Mary Panttaja

…where updraft implies a high preponderance of likelihood that something is really happening—that you are on the right track.

This morning, Saturday September 1, we are ensconced in our new apartment 95% moved in and totally functional. We chose the apartment Monday, signed and took possession Tuesday, hired movers Wednesday, and Friday did the whole shebang by 2PM when the movers left. Okay, I had some more unpacking and organizing yet, and it took a bit to do the whole first grocery run thing, but we ate dinner in our organized and furnished apartment. It surely helps that we only brought what we needed (except for three extra boxes of kitchen stuff), and that we had a house full of goods already packed and ready to ship. But here we are.

In addition, our partner Tom takes possession of his apartment today, partly furnished because the owners, at the last minute, didn’t want what was there. And we found and signed a letter of intent on an office that totally meets our specifications in size, style, location, etc. And that was quite a story: Wednesday, we asked to be shown the “Jack Falstaff” building at the corner of 2nd and Brannan, but when we got there the broker called and said that he made a mistake and he was about to show us (to his surprise) a place down the street. But it turned out to be perfect, perfect and the letter of intent was signed yesterday. It is three blocks from our apartment and two blocks from Tom’s apartment. (Our fourth partner, Matt, lives in Oakland and will be commuting.)

Last odd fact, we have a straight visual shot through a maze of buildings to the upper floors of our office building from our balcony–didn’t know that when we took it, because we hadn’t found the office yet—and that will help us with some network challenges.

That’s a bit of what you get in an updraft—a high preponderance of things going your way.

It is almost 20 years to the month since Jim and I started the original joint business that became Panttaja Consulting Group, Inc. As we start into helping launch another new business it will be interesting to note the similarities and differences. So far:

• You still have to hire people, get medical insurance and workman’s compensation insurance. But it seems to be easier and cheaper to outsource the process than it was. In fact, it seems to be a no-brainer to have a Human Resources outsourcing provider, so setting up the corporate structure for having employees is pretty much a menu driven process. Not so much to figure out.
• You have to find space to house the business. Of course, this depends on whether you are building a “virtual” company or one you want to locate in space and time. (That is, get everyone together much of the time.) We can choose not to “co-locate” people because of all the technology at hand that brings us together virtually: conference calls, virtual meetings, email, instant messaging, video chat, etc. It looks like we will be going “physical” with this new company, so we need the whole facilities and furniture scene. Though I will admit that, having been through it several times before, it is less daunting than that first foray into renting an office.
• The challenge of establishing the technology to support a company has more options these days. You can outsource it all with hosting companies and a wide variety of software tools. If you are not a software development company, you don’t need to install much of any software (you usually need a browser), but you can get away without buying much. Some of the online software choices (like Salesforce) are subscription-based with a fee (it’s called “software as a service”), but others like Google Notebooks are free. You will find free solutions for most of the general tasks you want software for, though they may or may not meet specific requirements.
• Even in the software business, many development environments are free or relatively cheap. They do not require the substantial investments we had to make 20 years ago.

So things stay the same, and things change. And the less you are dependent on physically gathering people, the more you can radically outsource your whole operation.

This follows a theme in the blogosphere (world of blogs) these days, which is outsourcing your life. Some of it is very cool. But yesterday I found myself with one of the ultimate non-outsourced projects—harvesting food for the week from the garden, picking the cherry tomatoes, pear-apples, and strawberries one by one. And it was great. Sometimes you want your life just to be your life.

Continuing the conversation about awareness of the planet, here is an interesting world-based organization that is working to figure out how statistical technologies (data collection, analysis, graphical visualizations) can help us make more effective decisions. The OECD is an organization that concerns itself with the evolution of our societies:

The OECD brings together the governments of
countries committed to democracy and the
market economy from around the world to:

• Support sustainable economic growth
• Boost employment
• Raise living standards
• Maintain financial stability
• Assist other countries’ economic development
• Contribute to growth in world trade

The OECD also shares expertise and exchanges views
with more than 70 other countries, from Brazil, China,
and Russia to the least developed countries in Africa.

And they have a special focus on statistical data and what it can tell us.

For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data. As well as collecting data, the OECD monitors trends, analyses and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.

The Organisation provides a setting where governments compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies.

There is a useful post by Michael Arrington in TechCrunch this morning. He spoke at the conference and discusses some of the technology that is evolving to capture the massive amounts of data and help us visualize what they mean. It’s another case of increasing awareness of the planet, in a more social construct, and using that awareness to make choices.

It makes me think about the simplistic and probably dumb systems we have all built over the years, that, if nothing else, have enabled us to evolve solutions that may really mean something in the biggest of pictures.

A very interesting post this morning by Peter Brantly of O’Reilly Radar on the multiplicity of projects aimed at gathering more sensed information on the state of the planet. This is focused on new science to enable us to learn what is really going on and make better choices.

Everywhere I look in the natural sciences, there is a sudden, significant maturing of large-scale distributed science projects that involve active real-time sensing of one of more aspects of the physical planet and its environs. These projects include Neon, the first widely distributed ecologically-based sensing project; the Keck Hydrowatch project based in the American West, and a burgeoning number of geological and space sensing systems. Together, these efforts are often coalesced together under the sobriquet Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in the ultimate hope that their data and insights may inform each other.

This made me think about our daily practice of developing more awareness for ourselves; to evolve our ability to actually know what is true and make better choices. It’s critical for ourselves and our planet that we not live inside of some story we tell ourselves, but actually see truly what’s happening. You can’t manage something that you do not see and understand. And you can’t move (yourself or your business) unless you have your feet on the ground with a true sense of where you are. That’s where traction comes from—feet (or wheels) on the real ground.

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.

We have a stack of books to read. The choices have come from a lot of different directions: lifestyle, business, new technology, programming, retirement. They all feed into the thinking process: what to create next.

Our process has included: watching what is going on in the blogosphere, attending conferences on new technology, trying to identify the most important thinkers and reading what they write, watching for interesting odd-bits and following their trails.

Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Work Week” came to my attention when he presented at the Ignite portion of the Web 2.0 Conference. His presentation “The Low Information Diet” was voted one of the top four presentations, and so he got to deliver it again at the closing session.

As a writer with books to publish, it has been interesting watching him go through the process of publishing his book, working the publicity trail using all the marketing tricks and techniques available. If anything, he is an agressive marketer and communicator. Something some of us frown at sometimes, though we are interested in the success it produces. This week he has been spoofed by Leno and then collected all the extra marketing appearances that such an event produces.

Reading his book has been on the list for two reasons: 1) Seeing how the publishing process works for him; 2) Learning what he has to say about a 4-hour work week. (Which is, of course, an intriguing idea.)

I was surprised at some of the really good ideas in this book, though I have some issues with some of the attitudes and techniques encouraged. For myself, I can see past the seemingly inappropriate recommendations (to daily manipulate your work efficiency to prove to your boss that you should be allowed to work out of the office, for one), and see that there are some ideas that really shift something about how I think about work and business:

1. It is possible to separate the ideas of earning a living (money to live) and your life and passionate work (see my work on Updrafting). You can build a business that generates the revenue and free time that allows you to dive into whatever you are passionate about. (This does not mean that your passion is not necessarily the same as the business that earns your income, but just that there is a possibility that you can separate them.) (I have done this before in my work, but not figured out Item 3: a strategic mistake; see below.)
2. If you are going to build a business to earn your income, it is most critical to really design a powerful and efficient business model. This is everything, for if the business is not financially efficient, it will not be efficient with your time and resources, and won’t generate income without a struggle. Been there and done that.
3. You can design and build a business model that doesn’t (after it is up and running) create a full-time job for yourself. This was really shocking—I always assume that what I am doing is creating full-time work for myself along with other folks. It was a very new idea to think about creating a business in which, as he says, “you outsource yourself.”
4. You can design an operational process that doesn’t care where you are—helped alot by the current technology platforms available. And he gives a lot of really specific tips, techniques, and references.
5. He gives a few business models for creating a totally outsourced business—they mostly focus around marketing products (things you can buy and resell at a good margin, or books and ideas). They don’t really get into the creative process: some of us are really interested in creating things—which somehow really does take time.
6. But the idea of creating a business the sole purpose of which is to automatically generate the revenue to support your chosen life style is an intriguing new, to me anyway, thought process.
7. If you created an automated income producing machine, then you get to spend your time on whatever you want. Travel and living overseas seem to be his passions, so he has lots of hints on how to do that on the cheap.

One theme that comes up is that where you live is an important part of the cost structure of the lives we have chosen. It is cheaper to live most other places in the world than it is to live here—thereby the reasonableness of really traveling—vagabonding. Many of the new retirement guides also suggest that life can be a lot cheaper for us if we intelligently chose where to live. The nix in the mix is that some of us have extended families that have inhabited neighborhoods for generations (like ours in Northern California), so picking up and leaving isn’t quite as easy as for some. (And though my children don’t live very close, they are also unlikely to follow us to Nevada or Arizona or Wyoming.)

Do I recommend the book? Yes and no. Some really challenging and useful ideas that I have not previously considered, but mixed in a bit with some shortsighted behaviors that are a little too manipulative. But that’s okay, take what’s useful and leave the rest. In general, it is a new angle from which to examine your life and make some decisions. What do you really want to do?

One of the blogs I read is Ryan Stewart’s Digital Backcountry where he covers rich internet applications. (He recently went to work for Adobe and covers Flex/Apollo extensively.)

There is a useful post on some new features coming out in Flex 3 that concern “deep linking” in Flash/Flex/Apollo applications. This has been an issue for web developers who come from the world where linking out of the application is possible and/or the user employing the “back” button is an inherent part of the application behavioral syntax. Flash/Flex applications, as “contained” application environments don’t inherently have a back button or a back button syntax and, up till now, the user couldn’t link out of the application.

Ryan writes correctly:

This also meant the back button wouldn’t work, so Flex/Flash felt very different from the browser experience and it was something that’s been criticized in parts of the community. There are some significant theoretical arguments about what the back button should actually do in the context of an application, and that has also been part of the problem.

In some ways I see this as an artifact resulting from trying to use one functional model to replace all other models whether or not it fit. The basic web technology (with its links and page sequencing (including back and forward)) was designed to present stand-alone objects (pages with text or whatever) in a sequential (or multi-linked-sequential) flow, originally without context or much control. Building functioning applications in this environment has always seemed like a bit of a kludgy hack to those of us who have designed contained and controlled application architectures. Of course, “web application” technology has evolved its capabilities to maintain application context and control behavior, but it has always suffered from a lack of true context control oftentimes because of behaviors like the back button.

So it is a “new” solution to a “new” problem: before the advent of the internet, application architecture enabled us exert control over content, context, and user behavior. Of course, they weren’t universally available over a ubiquitous universal network, so these days are better days in many ways. Adobe has published some really good talks and white papers on how application architecture took a large set of backwards steps, which are now getting addressed with several new offerings from many vendors.

Stewart reports that behavior that doesn’t reflect “browser” behavior is seen to be a deficient architecture. The reality is that every application needs to be able to control context and behavior as necessary within the requirements of the application, the user, and the proper control of the dataspace and context. Something as innocuous as the “back” button can’t be a sacred cow—elegance, usability, correctness, and common sense need to lead the day in building future applications.

The new application platforms that will allow applications to work on the internet and on the desktop (so far we’ve looked a bit at Adobe Apollo and Google Gears, though there are others) are exciting, but we have to get passed a need to hold them to a standard that only came to exist in the last decade and is a short term artifact of the current evolution of development capabilities.

And then there is the data management issue that Jim has discussed here, and which we will be exploring further. The models for managing the distributed dataspace of distributed applications (online and offline) are complicated and challenging.

We attended the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs Launch: Silicon Valley yesterday. It was very interesting and helpful. They showcased the top 30 startups from 170 applicants. Besides the wide variety of business concepts and models of the most attractive of the presentations—which is an interesting thing in itself—it was quite interesting to note how wide the disparity was between these, the top 15% hand-selected out of the larger pool.

And they differed in quality along quite a set of variables:

• Strength and quality of the underlying technology innovation
• Power and diversity of the underlying financial model
• Innovative leverage of existing markets
• Presentation skills and ability to communicate

It surprised me that there wasn’t more depth in the group at this level, though this is just one place that such companies can showcase their work. It was a great event though and I really got a sense of the kind of topics that are getting attention.

And for me, after being holed up in my country hermitage writing for years, a little practice in working a room again. Never my best suit, but not impossible to revive I see.

We did run into two of our former associates who are now entrepreneurs in their own right. Very cool to see them and reconnect.

Jim is posting on this event as well at jim.panttaja.com.

Pamela Slim posted an article that gets directly to one of the problems with a over emphasis on measurement: Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded

It is great reminder for me that there are very practical ways to explain and apply the principals of AWM (the Arising World Model). If not, then it’s not very useful. It’s application needs to extend from mundane, practical problems to the spiritual and philosophic questions that we ask ourselves. Everything should work