Life By Numbers and Notifications
From morning until night, I'm led by numbers and notifications. These numbers prompt me what to do next, what actions to take, and often, can be used to inform whether my decision was the right one....
View ArticleAchievement Unlocked: Throwing Out 1st Pitch at an A's Game
Over the last 25 years, I've attended hundreds of +Oakland Athletics games. From 2005 to 2008, +Kristine Gray and I had season tickets that saw us attending as many as 40 games a season. We've seen...
View ArticleWhen Priced for Perfection, Startups Not Given Room for Error
While I maintain the meme of a "billion dollar startup" is a myth, there's a clear reality that some early stage and often pre-revenue, companies are quite publicly obtaining historically high...
View ArticleJoining the Google Analytics Team to Help Make Data Count
Starting tomorrow, my six year old twins begin the next steps in their education, as they begin the school year in first grade. Similarly, I've made a move here at Google that I'm excited about,...
View ArticleStriving for Streams of Serendipity or Inbox Zero?
Nobody really likes spam - those unrequested commercial emails that join your email box. They interrupt you, distract you, mislead you, or maybe worse - trick you into giving up your money or personal...
View ArticleIf Content is Portable, Where You Consume It Doesn't Matter
My good friend and colleague +Adam Singer lit a thought bubble with his latest rant against the dumb pipe of television, saying the formulaic, reality show centric content there is no longer palatable...
View ArticleRachio Users Save 10 Million Gallons of Water Amidst Drought
California, and much of the Western United States, is in the midst of an incredible drought. But despite the dire warnings to stop wasting water, most sprinkler systems are still pretty dumb, or are...
View ArticleI Heartily Endorse This Event Or Product
Everyone's a cynic. Or at least it can often seem that way, when the concept of 'balanced' reporting means to find the gray cloud for every silver lining, giving equal weight to unequal issues or...
View ArticleZillowionnaires Common As Bay Area Property Prices Boom
While much of the world isn't all that sympathetic to the concerns of a relatively well-off Bay Area population that is home to some of the most successful tech companies on the planet, there's a clear...
View ArticleBlogs Still Trump Streams for Longform Content With a Long Shelf Life
Five or so years ago, the idea that one of the most visible bloggers would walk away from their website and completely move their presence to a third party network would have been a step short of...
View ArticleAutomatic and Fitbit Data Show My Car Use Down 50% as Steps Are Up 33%
It seems fairly logical that if you walk everywhere, you're probably driving less. But even as I've been on something of a Fitbit kicksince early 2012, I've reached even higher highs in the last...
View ArticleCloud Powered Near Instant PC, Mobile Upgrades Are the New Reality
Buying a new computer or getting a new phone used to be a huge pain. Even if everything was up and running right away, you had to plan for hours, or even days, of moving all your data from the old...
View ArticleWhat If We Redid the 2000 .Com Monopoly Edition for Today's Web?
In the year 2000, as the .com bubble was at its peak, it seemed new tech names were going to rapidly eclipse the old guard. Emails and downloads were new conversation topics, and if you weren’t still...
View ArticleFitbit Launches Challenges to Push You and Friends to Go Further
The charm of Fitbit has always been more than just counting steps and seeing how far you've meandered in your day. Even more than the virtual badges you can collect for hitting new personal records,...
View ArticleOur Smartphones Have Surpassed Their Role as Computers In Our Pockets
The prevailing mantra holds that as our phones become increasingly smart and constantly connected, that we're walking around with the equivalent of computers in our pocket.These intelligent devices can...
View ArticleYou Can't Achieve Equality by Expecting Everyone to be the Same
There's not much a fairly privileged white guy who hails from the suburbs can say about diversity or racism without being questioned. Compared to many other people who don't hail from WASP backgrounds,...
View ArticleIngress: The Incredible & Addicting Covert Game Being Played All Around You
A little over two years ago, a small team within Google called Niantic Labs introduced Ingress, a game that adds a virtual reality layer on top of the entire world, which you can claim, defend or...
View ArticleTablets, Touch and Talk: Technology Through the Eyes of a Child
Braden With my Nexus 5, Watching the MLB At Bat app.My children have never known a world without high speed Internet, streaming movies on demand, and a seemingly all-knowing personal assistant,...
View ArticleTaking the 100k Steps Fitbit Challenge and Raising Money for Charity
On Monday, I have a crazy plan to set a new personal record for Fitbit steps. The goal? 100,000 steps in a single day, blowing away my previous personal best by more than 50 percent, and coming close...
View ArticleA Successful 100k Steps Leads to a Sore, Yet Happy, Christmas
Monday's personal record setting Fitbit dashboardLast week, I introduced a crazy and audacious goal, of knocking out 100,000 steps (as measured by Fitbit), in the name of personal achievement and to...
View Article10 New Year's Resolutions (for you) for the Year 2015
A new year is a somewhat arbitrary point in time to mark change. But tradition has it that we do two things when the calendar turns from December to January. We look back on the previous year, either...
View ArticleAdult Problems Stink. I Blame Drew's Cancer. #BlameDrewsCancer
I quickly glossed over it during my first post of the year, when I said "Adult problems can be a real pain," but I'd be skirting around some big issues if I didn't go deeper on some very real drama...
View ArticleYouTube Kids: Smart, Mobile First, and Child Sized.
In December, I wrote about viewing technology through the eyes of a child. As much as I think of myself as an early adopter and 'with it' net citizen, I'm equally amused and amazed at the activities my...
View ArticleFriendFeed's Closure Another Painful Loss from a Vibrant Era of Social Media
Amidst all the Apple watch hoopla today, FriendFeed's blog announced the long-ignored social networking pioneer was finally going to be taken out back behind Facebook's brilliant new campus and be put...
View ArticlePreaching to Our Choirs and Setting Up Blinders for All Else
Just about four years ago, Eli Pariser raised some very real flags about the "filter bubble", concerned that many of us on the Web were limiting our viewpoints by following those people and companies...
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