Bubba Murarka

I thought the iPhone 3g announce was cool.  Cisco’s holoconf demo is unreal…like I am still not sure if it is real. Stop what you are doing, click here, and watch the freaking video:

http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html

 Via the one and only…Guy!

I was driving back home last night rocking out to a local rock station which is not all that unusual when my iPod touch runs out of juice.  What was crazy was the ad I heard from the radio station, paraphrased:

“quit your googling, facebooking, etcer-ing, and twittering…“ 

Lofty company! 

Granted I live in SF so this is not quite mainstream, but this is the first sign I’ve seen that clearly points to twitter breaking through.  I won’t even link to all the chatter about twitter being life changing (for a small set of people I think it is…jury’s still out for mainstream), or to the latest meme about friendfeed eating twitter’s lunch.  Why?  Well, I haven’t heard anyone say “friendfeeding” on the radio (yet). 

As much as twitter’s growth could suffer from their technical challenges they look to have a chance to become a verb.  I’ve had a mixed experience wrt twitter as I only follow a few close friends and have been occasionally pleasantly surprised by the assisted serendipity.  But not nearly enough to become an evangelist or hardcore believer. 

Update: Reading feeds right now and saw Dare has posted about about chasm crossing. 

A while back my friend Phil Boyte asked me to speak at his yearly leadership conference for high school students.  It happened last night and it was a blast! It was sort of a homecoming as I had the opportunity to attend this conf. when I was in high school.  I was asked to speak about lesson I’ve learned to help create success.  It was a wonderful opportunity and I really enjoyed the setup - 4 sessions with ~30 students at a time & lots of Q/A time. 

I covered three points and shared stories from my personal experiences as well as stories / observations about my friends.  Phil dropped me a wonderful note today letting me know that my points really connected with the students as they were shared after the sessions.  I learned a ton through the experience as I got to refine my thinking, connect with folks with a different view point, and even got a bit of market research on how high schoolers use social networks! 

Oh, yeah, the three points were:

• Find a mentor - for your professional and personal development areas or biggest challenges.  Equally important is to become a mentor as it will help you grow just as much as it helps the other person.  Mentors can even be historical figures…read all about them to learn how they were effective.  Some of the kids asked for my email address and I really hope to hear from them. 
• Be persistent - that word is part of the blog masthead, and something that can never be underestimated.  You must persist through failures and obstacles to reach your goals.  If you can’t reach your goal immediately, come up with a plan to get there over time through incremental steps and experiences (e.g. you don’t run a marathon on the first day you start to train for one). 
• Find your passion & team - figure out what you do so well that time disappears for you and then figure out how to get others around with complimentary skills / passions.  If you have a team in place, make sure you have people doing what they are great at. 

As I’m writing these up I realize I could have cited books that helped me learn each of  these over the years.  Next time I guess.  The questions were great…I can’t wait to see the guy how said his goal was to be the CEO of Starbucks run that place some day.  I hope he hooks me up with a free latte!

What lessons would you share with a room full of high school students to help them be as successful as possible? 

update: grammar edits, minor content addition (darn post button instead of save and continue to edit)

Whether you like him or not, you should read him.   Welcome back my friend…and next time you come near SFO I hope to get a call!

From the Cedar Creek Treehouse website:

“we are redefining the concept of a treehouse resort”

Turns out there is a market to redefine!

Last week Microsoft’s JD Lewin (Evangelism) and Michele Johnson (Strategic & Emerging Business) sponsored our Halo 3 Fragfest at the Microsoft Home.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any links to the Microsoft Home but it is one kewl place!  They have converted a part of the Microsoft Silicon Valley’s Conference Center into a home (living room with flatscreens, bedroomss, full kitchen, etc.) that shows how a variety of Microsoft technologies could exist in a futuristic home.  It is a totally dialed setup and even though I had worked at MS in the Silicon Valley for 4 years I had never been inside.  Be sure to go if you ever have a chance to see it!  They also have one up in Redmond that is even bigger…also worth checking out.

We had a great group of VCs, Entrepreneurs & Corp Development folks showed up for the Halo 3 showdown.  A while back Munjal Shah and I started doing this in his basement as a reason to get together and talk some trash with mutual friends.  I mean network and brainstorm new ideas! 

Having the event at the MSFT Home was a special treat and saved our backs from lugging TVs between houses.  Unfortunately there were a couple of Corp Dev ringers that joined the VC team to put the beat down on entrepreneurs!  Luckily the stakes were just bragging rights and not funding terms.  Nevertheless, I’m starting a serious training regiment to sharpen my skillz before the next fragfest.  If you are a top notch entrepreneur & Halo 3 player drop me a line…we might be able to use your help!

Found this via Brad Feld’s blog and thought it was a great peek into google’s internal intranet tools.   Most big company folks I know say their intranets are a mess and unusable. I’ve seen a bunch of startups doing interesting stuff in this space.  However,  it seems like google has tried something different on their own.  I wonder how useful it has been for their folks. 

Automated status report management with search is pretty killer idea, but doesn’t make writing status reports anymore fun (thus hard to get done)…even though it is critical for project management. 

I built an ideas portal at microsoft and it got lots of content initially, but the pipeline for reviewing / approving / implementing was not there.  Google seems like they’ve nailed that aspect with top down buyin & committed time to review and even fund some “out there crazy” ideas. 

Expert search is just freaking awesome assuming people update their profiles.  Stupid that it is so hard and takes human supernodes inside of a company to help keep information flowing between people. 

At Bfast on Sunday a few friends and I came up with a feature idea / request for facebook.  What if you could get a feed of friends’ status messages that contain specific words.  This is basically like twitter’s track feature.  Mike Vernal, who just joined facebook from MSFT, was at the table and thought it might already be available.   He said if it was not he’d look into it because it was a good idea.

Turns out that the feature wasn’t there after I fooled around for a bit on facebook.   I sent Mike a quick note letting him know and last night I got a response with the following directions:

Go here:
1. http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status
2. Click on the subscribe link
3. Add a &q=term1+term2+term3 parameter

Dang, that that was pretty fast.  Here is what I am using it for:

I’ve added a bunch of geo related keywords and tracking if any friends (esp. from Seattle) are in the bay area.  this is awesome.  it is like a poor man’s dodgeball when paired with an rss driven sms alerting service (like windows live alerts).

I wonder how long something like that would take to push live at Google, Yahoo, MSFT (not just coding, but the process)?  Of course the better comparison would be at a web company with ~ 500 people at it…but I can’t think of any of those off the top of my head. 

I wonder if this article promoting placement of ads near “action spots” (e.g. links) is the right thing to do after reading Mr. Belshe’s latest material.  From a UX perspective, I certainly have accidentally clicked ads near comment fields & site navigation links way to often. 

Facebook’s approach to I18N, outsourcing to the userbase, seems to be going pretty darn well.  What is even better about it is that popular apps will also benefit & get I18N much easier than in other development platforms.  Sweet!