamental principles, that it's no longer supporting its core business model or philosophy. Some have even gone so far as to develop a browser extension that shows how Google's "Search Plus Your World" strategy outright betrays its users by delivering them inferior search results.

What these people fail to understand is that Google is a bleeding whale surrounded by a bunch of really hungry great white sharks, and they're about to go on one hell of a feeding frenzy.

Seriously, look at what Google has to compete with:

• Facebook - More eyeballs are now glued to games, photos, videos, status items (and ads) in Facebook's walled garden than ever existed in AOL's walled garden. Facebook is going to IPO big, collect a huge pile of cash, and become Google's number one enemy in just a couple months. They're much more flexible, they've got close to a billion devoted users; who needs to search for anything when it's all right there in my Facebook?

• Twitter - The immediacy of streams of short, information dense messages on a ticker trumps anything coming out of Google's behemoth search index, and it's all information that's relevant to me and keeps me informed; I'll perform a Twitter search before I perform a Google search to get the latest news. What's happening? Not a Google search.

• Bit.ly - Short linking is self-selection. The links that bit.ly collects are ALL relevant, and the social graphs that tie them all together can be analyzed. That kind of human curated data will outshine anything the greatest PageRank algorithm ever invented can do; watch out for when bit.ly releases its social search, because it literally will be a Google search killer.

• Apple - Last, but hardly least, is the wunderkind company that just announced its ridiculous earnings. What's Google going to do when it butts up against a company with $100BB in CASH? That whole Android thing is starting to look like a real also-ran. Apple's hardware-based walled garden means that Google is going to get muscled out of the non-PC future; really all Apple would have to do is buy bit.ly and stick everything up its iCloud, and Google's future is looking none too shiny.

As you can see from most of the companies above, social wins every time when it comes to search; Apple of course is our "one of these things is not like the others" in the list above, and I congratulate Google for having the foresight to realize that market forces have all but killed the PC, but you can't outcompete a hardware manufacturer with software. Google should have started making their own phones and tablets and devices a long, long time ago - the Motorola deal is too little, too late.

So, it's obvious that Google needs social to compete. But despite Google's myriad forays into social (Orkut, Wave, Buzz) it has never had a real social winner - not until it forced a winner out of its guts by literally compelling all its users onto Google+ with their Google Profiles. Without social, Google is dead. And I mean completely dead in the water. It's only a matter of time before all the ad dollars previously spent on "search keywords" get sucked away into these social hyperchannels that can deliver ridiculously well targeted campaigns directly to people who are getting all the information they need from their friends.

When you look at things this way, you can see quite clearly that Google has no choice but to change its privacy policy to remove opt outs, to compel users to use their "real names", to delete relevant results from competing social networks from its search index, and essentially "pull a Microsoft" by forcing all of its users into using all of its services and linking all that user data together in Frankenstein-like fashion to attempt to mimic the same social network effects that have grown organically from those other (actually successful) social networks.

What other choice do they have? What frontiers are left for Google at this point? Google TV? Driverless cars? Outer space rocketships? Maybe they should just start applying for their government bailout now...

Singularity Summit 2011

Just a quick note to say that I'm very excited about attending this year's Singularity Summit on October 15th-16th, even though the program may be a little more skewed towards computers this year; I always hope to see more along the lines of synthetic biology and genomics, but I'm sure topics will tend that way regardless. There's still time to register - let me know if you'll be attending, and we can meet up! It may seem a little pricy, but it's worth the cost to hear the sessions and meet the people - it's much more scientficially and engineering inclined than TED is, and I enjoy that immensely. Check out some of their past videos.

I also think it's worthwhile to point out that plenty, if not the majority, of the speakers and attendees are skeptics and realists; very few there will be "nerd rapture" types. And the talks are about real science and engineering work that's happening now, not science fiction about speculative futures. If you want to get a real picture of the cutting edge of science and technology today, this is the place to be.

I'll be livetweeting the conference all weekend, and will post a summary of my thoughts and impressions here on the blog. Maybe this time I'll get a straight answer out of Peter Thiel (listen for me during the Q&A at the end where I ask him about social justice and economic parity in Singularity)...