[From Wikipedia] Déjà vu is the experience of feeling sure that one has already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined.

We've all experienced the above before, but why does it occur?  

During a daydream, it's likely you run scenarios in your head about the future.  You think what the upcoming weekend will be like, or how dreadful the presentation you are giving tomorrow will be.  You can run these scenarios because your brain already knows a lot about the future.  If you're going to be in a room you've been in before, you have a setting.  If you know who you'll be with, you have your characters.  After you factor in the previous interactions you've had with the characters and setting, you can put together a fairly accurate representation of what the future holds.

Similarly, when you dream your brain probably continues this process.  Dozens and dozens of times, your imagination takes creative license with the vast amounts of memories you posses to run scenarios about the future.

If something coincidentally happens in the present that feels similar to something that has happened before, it's probably nothing more than a loose parallel to a scenario from your dreams.  I say loose because from my experience, our memories are pretty shotty.  Memories seem so clear, but often when you re-experience something you take note at how poor your memory's interpretation was.

Déjà vu then, in my opinion, is nothing more than a flashback to a dream that was close enough to something you just experienced.

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This would trump developing Facebook apps and tapping into 'the social graph.' The real social graph lives on my phone. I don't send my closest friends Facebook messages that often in favor of calling and texting.

What if I could build an events web app powered by iCloud's access to my contacts and calendar? Then I could share photos from an event via the 'photostream.' All the user has to do is login and authorize with their Apple ID. Not to mention the payment system is built in.

The data in these basic services is gold to any developer and potential access to 200 million user's information would fuel a whole new generation of web apps.

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Within the last month or so, facebook overhauled their Questions feature to resemble polls.  I've been tinkering with Questions through my RestlessNapkin facebook page to see how well it worked.

It doesn't.

Through a combination of answering questions that pop up in my news feed as well as starting my own questions, it's become apparent that facebook overlooked the effect of showing other's answers prior to voting.  I currently have a Questions poll asking people simply "What's the best queso in Austin?"  I was expecting to see answers all over the board, instead one place commands 58% of the 19 current votes.

Why?

Because when I created the poll, I voted for the place that is currently in the lead.  Sure that's not the only reason, I voted for the place because their queso is amazing.  However, this is Austin and there are countless places that should emerge on an open poll like this.

I don't see any reason to show other's votes prior to voting.  Imagine someone walking up to you and asking whether red, green or blue was the best primary color.  What would your answer be?  If that same person instead approached you and asked whether red, green or blue was the best primary color and included that red currently had 256 votes while blue and green had 45 and 18 respectively; what would your answer be then?

This is another fail to add to facebook's increasingly flawed designs.  As I read a few days ago, facebook is the new ebay.  With their rapid growth, they have the network effect on their side preventing anyone from entering the market.  Unfortunately, this means we are all forced to use features that are half-thought out; built by the best engineers money can buy, but not designed by socially intelligent people.

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Somehow Einstein here made it as a Congressman and is now blaming the iPad for killing US jobs.  "Yes it makes people more efficient, but what about all the Borders bookstores that are closing down?"

Yes, let's stop innovating to save jobs.  Let's not consider that the amount of trees not being cut down to fill Borders bookstores while out of date textbooks being thrown into landfills may be having a positive impact on the planet.  Or that Borders is closing 517 stores while Apple has created 317 stores since 2001, and is planning on opening another 50 this year alone.  Let's not consider the developers that are developing for the iPad and iPhone that have generated over $1 billion for themselves in the first two years of its existence and the amount of businesses that are growing through efficiency in the process.

No let's not consider any of that, down with the iPad!!!

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I received this pen as a gift while working at the YMCA as a swim instructor during college. I taught private lessons to a young girl who's only goal was to touch the bottom at the deep end.

I remember little about this girl other than flashes of her underwater with her eyes squeezed tight feverishly grasping at where she thought the bottom should be. Most of the time she was several feet shy. Sadly, I can't remember what her expression looked like when she eventually succeeded. My brain tries to fill in the blanks but it's doing nothing more than manufacturing filler of what I think her expression might have looked like. Memories are fickle like that. You don't always remember the things you wish you could, but sometimes flashes of something random but vividly clear finds its way to the surface.

As is the case with my pen. Every now and again when my eye catches the engraving I'm transported back underwater watching a little girl with her right arm flailing for the bottom. I wonder sometimes if she ever flashes back to the moment where she was successful. Does she recall the feeling of accomplishment? Telling her parents? Shopping with her mother for an engraved pen? Or possibly my face when I opened the gift?

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I was just on the phone with my credit card company as my current card expires in two weeks and I haven't yet received a replacement.  I waited on hold for a reasonable amount of time then was directed to a rep who did the following:

1. Listened to my issue
2. Verified my identity
3. Identified the problem
4. Relayed the problem to me
5. Fixed the problem

That's what anyone could ask for when dealing with any company providing a service.  Except, I left out a few extra steps; It really went like this...

1. Announced herself and said she was here to provide me excellent customer service
2. Listened to my issue
3. Apologized for having an issue and said she will do everything to fix the issue and provide me with excellent customer service
4. Verified my identity
5. Told me what steps she was going to take to provide me excellent customer service
6. Identified the problem
7. Apologized for the amount of time she was gone while she was identifying the problem
8. Relayed the problem to me
9. Fixed the problem
10. Closed the call with a monologue about how she hopes that she provided me with excellent customer service while she offered me a 0% balance transfer

Needless to say, there were many unnecessary steps that could have turned this 10 minute call into a 5 minute one; Thus saving both the company and me valuable time to allow us to accomplish a little more in our day.

The funny thing about this situation is the complaints I hear from time to time(at Pervasive DataSolutions) that we do not provide phone support for our products.  Maybe it's personal preference or a generation gap, but I'd prefer to never talk to a customer support rep on the phone assuming I could get the same quality of support over various other mediums.

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Video has more than a half century of sales experience under its belt, but now that YouTube has become one of the most popular search destinations it's time more organizations utilize its power.  Salesforce has almost 1,000,000 views on less than 1000 videos, Google educates all of their new features and products with educational cartoons and smart small businesses do the same.  Educating potential customers on your industry with a helpful video like Salesforce's 'What is Cloud Computing?' is a great way to build trust and credibility.  You don't need a media team to provide something great; a $200 flip camera, some creativity and the knowledge others want that you possess is all that's required.

Here's the New Yorker's engaging video selling their iPad app

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I've become frustrated with a lot of products and services lately and am making a declaration that the four core features that will make or break any experience is whether it's fast, useful, simple and stable(FUSS).  Let me walk through some of my reasoning:

1) My internet connection - I've lived in my house for four years and have had three different ISP's.  Cable, DSL and most recently have switched to Clear.  All I want is a stable 3-6 Mbps down and 1Mbps up(these are speeds of downloading and uploading information if you're unaware).  I don't want 25 Mbps at peak speeds if that means I have to live with sub-1 Mbps at other times.  I don't want to constantly tweak my hardware and reset modems and check for signal strength.  I just want it to work as i'm told it's supposed to.

2) Digg.com - This is a social news website i've been reading for five years to get tech and other news.  I go on and off with how often I visit the site, but I am a creature of habit and have been a loyal reader for a long time.  Recently they changed to a new version and the site is down almost every time I visit.  I'm going to get my news one way or another, in this case i've gravitated towards news.ycombinator.com and reddit.  As I said before, i'm a creature of habit and if these new sites are my new habit, Digg may have lost me permanently.

These two experiences recently have made me think about my laziness as a consumer and how quickly I will change direction if you don't give me what I want.  I won't even give the satisfaction of a text message breakup, I'll just be gone.  I'm sure most other mainstream consumers are the same way as I see the same patterns when i'm the service provider.  Do you find that that FUSS is applicable to most products and services?  Is there anything that should be added or taken away?

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Whether you realize it or not, Apple is building a full featured social network that will serve as an incredibly viable Facebook competitor once all is said and done.  Yes they have released Ping and everyone realizes that it's pretty weak in its current iteration, but it will get better.

What people are overlooking is that Game Center was also released yesterday.  It allows me to invite friends via my phone's address book, create status updates and invite friends to compete against me with games that we both have.  If I don't have a game a friend has, it shows me the name and price of the game so I can purchase it.

Let's compare Facebook to Apple. Facebook has 500 million potential people to connect with and makes almost $1bill selling ads.  Facebook realizes that gaming is a great way to keep people using the site and create a revenue stream with Facebook credits to buy in game items.  So Facebook has the social graph but lacks in a strong development community and users credit cards.  Apple has tens of millions of devices in people's hands and 160 million people with Apple ID's who are already familiar and comfortable with purchasing through Apple's ecosystem(Apple has paid $1bill developers through app sales).  They just turned on Ping and Game Center to begin building their own social graph that relates to music and games that will inevitably gravitate towards TV, movies and books as well.  Apple has the hardware, the development community and users credit cards, but lacks a strong social graph.

Seems to me Apple can easily create the social graph as people inherently have the desire to share music and games with friends.  If they move forward with giving MobileMe away for free(rumor), they'll have the beginnings of the rest of the package.  Throw iChat and Facetime in the mix and we also have text/video chatting capabilities.

What am I missing?

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I can't even begin to explain how many times I've gone on a business trip or a meetup group only to forget my business cards. Randomly, my boss began attaching his contact information in a QR code within his email signature. At first I thought it was kind of a lame conversation starter until the lightbulb went off in my head. What if my iPhone wallpaper was a QR code with my info on it?

Without further adieu, my brand spanking new (21st century) business card.

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Lost in the whirlwind of launches over the past few days including the iPhone 4, its new operating system iOS4, Salesforce Chatter and Google Voice; a small gaming company's public launch got lost in the mix from the tech blogosphere.  Atmosphir is more than a game, it's a platform for gamers to customize virtually everything including their characters and new levels.  Once a user has created a new level, that user can share the level with the entire community.

It's truly unique gameplay and shows promise that the game won't stale over time.  In comparison, Zelda has 16 titles while Mario has god knows.  What if these two classics allowed you to extend the game, or allowed users to create a bundle of levels that could be brought together to create new stories so the game would never end?  The game manufacturers, like I would expect Atmosphir is doing, could simply enable new features of game play while maintaining the service.

This brings up an interesting thought; What's the point of building something that isn't inclusive of a platform or at least contains a fully open API to build on top of?  Creating software today that doesn't allow strangers the ability to tinker seems like a road to failure.  I can't think of a company that is creating cutting edge stuff that isn't working on a platform.  Yahoo! has BOSS(Build your Own Search Service), Salesforce has Force.com, Microsoft has Azure, Amazon has AWS and Pervasive (the company I work for) is even getting into IaaS or Integration as a Service with our DataCloud2 platform.

It doesn't stop there, smaller companies are also jumping on the bandwagon to extend their niche.  The hottest thing in mobile right now is location, but developers don't have to worry about curating their own location data or features; Simple Geo, Geo API and Location Labs all have platforms with location data and services ready for consumption.  Further proof is what some companies are calling Font as a Service or FaaS.  Fontdeck and Typekit allow web designers access to an encyclopedia of fonts via web services which should help push the adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 further faster.

Here's a video overview of Atmosphir

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I often help prospects fix something here or there with an implementation before they buy my software.  When I do, I use a tool called GoToAssist to remote into their system to see and fix issues quickly.  I launch the application which instructs me to tell someone to go to www.fastsupport.com and give them a nine-digit support code.  This is what the customer sees:

This goes back to my post about "Overcoming the Learning Curve" and why you need to try and understand your customers better so you can support them better.  Don't always assume that you can predict what someone will think or how they will use something.

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When I checked in for my flight last night I saw a new option for a mobile boarding pass. "About time" I thought and eagerly chose that option, how many others would have done the same vs saying "I don't know how that works so I'm going to go with the standard option." When I got to the TSA agent and showed her my phone, she pointed to some free standing piece of machinery. I took my phone and began to flash the below barcode to various areas on the device that I figured might have been a barcode reader(I was way off). The TSA agent got frustrated with me and started barking orders at me until I got it right.

Needless to say I looked pretty stupid for a bit, but now it's done and I know how to use it. It serves as a reminder to me that I need to always try the cutting edge stuff to stay an early adopter and not be complacent with what I'm used to. I invite others, including my mother to do the same.

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One way or another I came upon an article about Twitter via a blog I had never been to before.  Scripting.com is written by an 80's software developer and gives insight into tech subjects from that point of view. As I began to explore his other articles, I found one titled "Microsoft rejection letter, 1987" which piqued my interest.

I learned that Dave had created a piece of desktop presentation software called MORE in the mid 80's that was quite successful as well as very popular to its loyal fanboys.  So successful that Bill Gates offered to purchase the software in 1987 to add to his upcoming office suite but instead deciding to go with a competitor's product which was called PowerPoint.  

Think about that.  Think about what kind of household name PowerPoint is to all of us.  PowerPoint is to presentations as Google is to search.  If a different decision had been made a little over 20 years ago, you could be giving a MORE presentation tomorrow.

But I haven't gotten to the interesting part yet...the real fascinating part to geeks like me is the Rules dialog box from MORE pictured here

This dialog box allows the user to create a 'blueprint' that your presentation must live by.  With it you could tell MORE that all headlines needed to be blue with a bold font size of 14pt.  Or that all bullet points should be indented exactly a half an inch from the relative text it was bulleted from.

Who cares?

Every single person that has designed every single page you have viewed on the internet for the last decade, that's who.  For those who don't know, web pages are broken into two pieces.  HTML(HyperText Markup Language) and CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) or content and presentation.  CSS like MORE's Rules dialog box allows web designers to create a blueprint just like an architect will define how the raw materials (whether words or wood) shall be constructed together.  So without CSS, every page you viewed would look like this

The difference is that MORE came out about twelve years before CSS was released in 1998.  Talk about being before your time....

Though perhaps it was this added complexity that made PowerPoint attractive to the brass at Microsoft.  Today, 24 years after MORE was released and 12 years after CSS, most internet users would probably stare blankly at you if you asked them why CSS is important or worse how to write it.  

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I StumbledUpon an article about immortal jellyfish and immediately thought about Bruce Sterling's "Visionary in Residence".  He has some short stories (all wacky science fiction of course) about "bio-punks" who make upgrades to their (and their pet's) bodies in a Johnny Mnemonic sort of way.  But, instead of simply being able to store data in your head like Johnny they had some pretty useful alterations.  For example, one of the guys had a pet hog who could eat something, then analyze the ingredients of what was eaten and send the analysis to the owner's handheld.

All this makes me wonder when we will see people experiment with their bodies in this manner.  When will we see a company that specializes in wiring your brain directly to the internet to bypass a computer terminal altogether?  When will there be a separation between human purists and biotech modified humans, and which group will be alienated?

You might think that modifications that drastic are too far out there for anyone to even think about.  Try telling that to this guy, this guy or Kevin Warwick.

I'd like to think we could tap into a plant's ability to capture energy through photosynthesis or a horse's ability to mature into adulthood more quickly coupled with an implant to make all of human knowledge a natural instinct to skip the arduous 20-year schooling process. 

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