The Narrative

Project: “My heart beats for you”

Posted on by charlie

I was inspired by this clever little Valentine’s Day card from the delightfully creative Charlyn (left), made with a wee Trinket M0 (a fave of mine), Neopixels (blikenlights!), laser cut parts, a 3D printed case, and rechargeable battery.

Alas, I don’t have a laser cutter, so doing a similar cool design was sorta out of my reach.

But then I took a side step in my head and got a brainwave to do something similar on my 3D printer. And I could mount it all into an Ikea frame I had left over from my lithophane project.

Then I started thinking of my heartbeat, and that I always wanted to do something around it. Y’see, my wife has the same number of letters in her first name to match the PQRST of an EKG trace – hence there’s a connection between my EKG and her – my heart, indeed, beats for her.

What’s more, she actually has a Kardia I’ve used before to capture my own EKG.

The build
I found a design from an amazing illustrator* for a heart that had some anatomic verisimilitude – with a PhD, DVM, and MD in the family, anatomic verisimilitude is how we roll.

Then I captured my EKG and calculated all the timings of the peaks (PQRST, remember?).

I edited the graphics of the heart and the EKG of a single heartbeat thru Inkscape to get them into an SVG I could import into TinkerCAD.

Then I built a simple model with a hole the shape of the heart, the trace, and “My heart beats for you” just 0.5mm up off the bottom of the model. The intention is the first 0.5mm is translucent and the rest of the model is a black mask.

Test models helped me refine the final print, and I ended up using white PLA for the bottom and black PLA for the top.

Prototyping
I like to do tests as I build something. Helps me try parts out without having to do the whole thing. For example, I did a tiny print of the heart to see how it looked with light from behind. To improve the process and see how different colors looked like, I practiced the two-tone filament switch with test prints, even though I’d done them before, such as in my Tree of Life.

With the code, I have a CircuitPlayground Express I normally use to prototype Neopixel code. While things printed, I was experimenting and refactoring the code, such that when I was ready, I was able to just copy and paste it, and then tweak it, for the QtPy I ended up using (actually, a QtPy Haxpress I had made a long time ago).

Let there be light
This is a project meant for lights – Neopixels.

The idea was the PQRST parts of my EKG would light up in sync with the parts in the heart (so P would light the atria, R would light the ventricles) and the words (see, same number of words as PQRST). What’s more, when the ventricles light, the heavy dub of the heart’s lub-dub, “beats” will light too (OK, so didn’t plan that one, was a coincidence).

When I do these pixel constructions, I print a guide image and use double stick tape to help me place and connect the Neopixels. Right, a view of the Neopixel strand, glued to the back of the print, ready to go into the frame.

The iffy GIF at the top of this post shows the final build, with the print and pixels mounted in the frame and going thru a single beat of the heart, MY heart.

My mom of course, showered praise on me – what a great mom. But the really hard one to please was my wife, for whom this was designed, and she was delighted. And I was able to surprise her as she has ZERO interest in my printing and soldering and coding. Haha.

Blemishes
What was really fun with this project wasn’t that it was the first mixed-media microcontroller-based project that I’d made in a while. The real fun was the errors and blemishes that revealed new opportunities to learn.

Stepper motors: For example, I normally am near the printer when the pause for filament swap happens. But one time I noticed the print head sag a bit and I had to try to recover (which didn’t work). But then a subsequent time, it did it again and the print head ground into the print and print bed.

Thinking my printer busted, I did some research and learned that the stepper motors have a time out for how long they hold their position. The two times my print head sagged were times I was NOT near the print when it paused and had tried to do the filament change long after the stepper time out.

Now I know, and have changed the timeout in my pause script in Octoprint, as well.

Filament tangle: I also had the filament get tangled and stuck in the spool. Kinda has been happening on a few of my spools, but I’m usually around to release the tangle. I knew the tangling was related to the winding of the spool. But I didn’t realize that there were ways to avoid the tangling.

Gcode: And challenges in making the filament swap go smoothly had me learning about Octoprint scripts and tweaking gcode. GCODE! That was a rush when I felt like I had leveled up in 3D printing, haha.

Animations: I also wanted to animate the pixels to fade, rather than turn on and off at one brightness. So I spent some time trying to animate the Neopixles to fade. But there was a lot of flickering. I think CircuitPython was too slow for the speed of animation I wanted. But was truly fun figuring it out and trying to do the animation.

In closing
This was a fun project. I applied learnings from previous projects, learned new skills, and got deeper into some domains.

And the process of making, figuring things out, watching something being created, and learning – that’s a rush.

 

*Hm, I have no problem buying designs, which I do often with 3D models, but didn’t know what to do here. Felt wrong just downloading the image and using it, even with all the ‘fair-use’ thinking. So I bought a sticker to put on my laptop. The first sticker I’ll put on it. Gonna be a good story-starter.

The Narrative

This call to bring back blogging got me reminiscing

Posted on by charlie

Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal.

Source: Bring back personal blogging – The Verge

My first exposure to blogging was during a project I joined (more like, weaseled my way into) that was looking to put wee blogs on phones that folks could search for and engage with (it was an interesting idea and could still be something cool). Around that same time, I was slated to join a team working on a digital multimedia diary at the start of 2004. Turns out, just before I joined the team, at an ex-officio meeting I attended in late 2003, they chose to name the product Lifeblog, forcing all of us to jump into blogging (and retconning blogging features into the product, haha).

From 1.0 to 2.0
I’d already been online for many years. I had used various sorts of bulletin boards and forums to post stuff and engage with folks. I had jointly run a proto-blog for a company (mostly news, analysis, and commentary in reverse chronological order – but no comments or permalink or feeds). And I had a few pages for family updates on Geocities (Athens 1066 was the main one). This was during the roaring 1999-2001.

Yet, blogging was different. Blogging took various nice elements from being online and gave online writing key features to help build engagement and ease of publishing. Not to mention, there were some hosted services, such as TypePad (where this blog got started at cognections.typepad.com) and Blogger (purchased by Google in 2003), hosted service that became THE thing in 2004 (blogging was a regular cover story in 2005).

Back in the day, a Tuesday, to be precise
Because our Lifeblog product was about blogging, we had to dive into the world of bloggers and blogging. As far as I know, our team was the first at Nokia to talk about our products and to engage with bloggers to earn goodwill for a product launch. Over 2004 and 2005 I did a lot of traveling and speaking and posting about blogging and mobiles.

Fast forward to end of 2007, Nokia corporate comms brought me on to build and run the Nokia corporate blog, which we called Nokia Conversations. This was not the first Nokia corporate blog. The first one was the S60 blog, set up by Phil Schwarzmann, who followed me after I had left the S60 team. I was a sorta godparent to the blogs he set up and ran. Of course, I turned to Phil to replace me when I left Nokia and the Nokia Conversations team.

Why didn’t the Nokia Lifeblog team have a blog? Well, individually, some of us did, and we talked about what we did, our products, and such. But blogging was so new. As I recall, someone told my boss ‘We don’t make celebrities at Nokia.’ Really, none of us wanted to be a celebrity blogger riding on the Nokia brand. We just wanted to promote our products. Tho that led to the other rub – the whole blogging about our product seemed so contrary to how Nokia had been marketing all their products.

So in the end, the team that finally brought blogging to Nokia was sorta not allowed to actually have one.

By the time Phil set up the S60 blogs, things were more accepted, and marketing teams were more experimental. By the time I got back into the game, Nokia Conversations was able to go big, be experimental, drive huge changes in Nokia comms, and do it while having fun (thanks to a forgiving and creative leadership).

Still here
This blog started on cognections.typepad.com, by my records, in mid-January 2004 (on a Tuesday, actually). I moved the domain to Molecularist.com, I think around 2008/09, just before my move to the US.

I was a heavy blogger in the day. And I’ve had the good fortune to have various jobs where blogging was part of the role. No more so than Nokia Conversations, of course, but also at Children’s Boston (more videos and Facebook than traditional text blogging), IBM, Owl. Indeed, posting something online is always my go to move at any org I’m at.

But, as I saw way back in 2005, social media morselized the web – fragmenting where people ended up, spreading convos across (off the top of my head) Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, and of course Twitter, not to motion so many other places people post stuff, such as Yelp, Amazon, Wattpad, and all the ones that have died in the past 15 years (looking at you Flickr).

And folks follow the conversations. So, for me, this blog became less of an outlet, especially as feed readers and the like died down, I lost contact with so many I knew back in 2005-2009, and everyone moved to mostly Twitter. I usually end up having spurts here when there are no other places for me to write things down, or when I have a brainwave and just need to write it down.

You know the line ‘dance like no one is watching.’ Blogging to me these days is just like that. The things in 2005-2009 that made blogs hum with activity are no longer around or widely used. So I don’t give a damn and ‘blog like there’s no one watching.’

Social media is dead, long live social media
What struck me from reading the article I link to above, is that these past few weeks I’ve been reviewing my online presence, like I do every end of year. I had soured on Twitter so long ago, but in the past few years, I heavily curated my Twitter feed, focusing on makers and the like. Tho in the past few months, I basically shut off the spigot on all my online and offline feeds, narrowed down to two websites and a print magazine. I occasionally hit Discord for two communities, mostly to troubleshoot electronics things I’m working on. And I use LinkedIn for work.

But, for sure, this blog, the one that predated all of the others, is still limping along.

I know what it takes to grow a blog, and not sure that’s the path I want to take. Growing a blog is hard work, like any channel. I’ll leave that to someone who wants to pay me. Haha.

I’ll be content with posting something once in a while for now, mostly for me, not working hard on changing things up.

And if you happen to be one of the rare person who is actually reading this, let me know. Perhaps that will encourage me to write more.

What do you think of the Verge article? Do you blog? When did you start? Why do you blog?

[BTW, just saw this right after I pushed the publish button. Russ Beattie, a compulsive blogger for many years, also commented on the return of lifelong blogging and his own path from blogging for a living to tweeting and back to blogging. Hm, wishful thinking or a real trend?]

 

Image by Nile from Pixabay

Strategy

When the myth of the visionary founder flounders: push back!

Posted on by charlie

Tesla has announced it’s phasing out its cars’ use of ultrasonic sensors (USS) to sense objects in the world around them. It’s part of the company’s shift towards its camera-only Tesla Vision driver-assist tech

Source: Tesla ditches ultrasonic sensors from new cars as it bets on camera-only driver assistance – The Verge

I have a car full of sensors. Indeed, I bought it almost exactly 7 years ago for the very reason it was chock full of sensors – particularly the visual, ultrasound, and radar sensors and how they help with safety features such as lane guidance, parking and backing up, and front braking and adaptive cruise control, respectively.

But some ‘visionary’ EV car company founder thinks he knows better and has effectively mandated his vehicles only be camera-, visual-only.

Not only did this mandate trigger in me, as a biologist, to point out that if you are making a smart vehicle, look to nature for ideas on how to make use of all forms of sensing, rather than just one human-centric one.**

But what this mandate really triggered in me was this rant against the idea that ‘the visionary founder is always right.’.

No surprise, Musk is having a totally f-ed up end of year (really, read this article, if only for the ‘Howard Hughes moment’ comment).

Yes, vision counts for something
I do believe folks like Bezos, Jobs, Musk, Zuck, and others are amazing in their vision and have upended industries with their monomaniacal drive and direction.

But they, especially, recently, Musk, have all had disastrous moments when their vision was just downright wrong, or that they didn’t listen to the chief smarties they hired to run their biz. [Again, don’t listen to me. Just see the mess Musk is in from all his meddling.]

I’ve seen this in many other companies (even too close to me): a strong overreaching visionary or exec or board member who went a bit too far and ended up with some shit outcome. They put down or yell over or just suppress or disrupt any check that normally would have happened had they listened to someone under them who actually knew more (indeed, who was hired because the hired knew more).

Often the visionary blames their underlings for the failure, underlings who ended up with no recourse other than to just follow the idiocy their boss demanded, even if straight over the cliff. What’s more, the visionary will never own up to how their ‘infallible’ vision chewed up and spit up really good people who could have helped the visionary succeed.* [Hm, I’m getting total Nuremberg vibes right now, this is such a negative feeling for me, sorry]

Dignity is as dignity does
I used to think shit products or websites were the outcome of designers, with no dignity, pushing out shit stuff.

But watching the shit-show at Twitter and reflecting back on some personal incidents, I will now think that when I see shit products that they were made by really well-meaning and talented designers who were ground down by some overbearing ‘visionary’ boss who thought they knew better and micromanaged some shit design that got launched.

Fuuuuuck.

I should know
I’ve been pummeled into that passive, what-the-heck, I-can’t-fight-anymore subservience to release something that was shit.

Alas, this disaster has happened more than once to me, so I clearly have an inability to recognize when I’m walking into such a damaging situation. What’s worse, when things did go wrong, I first blamed myself for all of it. Tho, only in retrospect, after I’ve already been destroyed and discarded, did I see where the problem originated.

I think it’s my naïve optimism and enthusiasm that keeps me from realizing I am putting myself in the way of harm, without being prepared to push back. Such is the draw and force of the visionary. Moth to flame and all that.

Fortunately, I have had a few opposite outcomes where I was confident enough to push back with evidence, experience, and confidence, or was blessed with a visionary I was able to work with fruitfullywith much success.

It can and does happen. There’s a role for visionaries. And hope for me, yes?

Beware what you wish for
We all worship the visionary sculpting reality to their bidding. Or better, making a whole new reality. But be careful when you think they are infallible in sculpting a new reality or we end up being accomplices in them fucking it all up.

Yeah, this makes me bitter. And it should make you bitter.

We all need to get better at pushing back, differentiating when the visionary is right and when they are wrong. Shame on us for losing confidence at the wrong time.

Know what I mean?

Let me know what you think.

 

Image from Adventurelandia

*I know you are all thinking Steve Jobs and of his krazy-ass vision and drive. But I know, I _know_, he had some really strong chief smarties (Ives, Cook, Schiller, for example) who worked for him who knew how to channel that vision and keep it from driving Apple off the rails again. [Yes, Jobs already had driven Apple of the rails once. His humble return found how to temper his vision and drive with actually delivering a good product.]

**[added 08jan23] Ha, this past week Sony and Honda announced Afeela (yeah, I feel ya on how that name feels to ya). The car has 45 sensors (see image below), tho, being Sony, there are a ton of cameras.

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

It’s time we hack the shit out of this virus

Posted on by charlie

The subvariant, known as XBB, accounted for about 52.6% of all cases in New England during the period of time between Dec. 18 and Dec. 24, according to CDC data. The week before, it accounted for about 34.3% of cases in the region, and just 20% earlier in December.

Source: New coronavirus subvariant, XBB, now widespread in New England

Another season, another CVOID variant.

Viruses do as viruses do: they frantically multiply in their hosts, playing a clever numbers game of poor duplication that inserts mutations, leading to an effective exploration of the possibility space of infection, growth, and transmission optimization. And, like any optimization, there are diverse drivers that push the result one way or another: the optimization effectively responds to whatever constraints that are put to it.

I am a visual person when it comes to optimization and the best way for me to visualize it is as a walk across the ‘possibility surface’ to find a minima where the optimization can ‘settle’ (see graphic, right).

I could digress about local and global minima, and add to the visualizations a ball bearing wandering the surface, or ‘adding energy’ to help the ball find a new minima (like those shaky ball-bearing-in-holes-games). I could also comment that the walk is from adjacency to adjacency, so the virus can’t necessarily do a wholesale change: changes in organisms are usually sequential, and if you’ve been following your CVOD mutations, they have been mostly sequential (tho watch out when two separate sequential branches infect the same host and mix and match whole stretches).

But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is a krazy notion as to how we could hack this virus.

How, the f-, Charlie, do you think this can happen?
OK, I’m am NOT suggesting we go for ‘herd immunity’.

If letting a virus run rampant to get herd immunity was a thing, then we would never had needed all the vaccines we actually use – mumps, rubella, measles, polio, smallpox, chickenpox, shingles, flu, plague (oh my gosh, plague*), and so many others. Science works. Letting viruses run rampant in the mistaken desire for herd immunity, as the millions who have died until the invention of those vaccines can attest, is not a useful strategy.

But, what we are seeing in a fascinating, in front of our very eyes, accelerated fashion with COVID is that when confronted by our isolation methods, sterile technique, masks, vaccines, and the like, the damned virus says ‘no worries, I’ll just hop over to where I am not constrained and carry on as usual.’

Indeed, that’s ALL we allow the virus to do: we have a set of things that constrain the virus, and it is very capable of finding where we are NOT constraining it.

As we gain immunity it evades it. As we try to contain the spread, it tweaks its virulence. As we make vaccines, it modifies itself.

But what if we engineered our response to fuck up that walk?

A wee story from an earlier pandemic
Despite the gripes from a certain set of gripers during this pandemic, we have so many changes to our behaviors from so many previous pandemics, such as SARS (masks), H1N1 Flu (Purel EVERYWHERE, cough-in-inner-elbow), and HIV (gloves EVERYWHERE, masks, changes in blood-handling).

For those who don’t remember, HIV used to be a death sentence (and it sorta still is). And at one point we had three really promising drugs in the pipeline to keep it at bay. But they all failed. Individually. At the same time.

But TOGETHER, they were THE shit – they each f-ed up the virus replication in different ways, three different ways that the virus could not mutate to respond to at one go, three different non-adjacent ways that the virus could not reach by walking from adjacency to adjacency, so it was not able to explore a way out in one go.

We hacked three simultaneous constraints that the virus just could not overcome through the means of the usual random walk thru possibility adjacencies.

So could we hack constraints on this virus?
I don’t know if we could do some triumvirate set of drugs that could stop this pandemic. Keep in mind HIV is still endemic in lots of places. It’s not necessarily a death sentence, but only now do we have vaccines and drugs to keep it from spreading (40 f-in years later).

Tho might we be able to engineer the virus to behave in a way we want it to behave, let the virus prosper, but with characteristics WE want it to have, say, no deaths or hospitalizations, mild to no symptoms, no negative outcomes?

Haha, that’s absolutely bonkers, of course. But this damn virus is really clever. How do we use its cleverness turn it into a ‘common’ cold that only gives you the sniffles and then skedaddles off?

What I am suggesting is a selective evolution of the virus at a population scale. Could we do a coordinated effort to nudge the virus in the direction WE want it to go rather that freaking out at each new variant the virus invents on its own in response to our CURRENT attempts to keep it at bay (which might never work**)?

Haha, leave that for some zany fiction story. The ethics alone have this as a an idea dead on arrival. And if just getting folks to get vaccinated and do simple safe behavior has been such a challenge, how would we ever be able to explain the science and goals of such a kracked science experiment?

Tho, I suppose, ahem, there might be some nation that has a ludicrously high level of control over it’s huge population and has a history of incubating respiratory viruses and releasing them upon the world. 🤔

Pft.

In any case, while perhaps bonkers ideas are unimplementable, might they inform something less bonkers?

Dunno. What do you think?

 

Images from Masina and Globe

*Plague, plague, PLAGUE! Yersinia pestis! How many millions died over how many centuries? Herd immunity, my ass.

*Way to go China for f-ing top your response and being an amazing viral repository these past two years, as the rest of us try to move on, now re-releasing it on the world once again. What kinds of nasty new variants have you been incubating. What next in this pandemic will emerge from you?

Announcements

Pause for station identification

Posted on by charlie

Yes, another station ID post. And, not that you’re keeping score, normally I have large gaps between them. Alas, we live in Strange Times and strange things happen. So, here we are again, providing an update as I enter a new and interesting role.

Me
Who am I? I’m Charlie Schick. I’m passionate about exploring how the intersection of bits and atoms help us tell stories of our physical-digital-sublime world. I also advise companies on product design, business strategy, and new market opportunities. I’m a recovering PhD, too, and proudly ex-IBM, -Boston Children’s, -Nokia.

By day
I just started (August 2022) a new role as Senior Advisor, Invest in Finland, connecting US organizations with business and investment opportunities in Finland. I will be focused, as has been my long-time interest, on opportunities in digital health and life sciences. I look forward to sharing with all of you my stories and successes in this new adventure.

By night
A most amazing development in the past few years is my journey into embedded electronics, 3D printing, and making in general. I post most of my projects to this blog, so do keep coming back to see what I’m up to. Oh, the places we’ll go.

Because I can’t stop
For a very long time, I’ve been sharing my experience, insights, and exploits, especially through writing for and speaking to large audiences and engaging with others in stimulating conversations, including the office of CxOs. With my new role, I expect things kick up again in this space. Let me know how I can help in this capacity (tho most likely through LinkedIn).

And of course, my standard disclaimer
(my usual riff off of an ancient Cringely disclaimer)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of any of my customers or anyone I work for, especially the Finnish government. If these were the opinions of my customers or the Finnish government, the site would be under their name and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer 😛, so don’t expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here.

If you have ideas or projects that you think I might be interested in, please contact me, Charlie Schick, at firstname.lastname@molecularist.com or via my profile on LinkedIn.

Yes, you can find me on Twitter. I use it more to follow an amazing community of makers, to be marveled by their creativity, commentary, and caring; though, do say ‘hi’ if you swing by. Left Twitter for good 15feb2023, after 16 years.

Image from a project of mine exploring life, longevity, and dementia

Strategy/The Narrative

Jammin’ to the venture beat. And my first patent thrown in for good measure.

Posted on by charlie

Back at the end of 2002, if I recall correctly, Nokia set up an internal Venture Challenge – a challenge to have folks submit ideas, find some promising ones, and get small teams to build and validate the idea, and perhaps contribute to the product portfolio.

When the Challenge was announced, I knew this was something I wanted to participate in, but had no idea what idea to submit. I have a vague recollection that I wanted the idea to be in a certain area and a certain format, but, with almost 20 years passed, I don’t remember the details.

What I do remember is sitting in an internal new-technologies presentation and seeing the word “music”. I started swimming upstream to figure out what that word was doing in the presentation, leading me to two guys working on music software in the Nokia Research Center, Pauli Laine and Jukka Holm, two very different guys on the same wavelength when it came to digital music.

Idea into product
Again, going on recollections, I was a bit of surprise to them – a bit over-enthusiastic, spouting things about product and business models, asking questions non-stop, trying to match the kernel of my ideas to the research they had been doing.

Together, we honed in on a two-device, Bluetooth(BT)-based, MIDI app that allowed two people to loop-mix over BT. I had come up with the model of an app that had a collection of different styles and loops that folks could buy and download, with graphics to match the style. I recall one was barnyard creatures set to hokey barnyard type music.

We called it “MIDI Jammin'”

And I guess the Venture Challenge board liked it: we were passed onto the next phase.

Product into business
We were handed off to Olavi Toivainen, who was in the Mobile Phones biz dev team, for business guidance and for connecting us to the right folks in the organization.

He was great and enthusiastic, scored us some funding to build a few prototypes, and got us on the path to be included in the upcoming N-Gage, the mobile gaming device Nokia had made. I also heard that Thomas Dolby got to play with the different music styles of the app (wish I’d been there).

Olavi also guided us in writing a patent on an idea I originated and worked on with the team. Basically, we proposed a mechanism to make the apps sharable device to device.*

Business to reality
The app was fun. You’d start up and the devices would synchronize, and then each person could select loops to play, each playing their own part, jamming away. Sure, you could play on your own, but the whole point was to play with someone else.

Alas, BT was flaky and slow, and the speakers not really loud enough, so often the experience would be underwhelming. And, then, as the N-Gage approached launch, there were much bigger fish who were going to ship for the device and we kinda were dropped.

Reality to future
For me, the whole endeavor wasn’t necessarily to get onto a phone. For me, this was really the first time I got into the whole venturing flow. Keep in mind, I had only left the lab a few years prior, so corporate stuff was still new to me.

But the process really triggered my product thinking, which was embryonic while working in the lab, grew at Nokia, and defined my future since. And the connections I made at the company vaulted me into my next two roles as part of the small Nokia Lifeblog team and as product manager for the Nokia Cloud project that became the core of Ovi.

Future to now
I do not recall if anything out of the Venture Challenges actually converted into some product or process at Nokia. Nonetheless, I hope, and guessing from my own experience, that the Challenge encouraged a lot of cross-department conversations, exploration and discovery of great ideas, and enhanced some skills in folks who then went to do bigger and better things within the company.

As for me, I still have the two mugs I got as finalist to the Venture Challenge (I entered again for the next one – I was hooked). And I do look back upon that time and think of how it taught me, though a real project, how to move an idea towards reality, building business models, and engaging and convincing stakeholders – everlasting effects that changed who I was and where I was heading.

And for that, I am grateful.

 

*An aside on patent and ideas and how things spread: Nokia, like any big company with a big research arm, had a great pipeline for capturing ideas and patenting them. Indeed, I was once pooh-poohed by a Nokia exec for touting a patent in internal marketing. And I suspect Pauli and Jukka had a few already and I’m sure had a few more after me. So, perhaps a patent from Nokia is no big deal. But for me, it was the first and only one I have ever been part of. And it was my idea. So, for me, it’s a big deal.

What’s more, the patented idea was taken later that year and incorporated into the first version of the Nokia App Store (yes, that would have been in 2003, about 5 years before Apple debuted theirs). That Nokia App Store progenitor arose from a discussion between me and a few others (Matti, Teppo, Mika, and Ari) on the team I was on at the time, so I’m not really sure who was the originator of that idea (I think it was me, of course, haha). Matti and I did explore the concept for a few months, but I already had too much on my plate to take it further, so we passed it onto Ari Hakkarainen, who did a great job of taking the idea and building the first version, which was then nabbed by the Mobile Phones group to form their official Operator App Store. Yeah, that Venture Challenge idea contributed to me and the company in ways we could not foresee.

 

Image from Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons

The Narrative

Teasing out my cultural connections through genetics

Posted on by charlie

Special note: Talking about personal genetics is difficult: what you say not only reveals so much about you, but also your parents, your siblings, and your children. I’ll be talking about genetics here, but from a broad sense, more about origins than any underlying disease or pre-disposition.

The setup
My brother received a gift from his family for a genetic test. I had an idea what to expect, though not the percentages. I also knew that whatever he found out would be the same for me, though he wanted to see what I would find out if I did the same test. I told him, being brothers, I would be the same, except for percentages varying slightly due to variability in the tests and when the test are taken.

He eventually did share the data with me – one part told me more than I already knew, and one part hit me much later.

Roughly speaking, based on my brother’s test, I am mostly (leaving out some minor percentages):

  • German 25%
  • Portuguese 21%
  • Jewish 21%
  • Native Amazonian 10%
  • West African 5%

The breakdown
The quarter German is from our paternal grandmother, who was from Hartmannsdorf, in southeastern Germany, just outside of Chemnitz (ex-Karl-Marx-Stadt).

The quarter Portuguese is mostly from my maternal grandmother. She was born in northern Brasil, first-gen, but genetically fully Portuguese (or so I suspect, see below).

The quarter Jewish is Jewish from Central Europe and is from my paternal grandfather. He was an ethnic German from Leitmeritz (Litoměřice to the Czechs – though when he was born it was Austro-Hungary). I wasn’t sure if he was Jewish as he never really practiced anything and his wife was Lutheran (German, right?). But in the past few years, I’ve started realizing he was most likely Jewish (as evidenced by name and geography). Then two years ago, a (third?) cousin (with a shared great-great-grandparent with my father through his paternal grandmother’s side) found us and helped me make the full connection. At the same time I discovered a ton of photos and references to folks in my cousin’s genealogy. Yeah, my grandfather was 100% Jewish – had to be for me to be 25%.

What’s missing
Now, if you’ve been keeping score, you see that I’ve still a quarter unaccounted for, and I have yet to mention my maternal grandfather.

My maternal grandfather was Northern Brasilian. And, as many long-time Northern Brasilians, he would have a bit of Portuguese, a bit of Native Brasilian, and a bit of West African (where Brasilian slaves came from).

One thing that hit me was why I don’t have more Portuguese from him. This could be because one or both of my maternal grandmother’s parents were not 100% Portuguese, but had a mix of other European ancestors.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t surprised that I’ve received from him a bit of West African and Native Amazonian. Though for me, this is more than just genetic. Brasilian culture is heavily influenced by West Africa – samba, capoeira, feijoada, Iemanjá on New Years, macumba, manioc flour. And up in Northern Brasil we have been influenced by Native Amazonian culture, as well, such as the foods we eat and the words we use. Parts of these cultures make up MY culture. Indeed, when I lived in Finland, I had to go the African food store to get my usual comfort foods. And sometimes I don’t realize I am not clear to other Brasilians when talking about foods or using words that are from Native Amazonians, because it’s always been part of my life.

Adding up the surprises
For a long time I was fine with the bits of heritage I carried. And I kept saying that, of course my maternal grandfather would have this mix, indeed, such mixes can be stable if everyone has a mix of some sort.

But then, recently, it hit me: my father was 100% European, my mother’s mother was 100% European. That means that the non-European part of me doubles with my mom and doubles with her father. That means he was (based on my numbers) 20% West African and 40% Native Amazonian. If we roughly round to a genetic multiple he could be 25% West African (a grand-parent?) and 50% Native Amazonian (a parent?).

That suggests that he was much closer to West African and Native Amazonian that I thought. And if we say he was about 25-40% Portuguese, this would translate to about a 6-10% to me.

Cool. And something to further explore.

Latin American mutt
The most exciting thing for me about this walk through my genetics is the matching of culture and genetics. I grew up in such a mix of German, Portuguese, West African, Native Amazonian, Brasilian, and North American food, culture, language. While I look like a European (due to dilutions by my maternal grandmother and my father), I’m still a krazy mix and belong to and live with way more than a single culture.

And I am proud of this.*

 

*I will admit, due to where I’ve lived, I might push the Latino package more than the others. Also, I am well aware that my upbringing (and looks) have shielded me from a life that folks who are more West African or more Native Amazonian than me have had to suffer. Lastly, I’m not so aware about North Americans and how mixed they are, but I do know that Latin Americans can be as mixed as me. I know of someone from the Caribbean who also has done one of these genetic tests, which revealed West African heritage, but also Native Caribbean heritage. And these are also expressed in her words and cooking.

Image – no, I don’t know who these folks are, this is just a stock image with a mix of folks that I liked

The Narrative

“The road less traveled”: getting it wrong, but getting it right

Posted on by charlie

Back in 2014, I was invited back to my graduate school as part of a professional development series for science grad students. Most of the speakers before me were from industry or academia, showing the students the traditional path forward. I was the odd one, brought in specifically to talk about ‘making the jump’ out of the traditional path (the talk was titled “When Opportunity Knocks…Navigating Job Transitions”).

Frost on the path
One poem that is often quoted regarding decision folks make is “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost. Everyone I hear quote that poem quote the last three lines, puffed up and proud of their decision:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference. 

What folks usually don’t know is that’s a misrepresentation of the whole poem. Indeed, Frost’s narrator points out that BOTH paths were identical and they just happened to choose one and knew they’d build a narrative that they took the more significant one.

Wikipedia has a nice summary of all of this, and the origins of the poem inspired by a friend of Frost. Do read it.

Forks on the path
As I alluded to in the opening, my path has not been seemingly linear. I have made interesting jumps in my career and life, with a long list of interesting binary decisions along the way. And at each juncture, while perhaps not equally unworn, a different decision would have led to radically different futures for me.

I don’t normally regret my decisions, as I know that I have no idea what life would be like if I had taken that ‘other’ decision at the time. While I am not nihilist, I’m not fatalist, either – we make the decision, best we can, and then live with it. I won’t waste time wondering if I would have been better with the ‘other’ decision.

Narrative on the path
At my talk with the grad students, one of the first things I dispelled was that there was any formula for making the jump to new job outside the traditional path. And I make it clear to them that they won’t know, when faced with a binary decision, if they are making the right decision. Not to mention that usually, time and information do not cooperate and you have to make as best a decision as you can at that moment and with what you have and know. Not ideal. Ever. Change and uncertainty are part of any life path, so make a decision and run with it and be ready to accept, resolve, or tolerate issues on the path you chose.

Also, the path forward doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but you. The one constant in that path is YOU. If you are true to what interests you, what you thrive doing, what you enjoy, then that’s the path you choose and those things will guide you in your decisions and be the common thread in your path – the narrative you walk.

The narrator of the Frost poem sorta knows that ‘the one less travelled’ is a narrative they prefer – the narrative keeps them from wondering if they made the right choice, what life would have been like on that other path, and to quell their FOMO.

So, in a way, when folks say ‘the one less travelled’, in a way, they got it right, even if they got it wrong.

 

Image from Wikipedia

Strategy/The Narrative

My greatest story, never much told: Nokia Cloud

Posted on by charlie

In early 2004, I joined the small Nokia Lifeblog team to lead sales and marketing. Over the roughly 18 months I was with the team, I learned so much about the fusion of internet and mobile, became the first in the company using blogging in marketing and influencer outreach, and engaged with a huge range of characters (many who were foundational to what was then called Web 2.0).

When the team was dissolved in June 2005, I spent the next few months in relative obscurity within Nokia (another interesting story in itself) working on an idea, inspired by all the work I’d done with Lifeblog.

Basically, I saw that the web was fragmenting (into morsels, is what I said back then) as media and social streams multiplied. My vision was a way to bring all those morsels into one view, on any platform, and to remix and republish as folks found, used, and shared social media.

You have no idea how that was so alien to many I spoke with. I learned the hard way the difficulty of articulating something folks could not see.

Nokia Cloud
In 2006, I was picked up by the Multimedia product management team, to focus on the online side of things (I had PC and a Mobile peer product managers). By the end of 2006 I had managed to secure a fuuuuuckload of money (I’ll never be giving that kind of money ever again, I suppose) to work with IDEO (who brought in Digital Foundry (DF) and R/GA for the technical and visual) to make my idea become reality.

We called it Nokia Cloud.

Cloud.

In 2007.

Yup.

In any case, I must say, 2007 was a wicked amazing year, working with really smart and enthusiastic folks. The cool stuff was doing field research (which did a good job of validating what I envisioned) and design workshops to refine the ideas, which R/GA and DF made tangible in designs and early protos. The not so cool was the pressure from a multi-billion euro company wanting the product to be immediately available in a zillion countries and languages, and what I called the Nokia Jello – when a big company just can’t help but kill your agility (no pun intended, we were the first to introduce Agile to a traditionally Waterfall company process).[1] And not sure if it was cool or not when we went to launch the service, by then called Ovi (“door” in Finnish), at Nokia World 2007, that Orange had taken out a full page ad in the FT to warn us off.

iCloud, but before iCloud[2]
The spirit of my vision drove Nokia Cloud. You could see it in the way Ovi was described as the ‘door’ to your online services, which was sort of the way I always described my vision.

With Nokia Cloud, you’d have an app on your phone and desktop that would, through a single view, help you see various levels of your social streams and media (peek), get details (reveal), or dive into the social media service (dive) – providing a range of interaction to rapidly go through and remix all your streams. In the early days, I also wanted to apply some analytics to help folks find and manage everything (Last.fm style, which was a big thing back then).

We were also inspired by the Sidekick Danger (same founder as Android), where all your mobile life was backed up and like a soul, could be placed into another device should you lose one or get a new one.

One cool feature that came up was a ‘stub’, where you start something on one platform, say your mobile, and then grab the stub on another, say your PC, and complete the task. Of course, in the past few years, you can do such things with your iPhone via Handoff. But we wanted to do this back in 2007.

Alas, we spread product dev out in phases and the Danger-like phone contacts and calendar and media recovery were the first to roll out. But I left the team before any of the later parts were rolled out (I don’t know if they were ever rolled out, actually).

I wish I had kept my notes, as so much of what we saw then foresaw where mobile and internet were going. That the iPhone and Facebook were taking over the world in 2007 served as a background for what Nokia had to get right, and fast.

And while we’ve come so far since back then, the world didn’t go the aggregation route I had hoped for (open, choice for all, competition), but instead the world doubled down on stove-piped platforms – Google, Apple, Facebook – where users stayed in walled-gardens, just like the mobile operator walled gardens at the time we had all hoped would be busted open by an open internet.

I did have a bit of a fantasy that Nokia could be the one to stave off the dominance of what became FAGMA (or is it MAGMA, now?). Nokia’s mission was ‘Connecting People’, and the greatest social media network was the contacts in your phone. I wanted to make the phone the door to your online life, and I wanted Nokia to do it.

Alas.

Fifteen frakkin’ years
I left the Cloud team in early 2008, for various reasons, but mostly how I thought I’d not be able to contribute effectively in the new re-org that had just happened (the ones that stayed behind were more than capable to carry on). But what I did during the time I led Nokia Cloud taught me so much about design, products, the fusion of hardware and software, organizational structures, and how to convert disparate insights into a coherent manifestation (and evangelize it).

Since the launch of iPhone in early 2007 was a big thing for us on the brand new Nokia Cloud project, I usually use the anniversary of the launch to take stock of how things have progressed since 2007.

Sadly, when I see where we are today after 15 years, I’m a bit disappointed: NFTs, crypto, Web3, MetaFrakkinVerse – not sure these are anything new, as it all seems way derivative or gimmicky.[4]

Though, in many ways, what I see folks trying to do with their social networks, media, personal narratives, is still the same as in 2007. The difference is that the MAGMAs of the world are dictating the interactions, tastes, and content – so we’re all in the passenger seat, more passive than one would think. Indeed, the medium defines the messages, and so long as MAGMA serve as the pipes, we need to engage with each other on their terms.

Alas, the MAGMAs of the world are just getting more ingrained in our lives and I do wonder how we break that stranglehold. Which is rich coming from me: I am very much beholden to the Apple ecosystem. I am railing from inside the asylum, so to speak.

Next fifteen
I have no idea what the next fifteen years will bring. My interests still reside in the intersection of data, internet, software, and hardware. Not sure where it’ll take me, but I’m a tad wiser. Looking back at the Nokia Cloud project and what it could have been reminds me, again, how I should trust myself more and fight for the visions I see as important.

And sad that this insight might be all that remains from such a fun time.

[1]Make no mistake, I thank Nokia from the bottom of my heart for the freedom and opportunity they gave me. I would not be where I am today without what Nokia provided me in my tenure there, especially during the time working on Nokia Cloud. There were no assholes (well, maybe one or two, but I didn’t have to deal with them for Nokia Cloud), just a bunch of enthusiastic folks who had a track record of doing great things. I am grateful to Nokia for permitting me to work with such folks.

[2]You won’t f-in believe me ever, but in 2002, a few months after we had launched our smartphone[3], I proposed some sort of app[3] that would serve as a market place for folks to read up on apps and download new ones. As I was already oversubscribed, a colleague on my team was given a budget and built it. Funnily, the mobile phone biz dev folks who were appeasing the operators flipped and took over the project and made it their own to let the operators use the on-phone portal for their own apps. Yup. Basically, the app store, long before the App Store. From 2002.

[3]What, you think the iPhone in 2007 was the first smartphone? And did you think the iPhone was the first smartphone to have apps? Oh, gosh, you have a lot of history to catch up on. Haha.

[4]Ok, perhaps I’m not one to judge. I think all of Western Civilization is a footnote on GrecoRoman history – they did it all, in sandals and togas, 2000+ years ago.

Strategy

Unlocking value in plain sight: not as common as you’d think

Posted on by charlie

I like to walk expo floors that have a lot of machines, gadgets, and gizmos and engage with vendors, doing some research and testing out some ideas.

Last fall, I walked around a local pharma manufacturing vendor expo. At this expo, I was particularly interested in folks who had sensors or sensor-based solutions (I was in an IoT state of mind).

My hardware side was interested in the size and variety of wired and wireless sensors, the different protocols used, the range of choice customers had to match their use case needs.

My real interest, though, was driven by my software side, to see if any of the companies went beyond sensor manufacture and had some software-driven business model, some value-added service for their customers. For example, I asked the sensor companies if they ran any monitoring services for their customers.

Blank stares
Interestingly, none (save two) of them really had any business where they ran monitoring or offered a monitoring dashboard for their customers. Indeed, one guy so didn’t understand my question, he kept talking about his installation and maintenance service. That seemed exemplary of the limit of the sensor makers’ business models.

Two companies, tho, were indeed focused on aggregating sensor data – one focused solely on temperature monitoring, the other on more general sensors for lab monitoring. They were collecting the data for recording and auditing, compliance, and alarms. One of them told me that they created a network just for the sensors that report to them, but I didn’t get a clear picture how that was done.

I also spoke to a few big-machine makers, at least the ones who seemed to offer some level of equipment data available to users. But of the ones I asked, none did the ‘phone home’ sort of business model for their customers (think GE and RR jet engines). Like the sensor folks, whatever data they provided was up to the customer to manage and analyze.

Opportunities
There’s a gap between what the sensor and equipment vendors offer and what the customer will find useful (notice I don’t say ‘need’ – read on for why). These hardware vendors could generate a new recurring revenue stream by adding value atop their hardware for their customers (see a bit of a related discussion here; and why it’s not easy, as I discuss here).

Ok, so note that I didn’t say customers ‘need’ something more than what the vendors offer. That’s because I think not only do you get blank stares from the hardware vendors when discussing any addition of a software layer of value, but you’ll also get blank stares from the customers as well.

With any new way of thinking, often the customer themselves do not know the value a new bit of software could add to their business. And so you not only get in a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in building the market, but the players (vendors and customers) in the market don’t even know that there is more value to unlock from the hardware they have.

How do we make the market, where there is value to be unlocked, but neither the manufacturer or the customer even know how to uncover the opportunity or even articulate the need?

What do you think?

I have some thoughts on this (and have actually helped vendors and companies unlock this value), but I’ll save them for another post.

 

Image by Kerstin Riemer