Gumption

Richie Hazlewood joins Strands Labs Seattle for the summer

Richie Hazlewood arrived a few weeks ago from the School of Informatics at Indiana University to work with us on our next generation proactive display applications this summer. Richie has been working with Yvonne Rogers, Kay Connelly and others at Indiana on a variety of interesting and relevant projects involving ambient information displays, data mining, information visualization, and using handheld devices for collaborating with people and interacting with physical artifacts.

Most recently - and relevantly - he has been working on Twitterspaces, an ambient display application that offers a dynamic visualization of "tweets" posted by the Informatics group - though it can be easily customized for any group - on Twitter. Tweets, and thumbnail images of their authors, scroll horizontally, and the vertical access represents hours of the day. I'm including a screenshot to the right (a real-time view can be found by clicking on the image).

In addition to his own work, he is co-organizing the Second Workshop on Ambient Information Systems (which is still accepting submissions thru July 11) to be held at UbiComp 2008 - he was also a co-organizer of the First Ambient Information Systems Workshop at Pervasive 2007 - and [thus] brings a broad range of awareness and interactions about designing and using ambient displays to promote awareness and interactions.

We're delighted to welcome Richie, who helps fill key gaps in the team - and team space - as we move forward on our new applications, about which I'll write more in the near future. Meanwhile, I'll include a couple of recent photos of our space, after Richie's arrival.

New Faces at Strands Labs Seattle

Yogi and I have recently been joined by some wonderful new people at Strands Labs Seattle, and our new office space has some new surfaces that make it increasingly habitable.

Sameer Ahuja, a graduate student intern from Virginia Tech, arrived May 12, and will be spending the summer with us. Sameer has been working with the Digital Government Research Group under Dr. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones and Dr. Andrea Kavanaugh, where they have been researching and developing social software, visualization tools, and content aggregation tools with the purpose of enhancing citizen awareness and promoting greater participation. We are delighted to have him participate in our efforts to research and develop new tools for enhancing awareness and promoting interactions in other contexts.

Shelly Farnham, co-founder and Social Architect at Waggle Labs, joined us as a part-time consultant on May 15. Shelly brings a wealth of experience in prototyping, deploying and evaluating social technologies designed to enhance communication, community, social networks, identity, knowledge sharing, and social coordination. Before co-founding Waggle Labs, Shelly was a Researcher with the Social Computing, Community Technologies, and Virtual Worlds Groups at Microsoft Research. She is also an accomplished artist. I've known Shelly - and admired her work - for over 5 years now, and I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to work directly with her.

Frank Kemery, principal at PPM Wireless, LLC, also joined us as a part-time consultant on May 15. Frank brings deep and broad expertise in identifying new market opportunities, strategic planning, business development, alliance building, product planning, development and management in startup and mature environments. Earlier chapters of his career include senior positions at Real Networks, InfoSpace, and Activate (which was acquired by Loudeye (which was acquired by Nokia)). Frank is our point man in addressing one of the principles outlined in our innovation manifesto for Strands Labs Seattle: aligning innovative social technologies with viable business models.

In addition to the new people faces, the lab itself also has a new face. The front area, facing University Way, has fresh paint, new carpeting and a new deck overlooking "the Ave". We are still sitting at temporary folding tables, using chairs that will eventually be moved to a conference room, and using 8' x 4' laminated melamine boards propped up against the walls as temporary whiteboards. The main thing, though, is that we have a nice open area with big windows with lots of light ... an increasingly conducive space in which our growing team can effectively collaborate on designing and developing new social technologies that bridge the gap between people - and the places we inhabit - by bridging the gaps between our online life streams and the physical spaces we share with others.

[BTW, speaking of life streams, Strands has a new feed (or lifestream) aggregator in private beta that will likely play a significant role in our projects in Seattle. I'll write more about that once it is publicly available. Meanwhile, as with nearly all major developments in our company, more information can be found on our corporate blog; ReadWriteWeb also has a review ... and a private beta invitation code to give away.]

Move-in Day for Strands Labs, Seattle

Today we moved into our new office at 4143 University Way NE - right on "the Ave", the heart of Seattle's University District, and literally a stone's throw from the University of Washington.

View Larger Map

We occupy the top floor of a three-story building, with 3400 square feet to grow into, and two (!) decks, one of which overlooks the Ave.

Yogi and I - and others who will be joining us soon - will work in of one of the back offices while construction continues on the front office area (several interior walls have been removed to open up the space facing the Ave).

We'll be using a motley collection of furniture until we get some new "system" furniture, which we hope to order by the end of this week ... and which probably won't be delivered and installed until mid-June. In any case, we have plenty of room to grow, and growing the team will be increasing in relative priority as space-related issues are settled.

We've been finding it rather challenging to determine how to configure a system of furniture that achieves an appropriate balance among occasionally conflicting goals - providing similarly-sized and well-delineated individual workspaces, promoting collaboration and teamwork between workspaces (and the people who occupy them), maximizing the "access" to natural light and offering sufficient storage. We also want to find the right balance between wanting to configure the space that best suits the people and the work in Seattle and not wanting to deviate too far from configurations used in the other Strands offices. A learning and growth opportunity, along several dimensions.

Of course, leasing office space was also a learning opportunity for me. Early on, we decided that being close to the UW campus would offer long-term strategic benefits, enabling us to more easily attend talks and other events on and around campus, and making it easy for UW students and faculty to visit - and perhaps work with - us. Even within the narrowed search space of the University District, there were a number of options available, in various shapes, sizes, locations and prices. This was a pleasant surprise, given recent reports that Seattle is the hottest office market in the country.

Typically, real estate brokers - commercial or residential - operate on a commission basis. Although a prospective tenant may utilize the services of a broker, they are paid by the landlord, based on the lease terms that are negotiated with the tenant. While this may be the usual arrangement, I wanted to have a commercial real estate broker who would be paid by us, to ensure that he would be working solely on our behalf without any conflict of interest. We were very happy with the tenant representation services provided by Tom Baker, of Office Lease, who helped us identify features and evaluate options along dimensions that might not have occurred to us, and ultimately helped us arrive at a decision on a space that we believe will best serve our long-term needs. Dennis Counts, of Yates & Wood, who represented the landlords, was also very helpful throughout the process.

The landlords, Sunny and Sarah Lee, have also been very helpful and accommodating throughout the process. We were grateful for their willingness to reconfigure the front space, and for their ongoing responsiveness as issues have arisen during demolition, reconstruction and refinishing work proceeds in the space. We look forward to a long, happy relationship with them, as well as with our new neighbors downstairs - Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches on the second floor and the Ave Copy Center at street level.

Listening to NPR on my way home this evening, I was reminded that today is May Day, on which some people celebrate International Worker's Day. We did not take a holiday or participate in a demonstration today - in fact, we didn't even have a celebration (we'll have to address that oversight tomorrow)! We are still not quite in a position to work a "regular day" at the office yet - we still have a few connectivity [Yogi has figured out how to alligator clip us into an Internet connection (!)] and logistics issues to work out. But today did mark an important milestone for us, as we set the stage for innovation at Strands Labs, Seattle.

Rebranding Strands (formerly MyStrands (formerly MusicStrands))

Strands is the new brand - and name - for the company I work for, which was formerly known as MyStrands (which was formerly known as MusicStrands), and has offerings that include partyStrands and openStrands.

The change signals both a simplification - unifying the theme that runs through all of our offerings and activities - as well as a diversification - reflecing the broadening number and types of strands (digital representations of our interests, activities and tastes in a variety of media) that we are tapping into in order to help people discover new people, places and things they didn't know they'd love.

Merriam Webster offers a number of definitions for "strand"; the one that aligns most closely with Strands, Inc., is "one of the elements interwoven in a complex whole <one strand of the novel's plot>". The evolution of a company can be seen as a novel, and thus new strands of the plot of this novel will be revealed in the near future (and beyond). As usual, more about this new development can be found on the Strands blog.

Yogi Patel joins MyStrands Labs, Seattle, as Innovationeer

I'm delighted to announce that Yogi Patel has joined MyStrands Labs, Seattle, as Innovationeer! Yogi's arrival doubles the size - and probably quadruples the productive capacity - of our new innovation team. He brings 5 years of development and program management experience, most recently in the area of wearable computing, contributing to the U.S. Army's Land Warrior system. As an example of walking the talk, Yogi was actually a land warrior himself - an infantryman (rifle and anti-tank leader) with the U.S. Army. In addition to his talents with non-traditional designs and deployments of technology, Yogi brings a passion for social media and using technology to help people connect in new ways. He has also inspired - or perhaps inadvertently instigated - two recent blog posts, on The Paradox of Choice and Dark Nights of the Soul.

I met Yogi during a guest lecture on proactive displays I gave at Ankur Teredesai's class on Social Networks at University of Washington, Tacoma, in February. I was immediately impressed with his curiosity and knowledge of both the social and technological issues involved in some of the proactive display applications I presented ... insights that would typically only arise through actually working on such systems. We continued the conversation after class, and I found myself thinking how great it would be for him to be actually working on such systems (with me) ... and I'm really happy we are now continuing the conversation into our planning for the next generation of proactive displays.

We discussed a number of prospective titles (as a self-titled principal instigator, I enjoy interesting titles). Yogi's official title is Innovation Engineer, but we both rather like the mashed up version of Innovationeer.

As I'd noted in my initial announcement of the new lab, I'm hoping to avoid writing job descriptions, but from our planning so far, it's clear that we will need one or more people with keen design skills who can help engineer ambient but engaging user interfaces for our new proactive display applications. We welcome opportunities to expand the conversation with other talented and passionate parties!

Innovating at MyStrands, Seattle

It's been a little over a month since I left Nokia and started principally instigating at MyStrands, Seattle. Most of my time thus far has been devoted to talking with people and looking at places, as my top two initial instigative goals are to attract a dream team and setup shop in a dream space. Eventually, we'll make progress on other p's - prototypes, papers and patents - but not without the right people and only (or, at least, more easily) in the right place.

I'm making some progress on these initial goals - I will be making official announcements when formal transitions take place - but meanwhile I thought it would be helpful (to me, at least) to write a little bit about what kinds of innovation - and what kinds of innovators - I hope to facilitate with this great new team and great new space! Taking a cue from one of Glenn Kelman's pearls of wisdom - "We never say 'I'" - during an inspiring presentation at my crash course in entrepreneurship (NWEN's Entrepreneur University 2005), I'll be using "we" liberally below, even though "we" is, technically speaking, "I" at this particular moment.

The mission of the Seattle Innovation Team for MyStrands is

To design, develop and deploy technologies that weave together the various strands of our activities, interests and passions to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds and help people relate to the other people, places and things around them in ways that offer value to all participants.

That's quite a mouthful (even for me) so I want to unpack that a little:

• weave together the various strands of our activities, interests and passions: MyStrands started out as MusicStrands, a web application that can recommend new music based on the music you listen to ("what you play counts!"). Since then, the company has branched out into other types of media (e.g., MyStrands.TV), and we want to further extend this extension to additional types of media, as well as other digital representations of our activities, interests and passions.
• bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds: with the growing wealth of digital representations of our activities, interests and passions, and the proliferation of mobile devices and wireless connectivity, there are increasing opportunities to create new value by opening portals to that wealth in the physical world, either through mobile social computing (MoSoSo) applications or more situated social computing (SiSoSo) applications, such as proactive displays.
• help people relate to the other people, places and things around them: we all long to feel a sense of belonging and connection to other people we encounter, the places we inhabit and the things we see (or at least some of those people, places and things); our technologies will be designed to help real world communities better enjoy the benefits of virtual communities, digital communications and electronic commerce.
• offer value to all participants: one of the things I learned - the hard way - during my earlier entrepreneurial endeavor (Interrelativity, Inc.) was the importance of aligning innovative social technologies with viable business models; although our primary focus will be on technical innovations with significant - and positive - social impact, we want to do so in an economically sustainable way that enriches all stakeholders.

As for the types of innovators (we don't call ourselves researchers - or developers - at MyStrands, though we will be doing both) we hope to attract, the primary criteria will be a passionate commitment to the mission of the lab. Of course, following the precepts of Joel Sposky, we also generally want smart people who can get things done. Among the more specific types of smarts that we value are insights into and experience with social computing, mobile and ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, many flavors of design (user interface design, interaction design, user experience design, visual communication design), web programming, rapid prototyping, personal and social psychology, economics, business models ... and, of course, recommender systems.

I'm planning to follow the lead of Lars Erik Holmquist with respect to [one of] his goals for the PLAY Research Group: build a multidisciplinary team composed of multidisciplinary people. As Anne Galloway relayed this idea (in what may be an unexpected recursion based on something I may have sent / said to her about Lars Erik's CHI 2000 organizational overview talk):

Alan Kay once remarked that he was attracted to the MIT Media Lab because of the..."attempt to collide technology with the arts, rather than [to] collide technologists with artists," and continued "You're always better getting people who have already had that collision in themselves." In PLAY, rather than composing a multi-disciplinary group, we try to have a group of multi-disciplinary people ... No group member specializes in only one topic. A typical member has a degree in a relevant field such as computer science, informatics or fine arts, but a strong interest in several other fields such as electrical engineering, linguistics, literature, film, or music. Whether accompanied by academic degrees or not, a wide range of interests is seen as a vital factor in the composition of the group.

Ideally, we will compose a diverse group of diverse people, with a variety of skills, from a variety of backgrounds, who respect each other and work well together, even though - or perhaps because - we may not always agree with each other (indeed, I hope we won't always agree with each other). I have enjoyed many conversations with many talented people so far, and I welcome the opportunity to initiate or renew conversations with other talented people. If current trends continue, we may be able to assemble a dream team without ever having to compose or post a formal job description.

As I mentioned in my review of First Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, I subscribe to the philosophy of Bud Grant, former head coach of the Minnesota Vikings:

You can’t draw up plays and then just plug your players in. No matter how well you have designed your play book, it’s useless if you don’t know which plays your players can run. When I draw up my play book, I always go from the players to the play.

Given my commitment to multidisciplinarity, I'm going one step further and not even specifying player positions at this early stage, hoping that we will be able attract just the right people with just the right talents to accomplish our innovation mission.

[Update: I forgot to mention that we have a number of more formally specified job openings at many of our other sites around the world. The (Senior) Mobile User Experience / Interaction Designer position may be of particular interest to some of my international friends.]