Last week, Andrew Mason, founder and former CEO of Groupon, launched a new company. The company, Detour, makes “immersive, location-aware audio walks”. Just like Uber turns your GPS-enabled smart-phone to your personal driver, Detour turns your phone into a personal tour guide. Andrew and TechCrunch  give more background. I signed up immediately and was given early access, and had a great experience.

[Full disclosure: I used to work for Andrew at Groupon, and I’m a big fan]

I chose the tour of the San Francisco Ferry Building. There were a few minor technical issues getting started (that the team is aware of and working on), but most of the tour went extremely well. The Ferry Building is not hard to love, given it’s design, prominent location, the delicious shops inside. The main guide did a good job narrating the history, but the real treat, but a couple things made it even better than having a live tour guide. Since you’re listening on your headphones, they can provide different background sounds – walking up to the building, I heard old cable cars rumbling, horses neighing and clopping, and talk from a market a hundred years ago. But the real treat was the interviews with old-timers connected to the building. The man who has maintained the clock for decades explained how it is built to last for centuries, and at 120 years old is maybe 1% into it’s design life. A (fourth-generation?) worker on the tower describes hidden graffiti in secret spots, and tells a harrowing accident story about an accident. Detour didn’t just give a tour of a place, it was an intimate look into the life of the city and the people that have built it.

Technically, the app worked well. The marketing copy says that you shouldn’t need to pull out your phone after you start the tour, and that was mostly correct. The content is broken up into chapters, each of which starts when you get to a certain location. The tour guide gave clear directions, and I easily found all except one of the points on the first try. The timing of the directions was also impeccable – every time I thought “Wait, am I going the right way?”, it wasn’t 5 seconds before she said “You should be passing X on your left” and I was right there. I don’t know if they check your location in-between chapters and calibrate, or I walk exactly as fast as the tour guide expected, but it really did feel like magic. It was easy to forget that I was listening to a recording instead of being guided by a live person.

I have no doubts that the technical issues will be fixed – Andrew has great product sense and personality and the tech team is very sharp. As long as the tours remain as high quality as the one I took, Detour should be a great product, for tourists and locals alike. Some people thought Detour was a strange followup from the founder of Groupon, but I disagree. Although the e-commerce aspect is what drove that business, Groupon was, at its heart, about loving your neighborhood and your city more and having a great time. Detour is another, possibly purer expression of that same goal. It makes me want to visit more new places, to see them through Detour’s eyes.

[Last night I went to the Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source meetup where Chris Anderson of DIYDrones/3DRobotics told his story.  Here are my notes, slightly rewritten and re-ordered to make more sense if you weren’t there]

DIY Drones talk by Chris Anderson, 3D Robotics

1/16/2013, Nokia Sunnyvale

Backstory involving building a Lego Mindstorms autopilot with his kids in 2008 (this is a good story worth watching, e.g. from his Maker Faire talk)

DIYDrones Community

• He fostered the community by “being dumb in public”, and letting interested people come and teach him
• DIYDrones is now the biggest community of people building drones, ~30K registered members, bigger than any aerospace company
• Ground control software written by an IT guy in City Hall in the Outback
• Smartphone processors and sensors have revolutionized robotics sensors and components
• Powerful, light, small sensors and processors are the “Peace divided of the smart phone wars”

[Read more…]

Shill time, baby!

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I love my iPad. I’m a sucker for the apps, the screen, the feel of it, the whole package. So I was excited to see a new project on Kickstarter for a new kind of accessory.

I don’t play games on my iPad as much as I did when I first got my iPod touch, but I used to play a lot. One of my few complaints about iPod gaming was the fact that there was no tactile feedback when you pressed the screen. The guys at Joystickers are making a button that you can stick onto the screen to solve just that problem. Go there, watch the video, pledge some money.

The part I’m really excited about are a couple of fancy styluses – one like a nice pen and one like a paintbrush. I love using NoteTakerHD, but the stylus I have is too short and thin to feel really comfortable in my hand. I’m dying to try out the Flow and the Scribe. To sum up, this is a great looking project worth contributing to. Check it out!

A few months ago, my wife went on a kick where we watched the first few seasons of the TV show Dallas, rented on DVD from Blockbuster Online. If you watch 2-3 episodes a day of anything, you can’t but help become a little obsessed. So when we heard there was going to be a movie remake of Dallas, we immediately critiqued all of their casting decisions and came up with out own more accurate cast for the movie. We spent weeks debating the pros and cons of each potential casting choice, scoured IMDB like Nike at a Brooklyn playground, and came up with the perfect cast. (note to self: If you ever spend that much time on anything, WRITE IT DOWN!).

Now I don’t actually care about a single mainstream celebrity, not one bit. I’m pretty up to speed on their lives due to the gossip magazines my wife leaves around the house (any reading material is acceptable in the restroom) but unless there was a complete debacle like at the end of Miss Congeniality, I would never actually seek out celebrity news.

I don’t care about celebrities, but I had a roaring good time casting Dallas, so I decided to try the same exercise with media I do care about: nerdy programming blogs! I have my own set of celebrities that are huge in their own sphere but who are COMPLETELY INVISIBLE to normal people. A normal person, like my wife, would have no idea who any of these people are. So as my gift to everyone who needs any easy way to explain the personality and influence of a programming blogger, I present this mapping of real world celebrities to programming blogosphere celebrities:

[Read more…]

I’m a fan of the Fail Blog, and the recent Sign Design Fail included a Google Maps StreetView link to Concord, NC, a suburb of Charlotte. They have streetview there? Apparently. I zoomed out to the entire USA and they have covered a TON of cities, many more than I would have suspected in the limited time it has been out. Apparently their data integration process is pretty streamlined to handle all that.

(click for bigness)

I’ve been quiet since the birth of my second daughter 3 weeks ago. A little too quiet for my taste, so here’s a quick personal post (apologies to those anticipating my usual hardcore technical content).

Lots of people write their impressions as a first time parent, but there’s not much to them. Usually it’s stuff like “Babies are small” and “I’m overwhelmed.” (trust me, I said brilliant stuff like that a couple years ago after my first). This time I’ve got all of the mechanics down pat (cooking while holding an infant, the proper bouncing to rocking ratio, etc) so I’ve had different observations that I was too blown away to notice the first time around. Let’s hope they’re useful to anyone contemplating a second child.

• Typing with one hand is hard and slow.
• Watching a newborn is like driving – doesn’t nearly use your whole brain but occupies your body enough that all you can do is think.
• No matter how much your infant cries, if you jump up from playing with your toddler to care for the infant, then the toddler learns that crying = results. Bad lesson.
• Being able to fall asleep fast is useful, since you never know how long you’ll get to sleep.
• Some items of housework are important (clean laundry, empty sink) while most others are not.
• If you want your kids well taken care of during the day, make sure your wife gets to sleep at night.
• Anything you want done, get it done fast (see bullet #2 for explanation).
• Love doesn’t happen automatically, it needs to be cultivated. While I’m thrilled about the newborn, I don’t have the same feelings towards her as I do towards the toddler because I have years of memories, experiences, and interactions with the toddler. But that doesn’t diminish what I have for the newborn – I’m already so much closer to her than I was two weeks or even one week ago.
• Following up the last point, you have to put in the time and effort if you want to enjoy your kids. Just like you’d never expect to learn something you didn’t work hard at and experiment with, you probably won’t love your kids as much if you don’t put in lots of consistent time in caring for them.

It’s been a great couple of weeks and I look forward to decades more with my two little girls!

Something very delightful on a Friday afternoon:

Go ahead, try it, it’s fun! (If I’m not #1 when you click it’s YOUR fault for not linking to me more often! 🙂 )

That was one of my New Year’s Resolutions that’s now resolved (be the #1 search result on Google for my name). Now I’ve just got to lose 30 pounds and get some revenue out of my startup!