Japan Matsuri Festival London

We went to the fantastic Japan Matsuri at Spitalfields market today. With a large variety of Japanese food and craft stalls, a rich program of Japanese song, dance, calligraphy etc. performances and probably half of the 50,000 or so strong London Japanese community present it felt much like a real summer festival somewhere in Japan. Including people wearing Yukata and Kimonos (even many Westerners, which I think looked a bit odd). Including a density of people per square meter remniscent of the Tokyo subway during rush hour. Including loooooooong queues for the various food stalls – especially for the Takoyaki booth. Of which there only was one. Y. said that going to a Matsuri without having Takoyaki is no good, and so we patiently waited and sweated for 1.5 hours in a very slowly moving queue, bravely fending off at least a dozen sly attempts of people trying to cut into that queue, until finally we almost euphorically dug into our 8 balls of octopus-filled dumplings.

spitalfield market buildings

Art by Japanese or inspired by Japan

art 2

beginning of takoyaki queue

after about 1 hour

takoyaki busy people

what everyone was waiting for

Did you know ?

Check this out - series of interesting facts (or apparent facts, who knows), but in any case great and inspiring visual presentation of those facts / apparent facts. And part two here. I like the concept of describing our times, our historical moment in time, as exponential times. New mass media technologies have been adopted in ever shorter cycles in the last 100 years, computer processing power of a single low-priced machine in 2049 is estimated to surpass the combined neural processing power of all of humanity etc. This of course is also a statement that is asking to be counter-argued on so many levels, not least of all since it equates processing power with brain functionality, two very different concepts. In any case, entertaining to watch and once again a reminder that if only presentations would use less bullet-pointed text and more creative visuals this world’s meetings would be happier and more effective places …

Defining The Scrum Product Owner

Reading through a draft chapter of a book about Agile Product Management by Roman Pichler, I came across a reference to the blog of Jeff Patton. I have scanned through a couple of his posts and articles, and particularly liked this one about the difficulties (and suggested solutions for those difficulties) a Scrum / Agile product owner typically faces. It is written in an entertaining, yet illuminating style with lots of illustrations. For some reason, I feel somewhat reminded of Scott McClouds brilliant book “Understanding Comics”.

Anyhow, one of the points in Jeff’s essay that particularly resonates with me is that ”Building a common shared understanding of the product within the team is a critical product owner responsibility (…)”.  Communication is key in the Agile process, and continuously talking about user stories and requirements, discussing details as the team goes along and using all modes of communication (verbal, non-verbal, paraverbal) helps to avoid misunderstandings that can easily occur in classic waterfall PRDs with hundreds of pages of requirements. Something, that cannot be read like a compelling story or stimulating essay. And therefore often does not really get read. Which leads to the common misunderstandings, which are so perfectly captured in the famous tree swing comic. But even when using all modes of communication, and doing so often and openly, there is still room for different understandings and visualisations. Mock ups help, but they as well cannot always capture all details. Making sure that the joint understanding of what and why we are building a given feature or product is one of the big obstacles to overcome, in my experience as well.

Presentation Zen – Google Talks

I really quite enjoy watching some of the large series of Google Talks on YouTube when I get a chance. It’s a great idea to expose their employees to a wide range of topics and ideas, and it is an even greater idea to share the videos of those talks with the Internet community. True to the spirit of making the world’s knowledge available to everyone.

Recently I have also been looking at buying a book about better presentations, “Presentation Zen”, and decided to check out its authors talk at Google to educate my purchase decision. Now it is off to Amazon to order the book, and then hopefully take something away for some of future presentations I get to do.

Future of Mobile – World Economic Forum Panel

Fora.tv (which along with ted.com is now my favourite online video destination for brilliant and inspiring talks) hosts this video of a high profile panel that discusses the next digital experience, or in other words the future of mobile. Speakers are Hamid Akhavan (Chief Ex-ecutive Officer of T-Mobile International ), J. Michael Arrington (Techcrunch), Eric K. Clemons (Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.), Chad Hurley (co-founder and CEO of YouTube), Craig Mundie (chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft ), Shantanu Narayen (president and chief executive officer of Adobe), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook).

Slideshare and Boosting Brainpower

Somehow in clicking through various articles and sites today I ended up on SlideShare, which somehow I managed to not come across so far. It is a platform to upload, share and browse presentations from all sorts of fields.

Really cool, and just the half a dozen or so presentations I checked out left me inspired and with new ideas.

One of the inspirations was a presentation about a book by some neuroscientist on boosting brainpower, and how it translates to the art/zen of making good presentations.

The site for this book – Brain rules – is one of the better sites I have recently come across, and offers a lot of insight from the book in the form of short, informative, funny, well made videos.

Whatever happened to the Segway ?

Was just browsing through some videos on TED.com, and stumbled on this talk by Segway inventor Dean Kamen. This was recorded in 2002, not too long after its initial much hyped launch (I faintly remember reading articles about it under its codename before the unveiling, and how it was hyped as the next big thing in consumer technology). Kamen clearly had a vision for the Segway to replace cars in inner-city transportation, to even provide clean water to people in underdeveloped countries.

Apart from the occasional sighting (e.g. I saw one at 3GSM in Barcelona once), which were so few, that they remain memorable to me, this vision obviously has not come true.

Here is some insight in an article in The Independent, on what the stumbling blocks are.

On The Relativity of Time and The Lack of Consistency of a Small Time Blogger

5 months without a post on this blog.

In hindsight, these 5 months feel short.

As I was living through them – especially during the more tedious days at work – the tens of thousands of minutes and thousands of hours that make up 5 months definitely seemed long, veeeery long.

Time is indeed relative – at least the human perception of time.

I also wonder what happened to the resolution to post regularly on this blog. Like once a day. Or at least once a week. In the end, I did not even manage a post once a month. And it isn’t like posting is somehow associated with something distasteful like the smell of sweat, sports shoes and too much cheap spray deodorant in gym lockerrooms or slightly painful like going to next hygienist appointment or even leaving the house into rain or cold. So why am I not posting regularly? I don’t know. I would ask my shrink, if I had one. Which I don’t, and I reckon this quest to investigate subconscious motives that lead to blogging-lethargy is not really sufficient reason to get a shrink. The shrink would make me talk about my real problems, as shrinks do, and who wants to go there … so, the question will remain unanswered, unless – like the discovery of the structure of DNA – a relaxing bath some day leads to the creative breakthrough answer to this age-old question: Why am I (such a lazy fool) ?

I am also probably one of the 5 worst people on the planet when it comes to answering personal letters, cards, emails, Facebook wall-writings etc. Much like I wonder at irregular intervals what keeps me from sticking with my good resolutions and posting on this blog at least once a week, I occasionally wake up in cold sweat and wonder how I can possibly explain that I have not been able to answer that last Christmas card for 11 months.

There of course is no good explanation, and I remain tormented by a guilty conscience – which is only slightly assuaged by the rationalisation that even though I did not actually send any physical communication I at least *thought* of the person in question. Until I finally do get around to write an answer, which invariably begins with half a page of apologies and self-bashing. I doubt there will ever be an anthology of those interchanges.

So here we go – finally another post, about nothing much at all, except a meta-level reflection on the act of posting. Which humanity could have done without. Which may well be the true reason for my lack of posting … it is all so senseless anyhow – the universe is endless, in time and space, what difference does a single blog entry make etc. etc. pp

Better not to think about it, and back to the couch for another episode of “Curb your enthusiasm”. Finally, here is something to give meaning to life.

Natural Language Search: Here is my Turing Test

The first search engine that provides a correct answer to the following question our conversation during lunch today brought up will have my vote as an operational natural language search:

“what is this type of music called where people fake electronic instruments with their voice and a microphone?”

I know the answer, it is on the tip of my tongue – but for the life of me I cannot remember it right now.

I tried Powerset and let me just say that the results were no help whatsoever. Needless to say, the incumbents Google and Yahoo were no help either, but then again those search engines don’t sell themselves as natural language based (just yet).

In the meantime, I might have to resort to real people to finally get this answered – although it would be a rather strange reason to give someone a call.

On a sidenote: here is an interesting article at searchenginewatch.com, about the challenges and recent commercial propositions around natural language search – albeit two years old still very much up to date.

Creating Mockups: Move Over Visio And Let Balsamiq Take Over

So far in my product management experience I have mostly either used Visio to illustrate mocks / user flows in early stages of a product or feature and / or taken pictures of whiteboards with bad drawing and even worse handwriting. Whoever has worked with Visio to create mockups for websites or apps (be they mobile or PC desktop) or has tried to decipher whiteboard photos will appreciate this tool called Balsamiq. Visio does the job, but it does the job for a large number of other contexts as well. It simply was not build specifically with software / web mockups in mind – however this tool is tailored to exactly this objective.

I just played around with it for 10-15min and love it. There was virtually 0 learning time involved, the UI is so intuitive that I was able to immediately start creating mocks. There is an extensive list of items / shapes available that should cover the majority of needs for most contexts / purposes. It could not be easier to drag and drop those shapes on the screen, move them around, delete them etc.

While I am not sure if this tool would replace a whiteboard / flipchart, I can see it as a great extension to eg. prepare or capture a whiteboard session. I have not checked the TWIKI integration for collaboration, but that looks promising too.

Here is the .png I got from that quick mocking around:

(By the way – as I was writing this post my browser crashed, without having saved it - I was excited to find that WordPress saves in the background automatically and all of the draft was still there. Coolio. )