Hulu.com

Link to Wired.com article

He [Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu] and his crew would emerge from their dismal cave with the sleekest, easiest-to-use, most professional video site on the Internet. Not only would it deliver shows and movies from Fox and NBC Universal, it would take you to programs from every other major network and studio. Full-length episodes. Entire seasons. For free. Within months of that late-August announcement, Hulu would be among the top 10 US video sites in number of clips streamed. Om Malik, one of the bloggers who had ridiculed it from the start, would pronounce it "brilliant." TechCrunch readers would vote it best video startup of 2007. "Game Over. Hulu Wins," Arrington would declare in a conciliatory post. How did that happen?

One paragraph, "As Dobron describes it, the initial business plan was all too predictable...", describes how Hulu was originally going to be "business as usual" - with the media company limiting the content in order to protect its existing business lines (syndication and DVD sales). However, this most likely would have failed, as previous ventures had in the past. Instead, they brought in an "outsider" to develop Hulu, underscoring the importance of occasionally questioning the assumptions and limits that people (and/or businesses) place on themselves.

The plan was to outsource both the site design and the underlying computer code. Kilar was aghast. "Technology is the source of our competitive advantage," he explains—the key to a service that would provide a high-quality videostream and support an ever-growing number of users and shows. "For us to design the company to last, we had to write every line of code ourselves." He sent the network people back to their old jobs and told the consultants they were out.

Chernin says. "You can't protect old business models artificially." This is a truth the tech community knows well, but it's not what you expect to hear from a media baron like Chernin. What he and Zucker have come to understand is that the media companies no longer have a choice: If they don't put their shows online, someone else will. "The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available," Zucker says. "We don't know for sure what the impact is going to be on our established businesses. But we want to make sure consumers know they don't need to steal our content. That's really what Hulu is about."

Finally, after decades of dictating what we can watch and when, the networks would be reduced to a Web widget, functioning at the user's whim. Just as it should be.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself to Get the Most Out of Life

Article at ZenHabits

1. Who do I love, and what am I doing about it?
2. Am I pursuing my dream, or is fear stopping me?
3. Am I doing something that matters?
4. What am I doing to help others?
5. Am I as good a person as I want to be?
6. What am I doing to live life with passion, health and energy?

For #2, it is well worth watching Randy Pausch's "last lecture" - Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

The accompanying text to #3 is worth excerpting in full.

There's a difference between doing work, and doing work that really
matters. Much of the time, we use up the few days we have on this
earth with busy-work, stuff that doesn't make much difference, and
that's sadly a waste of our lives.

Recently on Dumb Little Man, writer Ali Hale suggested you ask
yourself, "Will this matter in five years?" I think this is a great
question. It helps you distinguish between trivial busy-work that will
take up all of your time but not matter in a few years, and tasks and
projects and goals with high impact that will make a difference, in
your career, in your life, in the lives of others.

Pecha-Kucha

Link to Wired.com article

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down.

Link to JoelOnSoftware article

It sounded like a good idea. Speakers have to plan very carefully and rehearse repeatedly to make sure their speech is going to synchronize correctly with the slides, which makes for a more polished speech. They have to edit mercilessly to boil their subject matter down to 400 seconds, which makes it more interesting and dynamic. And if they suck, well, you don't have to wait very long for them to go away!

101 Atheist Quotes

An interesting read for atheists and religious people alike:

Link to Atheist Blogger page

Another quote that I quite like:

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

- Eric Hoffer

Advice on how to run effective meetings

Link to Cnet article

For companies to operate effectively, executives, managers, and key employees need to know how to run effective meetings. Meetings are how conflicts are resolved and plans are agreed upon. They are how critical strategic and operating processes are developed, managed, and to some extent, executed. Conversely, ineffective meetings result in lost productivity and frustration. They can also be a sign of a dysfunctional workplace, which can result in operating failure.

Three rules of meeting etiquette

1. Every meeting has a start time and an end time.
2. Every meeting is run by someone who is responsible for every aspect of the meeting including agenda, attendance, punctuality, and documentation. That person keeps everyone on topic and moves the meeting along using the methods described below.
3. Key decisions that are reached during the meeting regarding strategies, plans or objectives should be published by whoever ran the meeting within one day. That also goes for follow-up or action required and an owner for each item.

Five rules of engagement for effective meetings

1. Listening is good. Gratuitous speech is bad. Silence means consent. Don't chime in just to hear your own voice.
2. Presenting new ideas or brainstorming is good. Knocking down another's idea is bad. There's a time for reaching consensus.
3. Attack the problem or issue, not the person you disagree with. "I don't agree with you" is okay, but "I think you're an idiot" isn't.
4. Stay on topic, but don't beat a dead horse. Save other subjects for other meetings. Use a "parking lot" for important issues that may need to be revisited at a later date.
5. Be open, honest, and forthcoming. Don't hold back, bullshit, or sugar-coat issues. This is especially critical in meetings where key decisions are based on the information presented.

The Death of Network Television

Link to Wired.com article

Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence.

Ways that broadcast TV might be reborn:

1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal
2. Know your brand
3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience
4. Content counts
5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it
6. Don't break faith with your audience
7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em
8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend
   

Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive... It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable—about 65 million—hasn't budged for a decade.

To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show."

"A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast."

Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows.

Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there’s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. (a textbook example: Joss Whedon's Firefly)

For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction—toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel.

Shai Agassi - Better Places

Shai Agassi's TED Talk



Link to Wired.com article

The problem, he decided, was oil-consuming, CO₂-spewing cars. The solution was to get rid of them. Not just some, and not just by substituting hybrids or flex fuels. No half measures. The internal combustion engine had to be retired. The future was in electric cars.

Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of "smart" charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan—unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go—all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They'd buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity—the minutes.

When I ask Shai if he's worried about a competitor stealing his idea, he stares at me like I'm an idiot. "The mission is to end oil," he says, "not create a company."

Most startups try out their product on beta testers. Agassi wanted a beta country. A cooperative national government would be willing to modify the tax code or offer other incentives—essential to getting consumers on board quickly.

The entire staff is trying to write a mission statement with help from a moderator. He flips through slides on a screen: "Our mission is to transform personal mobility." "Our mission is to break the world's oil addiction (before it breaks us)."

Agassi, in a black leather jacket, a stiff blue-and-white button-down, and faded jeans, stops the moderator. "We still think we're selling to them," he says, after one of his long, drawn-out pauses. "We're not. It's not us to them. It's them to us. You see, people want this to happen; we just happen to be in the way of their getting what they want. We can't give them the car fast enough. That's something we need to capture: 'We're here to serve you,' not 'We're here to sell to you.' We're a facilitator, not the creator. This is going to be a community. We just need to get out of their way. They're going to push for policy, they're going to sell the cars, they're going to be zealots."

Update: Wired.com article on EVs being deployed in Hawaii, and the reasons why Hawaii is ideal as a test site

Update: Wired.com article showing Better Place's battery swap prototype