When I first set out to make this list, it was surprising what a disappointing year 2011 was for albums. That being said, there were a few gems that stuck out. Using the magic of science/last.fm, these are the alubms I listed to the most in 2011:

1. James Blake
2. Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire
3. Bibio – Mind Bokeh
4. Wilco – The Whole Love
5. Joe Henry – Reverie
6. Washed Out – Within and Without
7. Gillian Welch – The Harrow & Harvest
8. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l
9. Tom Waits – Bad as Me
10. Charles Bradley & Menahan Street Band – No Time for Dreaming

Leave a Comment

Today marks the first time in 12 years that I haven’t been employed by someone else. My excitement and motivation to build something I believe in have outweighed my aversion to risk.

I’ve always been motivated by money and stability, and usually stay in a safe situation long after I should have left. So why the radical departure from my previous self? The inspiration of innovation.

The past three years have seen technology go through a massive upheaval thanks to three transformative innovations: iOS, Cloud Computing and the “Consumerization” of IT. Each individually changed the rules of the game. Taken as a whole, this triumvirate has changed every business user’s expectations about how products should work. If something isn’t easy to use and isn’t always available, regardless of how it’s consumed, it will not survive. Your biggest competitor is likely the one that doesn’t exist yet.

This is no grand realization, but it was enough to make me think about what I want to do now and in the future. On one hand, I had a very good job at a stable company, as well as an outstanding manager who was both an incredible mentor and my outspoken advocate. But in staying with the company, my future would have been stale technology, fear of innovation and tighter golden handcuffs.

This change in our technical world has been set in motion, and I can either be a part of or watch it pass me by. Both the newspaper and music industries saw the change for years and did nothing. Look where it got them.

I learn best by doing, falling over and getting back up. So I’ve decided to go all in and start Gantry, Inc., focusing on making ExecutiveView the best product I can make. This is a very exciting time for both technology and business, and I’ve never been more motivated to be a part of it.

As I left my previous job, only a single person there thought I was making a bad decision; everyone else was extremely supportive. And it was shocking how many shared the desire to build their own companies but couldn’t, for one reason or another. So to everyone out there who does not have the courage to go his/her own way, take advice from Steve Jobs, a man who always follows his passions:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Leave a Comment

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." ~ Steve Jobs

I resigned from my cushy and safe corporate job the day after Steve to try and do exactly what he says in this quote. Life is short; you have to take chances.

Leave a Comment

http://dashes.com/anil/2011/02/malcolm-browne-dash.html

But commitment, I understand. Doing really hard challenging things, I understand. Trying to let go of my ego enough to focus my energies and attentions and ambitions on someone other than myself, I’m starting to understand.

Leave a Comment

http://gigaom.com/cloud/gartner-gets-it-wrong-with-cloud-quadrant/

Gigaom offers more proof that Gartner is irrelevant. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has Amazon AWS as a visionary reserving the leader quadrant for Verizon Business & AT&T.

Leave a Comment

Fact: 98% of all Android phones are sold to people who don't know any better. The other 2%: devs who promise to write apps but never do. ~ Alex Payne

Leave a Comment

One of BlackBerry’s primary talking points for its Playbook is that multitasking is its major iPad-killing feature. For the average enterprise and home user, I don’t understand how this is a feature that anyone would care about.

Every demo BlackBerry gives usually goes something like this:

1. Launch Movie, play it
2. Launch eBook Store
3. Launch Calculator
4. Launch Web Browser
5. Switch between the applications to show that they are still running

Without fail, they say something along the lines of “this is true multitasking, we aren’t just freezing the applications in the background.” This, of course, differentiates the Playbook from iOS devices since Apple’s implementation of multitasking will freeze all background applications (save for a few functions such as GPS, music, incoming voip calls, etc).

So the PlayBook user can have a calculator and web browser actively running in the background while they buy a book? This offers nothing more than strain on resources, specifically the battery.

Any company who thinks it can innovate the tablet space by replicating a PC experience has already failed. Microsoft tried this for almost a decade and failed miserably. BlackBerry is on course to repeat history.

Leave a Comment

View Video

Mavis Staples, where have you been all my life?

Leave a Comment

The private sector is always the lead locomotive. It’s always the engine that gets things done. It’s where the creativity comes from. But we build best when there’s some public/private partnership. And you can go back to the early history, when our infrastructure need at that time was to have bridges and turnpikes and roads and canals. We did all that together. We got electricity out to everybody that way, even plain old telephone service.The aberration was the eight years between 2001 and 2009, when we became somehow captive to this unhistorical aberration, that the market could do all of this by itself and let's forget public policy altogether. And as a result of that, we're 15 or 20th, or something like that, in the world with regard to getting broadband out to all of our citizens.We're falling behind. And this is an opportunity-creating technology that is the central infrastructure challenge of the early part of the 21st century. We need to get serious about it, and we have not been serious about it, until the last year or so. ~ Michael Copps

An excellent explanation on why we need government involvement in Net Neutrality.

Leave a Comment

Thanks to the wonders of aggregation and Last.fm, this is my list of the top 10 records of 2010 (or at least those I listened to the most):

1. The New Pornographers – Together
2. Beach House – Teen Dream
3. Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid
4. Vampire Weekend – Contra
5. She & Him – Volume Two
6. Local Natives – Gorilla Manor
7. Hot Chip – One Life Stand
8. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse – Dark Night of the Soul
9. The Divine Comedy – Baing Goes the Knighthood
10. LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening

The following five also made the list, but were made before 2010:

1. Passion Pit – Manners
2. Mayer Hawthorne – A Strange Arrangement
3. Theophilus London – Jam!
4. Lee Fields & The Expressions – My World
5. Menahan Street Band – Make the Road by Walking

Leave a Comment