Though I was a bit distracted by the Hackathon, I still managed to listen to and watch several talks from TED while out in Palm Springs.  Here are a couple of brief notes and opinions, and links to the talks themselves from TED.com when available.

Reuben Margolin: This was almost painful to watch, as Margolin literally looked like he was going to die of stage fright at any time.  He might have just been going for artistic effect, but all it did was make me want to leap on stage and try to save him.  That said, the sculptures themselves were beautiful and lovely and kinetic.  They reminded of the complex wood sculptures I used to see on the Oregon Coast as a kid; I don’t really want to buy them as much as I want to figure out how to build them.  A handy shortcut for getting engineering/science kids into art.

Andrew Stanton: So now I’m actually interested in seeing John Carter, which I didn’t know was coming from the Pixar folks.  It is a fact that it is difficult to make me cry but that movies seem to consistently do it – I tear up at Monsoon Wedding (specifically when the father makes the difficult choice to protect his family), as regular as clockwork.  And Pixar movies tend to do it more than most.  When I flew my father out to NYC for his birthday a few years back, we want to see Up together in the theater, which may seem like a strange thing to do after going cross country, but is actually perfectly in keeping with my relationship with my father.  And of course we both cried at the beginning.

Stanton’s talk wandered a bit, but like many things Pixar does, I was sort of OK with its non-traditional nature.  The crux of his talk seemed to be about different modes of storytelling, and what makes different styles tick.  It wasn’t especially academic or engaging, and I ended up paying more attention to the story of the talk itself.  The Pixar guys seem to me to be incredibly courageous – they made animation relevant to more than kids, when lots of people had written off the genre, and they did it over the stiff opposition of plenty of studio execs that weren’t believers.

So what gave Stanton the courage to do it?  He tracks it back to his parents, who were willing to tell him that he was special, as much for his weaknesses as his strengths, and to back his plays.  Which ultimately is the best gift an adult can give a kid: you may be wrong, you may be weak, but I’ll come along on the journey towards strength with you.  My parents were steadfast in that, as were many of my teachers, and I should probably go give them a call and tell them so.

Which is pretty much my takeaway from the talk: call all the people who supported you and tell them how awesome they are.

Though I was a bit distracted by the Hackathon, I still managed to listen to and watch several talks from TED while out in Palm Springs.  Here are a couple of brief notes and opinions, and links to the talks themselves from TED.com when available.

Paul Gilding: It is probably not surprising that I didn’t much enjoy Gilding’s talk.  For one, I don’t agree with his central thesis: that the earth is full.  Indeed, writing from a small apartment in NY and thinking home to Oregon, I know just how much farther we have to expand.  Anyone who says the earth is full needs to take a flight across America and contemplate the vast reaches where essentially no one lives.

But even if earth was full, we would simply expand outward.  We will find new tech, compete with new species and with ourselves, and grow.  Or we will die out, as other species have.  And all of these will be natural outgrowths and acceptable ends.  Gilding asked us to question what our children would think, but as I look back at the generations before me, I don’t have the same “why didn’t they do anything?” sensation.  I have argued for years that the bombing of Japan was unnecessary and resulted from the misunderstanding of Japanese culture but I look at it as a mistake, a terrible and tragic one, that taught the world lessons that have helped us become better.

Gilding’s lesson only works if we suppose that the earth will really “go dark” and hit a low so terrible that we simply cannot recover.  But I cannot imagine what even it is that he imagines that would cause that.  Even terribly apocalyptic views, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, have within them a continued human civilization that will re-evolve.  I’m just not on the same page.

Peter Diamandis: In many ways a rebuttal to Gilding’s talk by someone I think is better informed, Diamandis points out over and over again how things are actually getting better (despite the media’s perpetual coverage of disaster).  The standard up-and-to-the-right trend talk isn’t really the interesting bit unless you’re unfamiliar with all the many sources of information that point to things getting better for mankind.

The part where I get interested is not about state but rather trajectory.  Diamandis’ argument against Gilding is essentially this: why would we assume that doing more or less the same thing (advancement and consumption) would result in radically different results than it has previously harvested (the downfall of mankind)?  That’s a dramatic over-consumption and of course there are reasons to pay attention to consumption, but I can’t help but think about Star Trek: The Next Generation.  It may seem like a step, but in the iconic series, the moment of transcendence for humans was when we figured out how to get around the resource barrier and we could create almost anything for anyone.

I don’t think we’re really all that far from that, at least in the basic sense.  If we take the long view on technology, there is every reason to believe that we’ll figure out fusion in the next 100 years.  And with virtually limitless power, a great many other things become possible, like transportation of crops across long distances and the fabrication of materials at high energy costs and low waste.  Instead of focusing on pulling back, let us proceed ever onward, for the good of all those who are not sitting at the top of this hill.

About two weeks ago, I got a generous invite from Stefan Weitz over at Bing to be the product guy for their first ever TEDActive Hackathon.  The format was up in the air for awhile, and eventually settled on the format I prefer (which could only loosely be called a Hackathon): a single team (me, James Cox from Smokeclouds, Drew Volpe from Locately, Alan Cannistraro from Apple, student Rafael Cosman,  and Zach Szukala from Seso) solving the singular problem of helping kids with asthma, as proposed by TED Fellow Sandeep Sood from Monsoon Company.

So, kids with asthma.  Huge problem (25% of all ER visits, tons of deaths, and sucky quality of life for lots of people).  The team hit a little hiccup to begin with as people all wanted to collaborate on the ideation phase.  Which is great, as long as we don’t hold that all ideas are created equal: the whole reason Product with a capital P exists is because some people have spent a long time figuring out how to do this right.  That said, it was a volunteer hackathon, so making everyone feel included was as much a part of the goal as saving kids with asthma.

The largest effect of that was the core app had to be built around SMS.  Which is tough: if the goal is to get kids to use something, you want something with the strongest possible promoting pressure, which generally means access to as much rich content as you can get.  That said, SMS means that it is cheap to deploy around the world and widens the audience, so even if it lowers engagement within a particular population, hopefully the increase in population overall makes up for it.

Which lead me to defining the problem.  The first place people went was about preventing asthma attacks by avoiding triggers, which I think is a logical first step.  Problem is, there are already apps that do journaling and after consulting with some epidemiologists (special thanks to Kate Weinberger from Columbia), it turns out that the causes of asthma are so manifold that trying to determine the exact cause of different kids asthma was difficult.  And moreover, even if we knew the triggers, we had no way of using big data to warn them about them: pollen could be literally one tree, five city blocks away, that only stirred things up when the wind was blowing the right direction.

So I pushed for a product that ignored the actual triggering sources and aimed to do three things for all kids:
a) prevent attacks (which when you are targeting kids in general means breathing and body exercises that increase lung capacity and core muscle groups)
b) reduce severity of attacks before they happen (with similar exercises as preventing attacks, but focusing more on the forcing of air in and out of the lungs when constricted)
c) reduce severity of attacks while they are happening (which means staying calm, using the inhaler and breathing together, and knowing when to call for help)

Trouble is, apparently pulmonologists and scientists like to squabble about exactly how you do those three things.  Given the severity of the problem and the number of people studying the problem, I was a little surprised that so little had been done in this area.  They couldn’t even tell me if it was better to rest or exercise after you’ve had an attack and recovered!

Like every problem, however, there is some opportunity in there.  Assuming we could get widespread usage of our apps, we’d actually generate the data that would answer those questions, which makes for an unofficial d) prevent attacks through research.

So having figured out a long list of stretches and breathing exercises we needed to get people to do, I now had to figure out a way to get people to do them via text.  Enter the tamagotchi.  We ended up giving every kid a “village” and then creating tasks that helped them grow it – essentially, a caretaker game, just like the tamagotchi.  The tasks, however, sneakily get people to do the exercises I wanted.

Here’s an example.  Your village is on fire…blow it out.  So do it, right now: blow out a fire.  99% of people purse there lips and blow, which is actually a form of resistive breathing that, low and behold, helps strengthen core lung function.  And a simple command gets most people to do it, without going into long details about the right motion.

Turns out, we could figure out a whole pattern of these that resulted in different stretches and exercises (my favorite, suggested by Sandeep, was “hug a really fat panda”).  And there is a side benefit to the village tasks: they get kids familiar with taking instructions via text, which comes in handy for “attack” part of the app.

Having figured out preventive exercises, we needed to create something for when kids were actually having an attack, which led me to create the largest flowchart of my life.  Basically, when a kid has an attack, they text in to a specific number and presto, we start asking them simple questions to help triage them.  They find an adult, use the inhaler and breathe appropriately, and if they’re enrolled in the larger game, get some cheering on from their villagers.

And yes, it is still really just a bunch of text and we don’t know yet if that’s enough to get kids motivated.  But I think even if the village metaphor doesn’t catch on, even just a free program that helps deal with an actual attack is valuable.  And because we lucked out and had an Apple developer in Alan, we also go to produce a simple iPhone app based on the same principles: blow into your mic in a particular pattern in order to play the game and build your resistive breathing.

The results are out at breatheapps.org and Sandeep’s company has promised to continue the work.  For my part, I’ll be staying involved, particularly in order to keep up with the data itself.  Can a simple text intervention get kids to do this?  Will it prevent attacks?  Will fewer kids go to the hospital?  We won’t know for awhile (assuming this catches on at all) but even if we get a few kids to breathe better, it was certainly worth a few sleeplessness nights at TEDActive.

A few fun numbers, as a followup to the recent post about the unlikely coincidence of Leslie Bradshaw and I both graduating from the same high school in the same year.

Approximately 3.5 million kids graduated from high school in the US in the year 2000. Of those, using stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 21,000 are management-level.  Assuming that only 1 in 100 managers is a founder, that’s 210 founders. That means the hit rate for founders in that particular year is about 1 in about 17,000.

If we accept those postulates, the chances of Leslie and I coming from the same 150-person high school graduating class (assuming that JCHS/Oregon/other shared environments had no unique effect) is 1 in about 13,000.

For reference, that’s about half as likely as the average American (AKA you) getting shot to death (thank you, National Security Council, for that cheery thought).

Here’s the thing: if a customer didn’t share your deal on Twitter or Facebook, there is probably a reason.  Maybe you made it too hard (strong inhibiting pressures) by not having a simple share button.  Or maybe they just didn’t think your deal was worthwhile enough (weak promoting pressure) to waste social capital annoying their friends with (strong inhibiting pressure).  Either way, it isn’t an accident.

If it was just strong inhibiting pressures, you can easily address it: add the share button and be done.  And if the promoting pressure was too weak, you can give a gentle nudge in that they may just need to be reminded that it is an option.  What you don’t want to do is pay them.

And that’s what PowerVoice does.  You send messages about offered you liked to your friends, they pay you money – not a unique idea (as pointed out by TechCrunch) and ultimately, not a good one.

In psych terms, what you’re doing is raising the promoting pressure: you’ve paying people to get over the inhibiting pressure of actually sharing something and annoying their friends with it, which has the obvious drawback.  But more importantly, you’re also paying people for something that they are hypothetically motivated to do anyway, which brings in the overjustification effect.

Basically, when you are paying people to tell others about your brand, you are replacing any intrinsic motivation they might have (actually liking your brand) with an extrinsic motivator (money).  So you’re actually shifting the “why” of their actions and how they justify things internally.  This isn’t problematic…until you stop paying them.  Because you wiped out any intrinsic motivation with your payment, the moment you stop handing them money to talk about you, they’ll both stop doing and stop having positive feelings about your brand.

So this is a short-term gain play.  Sure, you can grab some new followers by spreading the word and spending cash.  But ultimately, you undermine the very thing you were trying to build: brand awareness and loyalty.  What you want is authentic motivation, and you can’t buy that with straight money (though you can spend money on programs that encourage it).  Which is what more brands should do, instead of pumping money into things like PowerVoice.