On Episode 25 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about 7 ways to keep your site fresh.
Category: Podcast
Staying Security Smart
Today on the Edge of Innovation, we discuss how to be put safeguards on your computer to be safe from hacking.
Thoughts on Entrepreneurship and Staying Informed
On Episode 26 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Paul about finding time to stay informed, entrepreneurship, and augmented reality. We’ll keep you on edge!
Show Notes
Tim Cook and Augmented Reality
Transcript
Sections
Staying Informed and Entrepreneurial
Tim Cook says augmented reality will be bigger than virtual reality
Staying Informed and Entrepreneurial
Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.
Jacob: So, Paul, as we look at the way you are productive and that you contribute to the business world, the entrepreneur world, and Savior Labs, the company that you founded and lead, there is a high volume of articles and content that you are pushing out, and it makes me wonder, how do you organize your time. How do you prioritize your time? How do you reduce what we’ve talked about as cognitive dissonance? How do you set up your time so that you can focus and read and think about what’s important and the things that are interesting to you?
Paul: Well, I think I take the time. You know, thankfully, this company called Apple invented an iPad, which makes it very easy to consume information. I mean, when it first came out, it was a… I tagged it as an information consumption device. That’s really what it is. It’s a way to consume information and so now I’ve… Over the past year, I have equally shifted towards the iPhone, because I have an iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a little bigger. And I can consume information there.
It is a very wide net that I cast, and it’s largely motivated at, because I don’t want to miss anything. Not because, you know, I’m not interested in the recent gossip on Brad and…whoever. You know. That’s not what I’m interested in. But I’m interested in thoughts that are occurring, so much so, that somebody has written about it. And they’ve made effort to do that.
And so what you see is these signals, you know, that are coming in. And you have to arbitrate them. And you know, I’ve been blessed with an ability to arbitrate lots of signals at once. Some might call that multitasking. Most of my reading is done while I’m doing something else.
Jacob: Is it really?
Paul: Yeah. It really is.
Jacob: So you don’t… Some guys talk about setting aside, you know, 30 minutes at the end of the day or whatever to do this.
Paul: No. I’ll use it as down time. Like, you know all the time. I mean, I was in a meeting last night, and then was some down time between it while people were getting their coffee and stuff like that and, you know, whatever the snacks were. And I was sitting there flipping through Flipboard. Oh, this is really interesting.
You know, a lot of the times, I tag the things, and it’s because I think they’re interest. Well, no. It is. I mean, it’s because I think it’s interesting and something that will add value to my daily routine, uh, and produce benefit. And, you know, people come along and say “How do you know all this stuff?”Well, you know, I just take a pill that adds it all to me every day.
Jacob: The Matrix downloads it.
Paul: I do the work, you know. But you’ve to be looking for those nuggets. You know what’s interesting is 30 years ago, it was very hard to dig this information out.
Jacob: Right. You had to get a subscription to 20 different magazines and keep your newspaper in front of you.
Paul: Yeah. It was very hard.
Jacob: But now, it seems to me like I think the word that’s coming out of this is being intentionally curious about the world around you.
Paul: Yeah. I think so. I am definitely curious and fascinated on so many different levels. Why is this? What’s this? What’s this? And you’ll see that as, you know, different things I edge into. I do have another habit where I post things that, you know, they get posted to Twitter. I also have a private channel where I save things that I want to read in depth and ponder, that I want to revisit that’s a much shorter list, but it’s stuff that… And it’s sometimes, like, weird. I mean, completely orthogonal to what you might think I was interested in.
So, but, I will, you know, I’ll get home from work, have a few minutes of downtime then, you know, I’ll read a whole bunch of articles then and, uh, usually when I’m going to bed, before going to sleep, I’ll, I’ll read a whole bunch then. When I’m exercising, if it’s on, you know, like a treadmill or something, I’ll definitely do it then. So that’s, you know, using all those, those opportunities.
Jacob: Yeah. That’s excellent. Well, thanks for sharing with us about how to be, how being intentionally curious is functional in your life.
Apple and Augmented Reality
Jacob: So, Paul, you recently were telling me about an article that you were reading about Tim Cook, the great Tim Cook, who, by the way, at the beginning of college football season, I will just acknowledge and celebrate in public that he is an Auburn University graduate.
Paul: Well, we all make mistakes.
Jacob: This is not going to way I expected. So, Tim Cook on virtual reality and Apple’s posture on virtual reality. Talk us through that article and just some of your thoughts, because you were sharing some very interesting things about that with me.
Paul: Sure. Well, first of all, you know, when, when Tim Cook talks, everybody listens. This is the voice of Apple now. And, uh, you know, he’s a very different person than Steve Jobs, you know. So we have to…he’s a business person. Steve Jobs was a visionary. You know, I’m not saying that Tim isn’t a visionary, but I don’t think that’s what he would put on his business card.
You know, where Steve, if he didn’t put it on his business card, we’d put it on there. And it certainly—
Jacob: Yeah. Well, his name is almost synonymous with the term visionary.
Paul: Yeah. So the whole idea and what bottom line is, is that… It’s an article in Vanity Fair based on an interview that was done with Good Morning America just September 14th, I think. He talks about augmented reality and virtual reality. And basically, he’s saying virtual reality, you know, is, is one thing. Augmented reality is going to be the one that takes off. And primarily, because it can be a shared experience. That’s really the distillation of what he’s saying, is that I put a virtual reality headset on, I’m isolated from you in the same room.
Now, we could both be in the same virtual reality, but I can’t interact with you really. I mean, I might be able to touch you or hit you or do something like that, but I can’t, I can’t have the visual, my visual cortex, you know, be engaged with your shape and who you are and see that you’re grimacing. I can’t see that.
Augmented reality, I can do that. And so, you know, augmented reality and the way the Microsoft HoloLens was sort of first introduced, it was a person in a house, and they looked at the refrigerator, and they saw a list of things that they needed in the refrigerator. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s sort of goofy.” But now if you sort of extrapolate that and say that we’re both going to go play a game, and we look at that wall and we both see the, the monster and we have to go and get that…
Jacob: The Pokémon.
Paul: The Pokémon. Yeah. So, that, that’s a little bit better. And so that sounds more intriguing than having my grocery list on the refrigerator. I don’t know why I’d have my grocery list on the refrigerator. That’s not when I need it. I need it when I’m at the store. Or actually, I need it when I’m driving near the store, and I haven’t made a commitment to go somewhere else. You know, like if you know, I imagine there will be some systems for augmented reality that will tell you, just after you passed the store, that you should have stopped. But that wouldn’t have been good. It would have been, “Hey, you’re heading up here. You’re going past your favorite market. Why don’t you stop and get these five things that we know you need?”
So really, he didn’t say a lot. You know, Apple has no play in this game. They have nothing in virtual reality. Samsung has virtual reality — it’s cool — for their phones. They can snap into a headset. You can do that.
Virtual reality is important because when we’re not in the same room, virtual reality is someplace where we can actually interact.
Jacob: It’s a place in between where we can connect.
Paul: Right. So I do that on Facebook with people all the time. Well, you know, I don’t think it will be all that unusual. And that’s why they bought Oculus is because they want the Facebook experience to happen in a virtual reality. So that means that the whole, you know, backdrop is virtual generated. Well, in augmented reality, only other things are generated. So, you know, you might have a white wall in your living room, and that might be a picture frame into a virtual reality that is where your Facebook friends are. So they come online, and you see them standing there in a combination of virtual and augmented reality.
So the augmented reality gives you that ability to have it within your own context. So you’re not isolated. There’s a, there’s a great movie from the ’80s called Brainstorm, which talks about, you know, some deprivation chambers and their…and some reality headsets that they were wearing. Very fascinating study on how that stuff can go horribly wrong. And, uh, you know, I don’t think it’s going to go that way — you know, science fiction, and I think more fiction than science.
But, you know, so Apple doesn’t have a dog in this fight yet. But hey. He’s talking about it.
Jacob: It’s telling and it’s interesting that Apple would not pull the trigger on one way or the other, which is probably an indication that what Steve Cook is saying, like, augmented reality is going to probably be the winner, but they haven’t laid their cards on the table yet or put their money in on a particular direction yet.
Paul: And you know, you have to remember, Apple is a consumer electronics company that makes stuff for mass market. They’re not a niche company. These are niche products.
Jacob: These are still niche products.
Paul: Very much so.
Jacob: And I think that’s helpful. That’s certainly not the way they come across in terms of tone at times. Like, they seem like, “This is the future.” Well, maybe it is, but at the moment, 0.0001% of the market actually cares about this. And I think maybe the tipping point might have been Pokémon Go.
Paul: Yeah. Well, it’s definitely…there’s a collision there of augmented and reality, you know. What’s interesting, though, my son is 16 years old and has some money from doing some work and was very interested in getting a virtual reality headset. And I said, you know, “It’s your money, if you want to do that.” That was 700, 800 bucks, a decent amount of money for the, I forget the one. The one that works with Steam. And he was enamored with it. And I said, “Well, you know, I was reading a great article.” It’s one we posted, I don’t know, probably three or four months ago where somebody had several virtual reality headsets sitting in his closet. And he was lamenting the fact. I mean, he got most of them… I don’t know if he bought them or he had them given to him, but he was like, “I just don’t use them.” And I, I said, you know, “You should really read that before you go off.” And he read that and read a few of these, and he says, “Yeah. I think I’m going to wait.”
Because there’s a lot of technology that, you know, sounds promising and you buy it and invest in it, and it’s a letdown. You know, and that’s what’s going to go on my tombstone, you know. Technology will always let you down, because our, you know, our brain is so malleable. And we can imagine the best case scenario. And it’s very rare that technology delivers that best case scenario.
Jacob: Excellent. Well, thanks for your thoughts on that update from Tim Cook and augmented reality. We’ll be looking to see what happens with Apple on that fight and in that dog in the race in the days ahead.
Cognitive Overload?
On Episode 17 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Paul about cognitive overload and recent changes in crowdfunding.
Agreeing to Allow Sneakiness
On Episode 23 of the Edge of Innovation, we discuss various topics such as data mining, new WordPress features, social selling, ReactJS and OpenStreetMap.
Show Notes
Security researcher accuses Microsoft of ‘sneaky data mining’ in Windows 10
WordPress Plugins To Try
Social Selling as an Investment
Five Reasons we Chose ReactJS
OpenStreetMap
Transcript
Sections
Agreeing to Allow Sneakiness
New WordPress Features
Social Selling
ReactJS
OpenStreetMap
Agreeing to Allow Sneakiness
Jacob: Well, along the lines of agreements and what we have agreed to, I thought the second article related to security issues was interesting. This is the second most popular tweet from the month. “Security researchers accuse Microsoft of sneaky data mining in Windows 10.” Talk us through that article and what’s fascinating about it.
Paul: Yeah, you know, I think there is, a deep bunker inside of Microsoft where there are five or six people who are plotting the demise of the world. And—
Jacob: Are we starting a new conspiracy theory?
Paul: No. Not starting it. It’s real. I mean, this isn’t a theory. I mean, theory. This is not a theory. They are sitting there calculating, you know. And it’s sort of like—
Jacob: Don’t worry. There will be a YouTube video validating this within the hour.
Paul: Absolutely. There’s black helicopters. It makes the Illuminati look small, you know. And it is all through Windows 10. You know, so, okay, it’s sneaky data mining. You know, it’s definitely political the way it’s… Not political as in our campaigns that are going on. But the way in which people frame these things, it’s interesting to use that. I mean, the metrics that are being sent back to Microsoft are being used to help them figure out what people do and don’t do on their computers so that they can optimize those experiences.
I saw another article just this morning where the FBI director — I think it came out yesterday — agrees that you should put tape over your webcam.
Jacob: Oh, really.
Paul: So, you know, the director of the FBI, you know. And that’s fine, and I understand. This is a little bit different, I mean, you know, because you can get hacked. And we’ll talk a little bit about hacking later. So, you know, if you cover it up, they can’t see it, you know. It might be cool to have a little list of great product idea. Have a little picture that you could have in front of the webcam that would be in a little bracket, you know, that would make them think it was somebody else.
But anyway…
Jacob: Like an “away” message or something like that?
Paul: Yeah. You know, just like in Star Trek, the Corbomite Maneuver with the dripping head alien that’s really scary. Anyway. If…do you even know that reference?
Jacob: I do know that reference.
Paul: Okay. Well, that’s good.
Jacob: I grew up on Star Trek.
Paul: Okay. Good. Well, so, you know, the article is about somebody who said, you know, I’ve opted out of everything, but yet there’s still data going out. And, you know, they’ve also made it very difficult in Windows 10, as an aside, to turn off updated. Now, in the past, you could just turn them off. What that left you with, for the normal user, was a machine that was out of date and potentially could be violated or hacked.
Jacob: Yeah. Potential security concerns.
Paul: So “Microsoft designs operating systems and allows users to shoot themselves in the foot by turning off updates,” as opposed to, “Microsoft designs operating systems to force you to install updates,” you know, violating your civil rights. So, I thought about that. I have one client who has a legitimate reason why they want to turn off updates. They have an application that runs, and it takes a week to run. It’s gathering a whole bunch of data.
Microsoft was updating stuff and rebooting the machine in the middle of that.
Jacob: Yeah. And I’ve heard reports of that at not merely data gathering level but like security level. You know, we’re running these security protocols or, you know, these sort of military operations and using Windows 10 and…oops!
Paul: Yep. Too bad. So they’re coming to terms with that and they’re fixing that. And that’s like, “Oh, gee. That was stupid.” But you know, Mac OS, there’s a point at which I will say, “Sorry. You’ve got to install this.” It’s a little draconian, and you know, what I’m also surprised with is what… Shouldn’t you guys figure this out a little easier. I mean, this isn’t the… You know, have a discussion with the users. Say, “When do you want your updates?” You know, this data is going out. This is why it’s going out. Do you want it there or not?
But you know, a lot of people, normal human beings that aren’t computer tech savvy, are like, “I don’t care.” And, they made the decision, the, What is that?
Danny: Sorry.
Jacob: Speaking of updates…
Paul: Updates.
Danny: Microsoft update.
Jacob: For those who are listening, we just got an update in the middle of our discussion about updates.
Paul: We’re rebooting. Welcome back. I guess Microsoft was listening, and they didn’t like that. So they probably sent an update to mess up our recording. So, you know, as he was relating this to me that his application was rebooting, I said, really the way to fix that is to go to the Enterprise Edition. Okay. What’s wrong with that? I mean, yeah, it’s a hassle. I’ve got Windows installed already. Well, the Enterprise Edition has all of those feature.
You know, that generally, Microsoft has been very, very, user-choice centric. They will let you do things 10 different ways, whereas Apple said, “This is the way you do it.” You know, “There is no alternative. This is the way you do it.” And I works for both worlds. In some reasons, most Mac users say, “Well, that’s the way it is.”
In the Windows world, we’ve been trained that we should be able to do anything we want. So as Microsoft sort of contracts on that privilege, we’re getting that bristling. What’s interesting is the inflammatory, nature of it. This “sneaky data mining.”
Well, you know, don’t use it, you know. I mean, you know, if you don’t like, or switch to the, you know… Go and do the work to turn it off. And you could do that, you know. You could easily put a firewall in place that denied all this kind of traffic.
New WordPress Features
Jacob: So, speaking of websites, WordPress 4.6 is out, and you have this article, recommending all these new features, talking about the new features of WordPress 4.6. So obviously, there’s a vast number of websites that run WordPress, and so how, how is 4.6 going to be an improvement? Why is this article helpful, just to kind of review?
Paul: Well, you know, it’s interesting. As we sort of throw things out there, you know, I look at it and say, gee, we support a lot of WordPress sites. 25% of the web is running on WordPress. I read it, you know. It was more of a, news, you know, hey, this came out. There are some new features. It’s not revolutionary. It’s almost yawn, you know. But what’s interesting is that a lot of you were interested in that, maybe for the same reason. I don’t think it was like, “Golly gee. This is the coolest thing.” But yet, it’s, you know, it’s like a new version. Well, duh. It is a new version. There’s some nice new features. One of the, you know, fonts, being in, in WordPress 4.6, you can, you know, it’s coming with Open Sans from Google Fonts. So, you know, it has some nice things. A bunch of plugin and theme updates. Faster updates, editor enhancements. Probably the nicest feature, I thought, was highlighting broken links, which is, you know, the bane of existence in a lot of things. So that’s really nice. Better auto save and recovery and better import screens, things like that. Localization improvements.
But not huge leap forward, you know. And as you get…as products become more mature, the next version is a very small increment, and we’ll talk about that with…
Jacob: Are there any sort of ways in which WordPress needs to make a leap forward for their, for the improvement of the system? Or are they really at a point where they’re kind of like refining but they’re stabilized?
Paul: Well, I think the biggest thing lacking in core WordPress is the concept of ACLs and categories. So, if you had 10,000 articles in a WordPress environment that would be painful.
Jacob: Yeah. It would bog it down.
Paul: Well, it shouldn’t, technically. But back end editing would be bogged down, because… Well, I mean, it would be paginated, but it would be cumbersome to work with. What people at WordPress are going to say is, “Well, you could filter it. And you could do all that dig stuff, and you know, get a list down.” But in Joomla, they have categories and all that kind of things. It helps. But there needs to be some work on, really the huge amounts of articles. You know, huge might be 100 for you. That’s still something that a person can’t keep in their head, you know. And so how do you slice and dice that? How do you organize it? That kind of stuff isn’t as easy as it needs to be.
Jacob: Well, folks at WordPress, if you’re listening, we would love for you to consult with Paul about you how can make that happen. Moving on. “Social selling is an investment.” Talk us through this article. What exactly is social selling? And why is it an investment?
Social Selling
Jacob: So, you have “Social selling as an investment” as one of your favorite articles from the month, or one of the more popular articles of what you were recommending. Talk us through what that means. “Social selling,” I’m not even sure what that means from the face.
Paul: Well, first of all, Social Selling is a book by Tim Hughes. And, what it basically posits is the, the idea of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, I’m being a little unfair, it’s really social selling. And what the idea is here is that, a billboard isn’t social selling. There’s no people involved. It may be effective. It may be ineffective. A, postcard is not social selling. A website is not social selling. When we start to move into it, if I post something on Facebook that is interesting, me using Facebook as a channel to communicate to you, that’s social selling.
And how do we leverage the social interaction, the proxy of a person, communicating about something and saying, “Hey, you know, this is really good.” Or, Angie’s List could be considered an avenue of an archetype of social selling, because you say, “Hey, I found this plumber who actually came when I called him, you know, and was really nice and did a great job.” That’s the passion.
Now, you can bring that passion to absolute selling, you know, to the fundamentals of selling as opposed to, just going in and saying, you know, “We offer widgets. Do you want to buy widgets.” It’s more of building a relationship with a person socially.
So, you know, and I think the key here is it doesn’t happen easy. It happens with a lot of work, hence the word investment. And it has to be something that you are committed to.
We have a client that is a national consulting firm. And we work directly with several people there, one of them being the president. And the president does social selling. He meets people. He talks with them. He gets to understand their problems, and he offers solutions to those problems. Well, that’s social selling. That’s really hard to scale.
So how do you do that in a web environment? Well, you start to multiply that, you know. You start to say, okay, blog posts, articles, video interviews, that kind of thing.
Jacob: Excellent. That’s great to hear, expect in terms of the investment part, because if it’s going to be social selling, I recognize that sounds more business-y, but effectively, that’s a focused relationship that’s going to need the investment of time. I imagine that’s going to be really helpful for a number of small businesses and entrepreneurs in terms of giving them categories for how to think through.
Paul: Well, you want to be an advisor, you know. You want to help them make good decisions. That’s really the bottom line. And I used to work at a Radioshack about 25, 30 years ago. And, people would come in, and they’d say, “I need this.” And we didn’t have it. I sent them down the mall to the store that I knew did have it. Well, that’s counter intuitive. But I just became their trusted advisor. And they came in next time and said, “What do they got to lose?” Because now I’ve already told them, “Go down to the store at the end of the hall to get that.”
If they come in and they say, “Well, gee, I need this.”
Well, if we have it, “Here it is.” If I don’t, I’m going to say, “Oh, you should go to think place.” And now they’ve got to best of both worlds. And that’s really social selling.
ReactJS
Jacob: That’s excellent. So, next article. “Five reasons we choose ReactJS.”
Paul: Well, yeah. So, there’s a lot going on. My role in the past has been, I’ve been a CTO, chief technology officer, for a bunch of different companies, and as that, I have always sort of tracked what’s going on in the way we implement technology, different technologies. And, you know, 30 years ago, we wrote things in C# or Visual Basic or, maybe even… I don’t know about java 30 years ago, 20 years ago maybe. So we used these different technologies.
So ReactJS is one of those newer technologies, and the thing that’s difficult for technology people is the stuff changes so quickly. So I look at these articles as not harbingers but almost harbingers of what’s happening and a way to get on boarded into them.
Paul: React JS is one of the things that CTOs should be considering as one of the future ways to do it. I mean, there’s lots of applications being developed and deployed in it, and it’s a really cool way to do things. I won’t get into the technicals on the podcast, but if you’re interested in development trends and the way things will be done, I think that React JS is one of those. There’s a couple of competing ones. But this is a good article that shows you some of the main advantages of it, and why you should consider that, and then why, specifically, one organization, they have moved to React. And so you sort of get the pluses and minuses of why they did that.
OpenStreetMap
Jacob: Okay. Alright. Next article. “Satellites auto detect buildings on OpenStreetMap.”
Paul: So, yeah. This is just cool. Basically, they’re taking this OpenStreetMap data, like Google Maps. There is a database behind that. And Google Maps is, you know, in the classic Google way of doing it, you know, they give, first dose, and then you need to purchase it, you know. So if you’re using Google Maps commercially, you need to pay for it. It’s 10 grand a year. It’s expensive. It’s a lot of money. I mean, it’s $800 a month, so, you know, that’s not terribly expensive, but it’s not something you make a decision in one second to do.
So there is this huge push. So Craigslist abandoned Google Maps because of that. And they have been a champion of OpenStreetMaps. So, what they have done, somebody out there — I don’t know the guy — is basically take satellite imagery, combine it with OpenStreetMap data to detect buildings that weren’t on there. So the database has holes in it, and they’re helping fill in those holes.