My first camera phone clung onto the back of a Sony Ericsson T610. It took grainy 285*250px pics after negotiating the maze like menu and waiting almost a minute for it to turn on. This was back in 2003 when phone were becoming a new age techo swiss army knife with flashlights, flashing lights, matrix style flip down microphones, music players, and spirit levels. And even though it was a virtually useless camera, I still melt when I see photos of my early years at university. My best camera wasn’t my clunky 3mpx Sony beast, but the one I had in my pocket.

Unexpected snow on Cornmarket.

Hundreds of almost unrecognisable photos and it was time to upgrade. After fastidious research I choose the most useless phone ever produced, the HTC TyTn. This jack of all trades promised so much; wifi, email, internet, document editing, a keyboard, and a fiendishly addictive game called bubbles. And yet it delivered so little, most features were poorly designed to the point where you don’t use them, and the phone was so badly made half of it eventually stopped working. The frustration of not having a working directional key is hard to put into words.

And yet having a camera made it indispensable. Especially when you find a way onto the college roof when they are filming a Hollywood movie to get a snap of the action.

Next came iPhone. The technology was already available but Apple’s genius was making it usable. On many occasions I’ve left higher quality cameras at home and relied on the always ready iPhone to take the snap. So when in Berlin, and you’ve crashed a party, you can get that awesome photo.

Your house is on fire. What do you take with you? Assuming your loved ones escape the flames, memories are high on the list to escape chardom. Photos are important. No wonder people develop such a close attachment to their cameras.

Understanding this emotional connection between user and device is how Apple nailed the iPhone, and why the iPhone is now the world’s most popular camera. Apple made it easier than ever before to take pictures with their phones, get them onto their computers, and then shared or printed. They removed all the clutter which got in the way on other platforms.

When showing off the iPhone’s photography features, Apple don’t brag about technical specifications, instead they show the emotional connection between user and phone. One of Apple’s most successful adverts was for Facetime, which shows friends and relatives having video chats. There isn’t any quoting of technical specification which no-one cares about, the technology gets out of the way. Because people care about stories they can relate to and not new fancy technology.

When presenting to Kodak in Mad Men, Donald Draper gives a great summary which I think applies as much to product design as it does to marketing.

“Technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job I was in-house at a fur company. This old pro copy writer. A Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond to a product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent.”

Now watch the clip

For the past 40 days I’ve been a vegetarian.  I’ve been looking to perform this culinary experiment for some time but needed the cover of Lent as an excuse.  And (apart from accidentally eating a Bratwurst) I’ve stuck to it for the whole of Lent, something I didn’t think I’d be able to do.

Why, why, why?!

Well:

1. Firstly it was for a change of perspective, how else are you to discover something new, exciting, and unexpected than to try out new things. I was also influenced by reading about Google engineer Matt Cutts, who has done a series of 30 day challenges like not drinking caffeine and taking a photo a day, which have resulted in some interesting insights.
2. Secondly I’m a remarkably one dimensional chef, meat sits in the middle of the plate and some veg surrounds it like extras on a filmset. I like lentils and tofu but had never given them centre stage.
3. Thirdly, I know eating meat is irresponsible. For a calorifically comparable meal of rice and vegetables verses beef, the beef uses sixteen times more fossil fuels to produce and generates 24 times more carbon emissions.  Like any good geek with a fear of the eventual collapse of society due to overconsumption, like in Paolo Bacigalupi’s excellent book The Windup Girl, I know we have to be forced to consider alternatives before it is too late.

So what was it like?

• Tough, I missed the taste and texture of meat. I even had a dream about bacon.
• It was also fairly unfulfilling as I struggled to find foods which could directly replace meat in my diet. Instead cheese, eggs, tofu and fake meat, often filled the gaps. There were also painfully long gaps between finding excellent dishes such as lentil and aubergine curry, and tofu Singapore noodles.
• Eating at restaurants was frustrating as your choice was reduced, it was interesting however to try things on the menu I would never normally order.
• I had some antisocial dining experiences with friends after being asked if I wanted to stay for dinner but then not being able to join in as they were cooking something meaty.

It’s been a fun 40 days but I’m glad to be back on the meat. I enjoyed the challenge and the change of perspective but struggled to find enough satisfying alternatives become a more permanent vegetarian. That said next year I am considering going vegan…

Last winter I upped sticks and moved to a disused malting factory in Berlin to take part in Palomar 5. A global melting pot of 30 young, ambitious, creative, and slightly mad innovators hell bent on investigating new ways of working and innovating.  Admittedly a vague and idealistic concept, but with the backing of sponsors Deutsche Telekom, we had the freedom to work as we please making the six weeks some of the most fun and creative I’ve experienced.

I left the camp convinced that innovation is now the most important factor in creating a competitive business, a subject I spoke about in one of our presentation at the culminating camp summit.

Moreover the cost of innovation is decreasing as the cost of tools to create prototypes become lower, and the knowledge of processes required for creation are more openly and widely distributed due to the wonders of the internet.

Simply put. People are making new innovative things more cheaply than before.  From furniture, to business processes, books, or research projects – more can be done with less.

The spirit Palomar 5 lives most strongly in Open Design City, a Berlin based workshop which brings together makers with the tools they needs to make products, objects and other tangible things.  Jay and Chris, the two members of the P5 camp behind ODC, are firm believers in open design and want this fablab to also be the centre of a community who share their knowledge and processes in an open manner.  The initiative is excellently described in this recent article by Fast Company Design.

Sadly I’m not aware of a similar community in London as I miss the chaotic/creative workspace of P5. Plus my collection of tools are looking for a home.  Any suggestions?

I

am proud to announce that I’ve joined the team at onefinestay to help build the unhotel.

So whats that? Well, onefinestay allows travellers to stay in characterful homes rather than bland hotel rooms. So it’s converted Churches, Mayfair boltholes, and houseboats rather than Hiltons or Holiday Inns. The aim is to lets guests live like a local but with the convenience and privacy a serviced hotel would offer such as toiletries, towels and a concierge. There are even some snazzy touches like an iPhone provided to guests during their stay with our app featuring local area information and a home instructional guide activated by pointing the phone at various barcodes located around the property (like on a wii or an oven).

Behind the scenes is a dedicated and smart team working on hard but solvable problems to keep the show running and increase capacity for the future. I’ve joined the operation team to help design and implement systems and processes to make our model work at greater scale. For example how do we accurately and repeatedly ensure that a home is left exactly as we found it? or what is the most effective way to move bedding around town, especially when there’s more than fits on a scooter?

I love the opportunity to work on building and improving a business I previously rated as one of the best emerging from Europe (and I’ve seen a few!). Also onefinestay is a great match for my interests/obsession with technology enabled businesses, good job as to work at a startup you need to be obsessed with what they are trying to achieve because the hours aren’t reasonable and the positions aren’t well paid!

How much stuff do we now need to not only function, but work and live life fully?

Last weekend I moved house, or more accurately I’ve carted 20 boxes, two bikes, an ironing board and a desk from Stockwell to Forest Hill.  The ordeal of packing, moving and unloading took the best part of a day plus previous efforts to cajole 3 friends into lugging a van’s worth of guff up four flight of steps.  But this isn’t the first time I’ve relocated - In my 2 years in London I’ve done 5 moves due to a mixture of rubbish landlords, enacted break clauses, and intermittent spells of staying at friends’ (I am however, obviously a perfect tenant :-)

At which point does the effort of moving everything become greater than the pleasure the things allow? And what opportunities am I missing by being rooted to the ground by a mountain of possessions?

Location independent living is modern day form of nomadism made possible by technology.  The theory is that if you spend 90% of your time working from a computer, that computer (and therefore the worker), could be anywhere in the world.

And then the possibilities really start, travel and communications have never been easier, so why not split your time between Thailand and LA? The price difference averages out to a permanent residence in London…

OK that sounds fun, but aren’t you just replacing the stress of moving lots of stuff once in a while with the stress of moving a small amount of stuff often?  Not to mention the continual planning and budgeting to make it all work out.

A few folk have decided that this is the lifestyle for them - here are tales of their experience

Site dedicated to location independent living by two of the early pioneers

Tim Ferriss picked up on the possibility in the 4 hour work week

BBC News Article on the Cult of Less

So am I going to sell my boxes of kitchen equipment, clothes, tools and sports kit and join the jetset? Simply no. I think a permanent life of travel would get tiresome fairly quickly as travel is only fun if it has a purpose or is with people you want to spend time with.  Travel should be about adventure, not having nowhere to stop.

Also I don’t think having minimum possessions is particularly satisfactory, in-fact it is a lecherous, as when at home possessions are useful, to cook food, fix items, build new stuff, brew beer, play sports and whatever other activities make up your lifestyle. When you don’t have your own stuff you have to borrow other peoples or do without.

So what about a third way, allowing location independence without the tradeoff of becoming a lecherous nomad?  Thankfully the internet yet again has the solution.  With One Fine Stay and Air B’n’B you can keep your home base to enjoy when you are in residence, but rent it out for the days you are travelling.  Similarly you can choose someone else’s home to stay in anywhere in the world full of their wonderful, useful stuff, so you can take up their lifestyle where they left off whether that is cooking a local delicacy or swimming in the ocean.

As an engineering student we did a simple labs experiment to measure the efficiency of a combustion engine at various operating conditions. With an understanding of the theory, you could improve it’s efficiency by changing factors like the air/fuel mix.

But what happens when you apply that experimental method to improve the performance or, err, me?

How can I measure my effectiveness as a knowledge worker and, armed with the relevant theory, improve it?

Given my newfound freedom to live/work as I please, I’m willing to give it a try.

So what are some good performance parameters which relates to factors in my life I want to monitor/improve?

• Rescue time performance - Rescue Time measures the time spent on your computer using different applications/websites and rates your productivity based on how productive you rank those applications/sites. (eg Excel = +2, gmail=+1, Facebook = -2) 
• Number or percentage of weekly to-dos which are achieved - I always give myself a set of tasks I *have* to do that week. What percentage of these am I actually getting done?
• Resting pulse rate - This is closely related to general fitness so a good one to keep check on.

Thats a good set of metrics to start with which I can note weekly.  More suggestions in the comments please.

Next step is to measure, experiment, and then measure.  But what experiments should I conduct?

I’m looking for ways to improve concentration, effectiveness, fitness, and effectiveness.  Time to get hunting for theories…

Over the past 2 years at Seedcamp I’ve met and worked with hundreds of amazing technology entrepreneurs, investors, and experts around the World, via 36 flights, in 14 countries, at 22 Seedcamps.  According to Dopplr, my average speed has been that of a duck.

So where to next? My next adventure is building my own startup and growing an awesome business.  I’ve a particular passion for building engaging experiences and plan to design interactive guides for museums/attractions/galleries which focus on the compelling objects and stories which make them so great.  For example, imagine a mobile application which allows you to go on a safari at London Zoo where kids (or big kids :-), are the photographers aiming to capture animals from different continents. I’m starting up from scratch so If that sounds interesting, get in touch!

At Seedcamp, I’ve really enjoyed working with and helping build the Seedcamp network of teams and mentors, It’s rare to meet such a smart and knowledgable bunch.  From them I’ve learned so much about building a smart businesses, and the technology space in general.  I’ve seen that the best startups keep their network up to date with progress and ask for help when when it’s needed - I look forward to following their lead.

The Seedcamp application process (with X Factor style efficiency) has whittled down thousands of applicant companies to 23 investments.  This batch of startup teams are obviously at the top of their game, and after hanging out with them you quickly realise that to get to that position they not only had to be supersmart, but work harder than the other guys to understand their industry and the gather the skills needed to build a great company.

The characteristics of great entrepreneurs are often debated as if they are innate characteristics with which you are born.  Having read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m convinced that these characteristics can be learned through painstaking study and practice.  That means they are no longer characteristics but skills, which turns the question into, what are the skills of a great entrepreneur?

I would start the list of important skills for entrepreneurs with sales, negotiation, concentration, and tenacity.  Specifically for tech I would add lean product development, online marketing, and infrastructure planning. (please add more in the comments)

So, equipped with this curriculum, I’m starting my apprenticeship in startups.  Watch this blog for field notes and progress….

Making a product is tough, and at a startup weekend the teams only have a couple of days to make stuff.  At Startup weekend Venice I gave a quick talk based on a morning observing the teams, to try and help them with their (really rapid) product development.

I spoke about how product development hinges on fuzzy and then focused thinking - and to make sure that they don’t take too long hypothesising rather than making their product.

FUZZY

The first stage of produce development is fairly unconstrained creative thinking. Thoughts need to come and go, be added to, mixed up, and thrown around to come up with the unique entity which your startup will become. This took place over the Friday night and continued over the Saturday morning of the Startup Weekend.

One of the teams was looking at making mobile search more personal to your tastes.  Around that topic they thought about searching for gigs, shops, regional facts, how users search when out and about, their interests, and business models - before deciding to focus on locational marketing based on offers specific to a users tastes. Textbook brainstorming based around a fairly well defined topic (to avoid overly vague thoughts), with the avoidance of making the process too output driven which makes folks scared to share.

In brainstorming not much is physically achieved, but that isn’t the point, these ideas and visions will eventually provide the foundations and plans for the building.

FOCUS

The tough bit, converting the big ideas into stuff people want, in errr, a couple of days.  My advice was to focus, like reallllly focus.  I felt it important enough to illustrate with a 6 step plan on how to focus.

The teams needed to rapidly produce a product which they think will solve the problem they are tackling, and by focusing they are more likely to crack the key part of the puzzle.  The hypothesising over what that might look like or feature is done, and more theorising is unlikely to produce additional insight as customer data is required to prove/disprove your product concept.  Borrowing from the current wave of lean startup thinking, I spoke about how a minimum viable product is a great way to gather this insight and therefore a good aim for the startups weekenders.

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” - ERIC RIES, Startup Lessons Learned

This product can be anything from a mockup, to an adwords campaign to demonstrate people are searching for what you aim to make.  This social proof is then used to iterate your product and ensure that you achieve product/market fit.  Making this first prototype is an amazing achievement for these fledgeling companies, in previous startup weekends companies have even generated revenue by the end of Sunday!

Lean startups are all the rage at the moment and there are some great articles about them written about by folk far smarter than myself - Sean Ellis, Eric Ries and Stephen Blank.

The startup weekend was a great success with GoWar (Risk type war game using the locational social network Gowalia) as the eventual winners.  Well done all who took part!