Instagram for Hamburgers

Had an interesting conversation with a friend last night about innovation. I tend to align pretty squarely with the Peter Thiel school of thought, i.e., that innovation has stagnated massively in relative terms over the past 50 years, and we're generally not solving hard problems anymore. My friend thinks innovation is flourishing because "tools" and "frameworks" have gotten significantly better over the past 10 years or so, allowing people to go from  idea to prototype (or company) in record time. While that's true, I'd argue that this has actually led to a decrease in innovation rather than an increase, because it's so easy to build something silly and turn it into a play company.

For instance, most of you have probably seen the parody of stuff that Silicon Valley people say. But I actually hear about companies like this all the time. So today, I'd like to officially announce the pre-alpha release of BurgerFlux™, a.k.a Instagram for Hamburgers.

BurgerFlux™ is a mobile social hyperlocal crowd-sourced culinary design platform that uses game dynamics to bring the most deliciously-imagined burger to fruition. Here's how it works. You, the hungry, burger-craving warrior, make your way to a local BurgerFlux Bistro, or a BurgerFlux Participating Partner (Burger PaPa). When you arrive at your imminent burger paradise, whip out your BurgerFlux Capacitor (a.k.a. iPhone 4 or above) and open up the sleekly-designed BurgerFlux Designer. With a few taps, you can select not only what goes on top of your FluxBurger™, but also what the "buns" are made of. Fried eggs surrounding a kobe beef patty topped with locally-sourced dinosaur kale and heirloom tomatoes, with a ponzu dipping sauce? I'll have two. Once you're satisfied with your creation, simply hit the "Eat me" button, and your order will be instantly put on the queue, with payment deducted via NFC, or Square, or one of our roaming BurgerBankers, who will conveniently procure your payment from your back pocket while you are deciding on quail eggs versus extra carnitas.


But wait, there's more! Your burger design is instantly shared with all other BurgerFlux customers! Indecisive? No problem! Just order the most popular FluxBurger of the day, week, month, or millenium. Locally-designed burgers are automatically given higher weight, and the default view shows your friends' recently-imagined burgers immediately upon opening the app. But just like that second and third bite of a FluxBurger, it gets even better. If you submit a new burger design, and other people order your creation, you earn points towards a future burger purchase! Which is why your design is instantly shared to Facebook, Twitter, your own automatically-created automatically-created Tumblr (don't think too hard), with your BurgerFlux Bistro locale auto-checked into on Google Checkins, Foursquare, and Yelp (for experts). And it probably goes without saying, but we use Hadoop to process the BurgerLogs and track BurgerTrends, allowing us to align the BurgerGraph with your social graph and maximize your burger enjoyment vector.


BurgerFlux runs on node.js and will go public (launch and IPO) on or around April 1st, 2012.

Christopher Hitchens, and Secret Superpowers of Stammerers

I'm a bit ashamed to say that prior to Christopher Hitchens' death, I don't think I had seen any of his interviews. I started YouTubing around the other day, and I was amazed at the videos I found. Regardless of whether you agree with his beliefs, it's clear that he was an amazingly vibrant intellectual mind and an incredibly skilled debater.

So I was also surprised to discover shortly into the first video that Christopher Hitchens was a stutterer!

As a stutterer myself, I possess the strange ability to spot other stutterers that non-stutterers usually can't. I remember once during university, a very prominent politician came to give a talk, and it was clear in her opening remarks that she was a "covert stammerer" (i.e., pauses and substitutes words, but doesn't repeat syllables). I asked my friends afterwards if they noticed anything strange about her speech, and no one did. I told them she was a stutterer, and they were quite surprised.

In any case, since Christopher Hitchens was also one of the most fearsome debating powers in the world, I questioned my secret superpower, and decided to leave it to the Google. A quick search for "Christopher Hitchens stutterer" leads to a New Yorker profile that mentions how he used to have a "severe stutter", but overcame it via massive amounts of public speaking and debating. "Overcame" is somewhat of a misnomer here, as it never really went away, but needless to say, he was an unbelievably skilled speaker.

Which I suppose just goes to show you that communication involves far more than mere fluency of speech rhythm.

Cleanliness in Asia

I've spent about six months each in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul, and there are some huge differences in cultural norms for personal hygiene and cleanliness between the East and the West. I picked up some good habits there, and look back now with filthy horror on certain breaches of sanitation that are considered normal here in the West. Here are three of the worst offenders:

1) Shoes in the house. Everywhere I've lived in Asia, you take your shoes off as soon as you enter the house. It makes a lot of sense - you've been walking around all day on god-knows-what, and if you then walk all over your home, you've brought all that stuff inside. Take your shoes off - your house will stay cleaner as a result.

2) Street-clothes on the bed. This one really bothers me now. I know tons of people in the States who will sit down in a disgusting city subway, lean back on a grimy seat at the movie theater, go hiking through a dusty forest, whatever, and the first thing they do when they get home is sit on the bed. I used to take naps after school/work still wearing street clothes, but would at least stay on top of the covers. Still gross. Before you get in bed, at the least, change your clothes, but preferably, you should shower.

3) Corollary to number two - suitcases on the bed. Holy crap! In the States, people will drag their suitcase through puddles on the street, stick it into the underbelly of an airplane for a trans-pacific jaunt, transfer it to the rank trunk of their car which hasn't been cleaned in months, and when they finally get to their destination, they'll unpack by putting that disgusting rolling case of biological mysteries on the bed that they're about to sleep in! Super nasty. According to a doctor friend of mine, this is also a hypothesis for how bedbugs spread from place to place.

Plenty of other examples exist, and there are certainly areas where the West does way better than the East (ahem, dental hygiene in China and Japan, especially male office workers, ahem). But if you want to make your home and bed a cleaner, more appealing place, this is a good place to start.

Siri-an Revolution

I used Siri for the first time a week or so ago, and I was exquisitely underwhelmed. It's basically a somewhat decent speech recognition system attached to a crappy version of Eliza, which was a simple question-and-answer artificial intelligence program written over 30 years ago. All of which begs the question - why do people love it so much?

Simply, Apple succeeded by humanizing Siri and then marketing the hell out of it (her?), even so far as to inspire various parodies such as the husband and wife argument. I've watched people use Siri with fascination, trying to tease out "sassy" responses, and searching for Easter eggs beyond what was reported in the press. In fact, I've seen this use case much more than actually useful things. But it's interesting anyway to compare with Google Voice Search, which has been around way longer and shares a similar feature set.

Google Voice Search is the best speech recognition system I've personally used. It's been getting increasingly better over time, and even learns how different individuals pronounce things differently. Android also added "Voice actions" a while back that essentially do what Siri does. So what's the problem? Why doesn't it get the attention that Siri does?

The problem is that most people don't even know these features exist. And the people that do know aren't compelled to use them. In both Apple's and Siri's cases, the feature sets are similar (Siri arguably has a larger vocabulary and better understanding of "natural language", but not by much). But in the case of Siri, people have an emotional connection, and perhaps it's this connection that pushes them to use what is clearly not yet a polished piece of technology.

What's curious is that Google has also shown the ability to connect emotionally with users, some examples being the absolutely brilliant "Search On" campaign that included the "Parisian Love" commercial shown during the Super Bowl, and most definitely the tear-jerker Chrome commercial "Dear Sophie". But in these cases, the marketing was much more general than "small feature of mobile operating system in order to convince people to buy my phone". This was by design, of course, but a notable difference nonetheless.

From a usability point of view, Apple unsurprisingly wins. How do you use Siri? Raise your phone and start talking after the beep. Yep, pretty darn simple. How do you use Voice Search/Actions (great name, btw....) on Android*? Well, there's a little microphone in the IME (that's "input method editor", for the inquisitive), in case you want to speak instead of typing. And there's a big microphone on the home screen next to the search box. And you can also press that big microphone button and tell it do something like, "Send a text message to Bob". And there's also this thing called "Voice Dialer" which does essentially a small part of what voice actions can do. Etc. Which experience would you feel more comfortable explaining to your parents? Yeah.

I always love observing how marketing and usability affect product outcomes, and since the battle between Android and iOS is only heating up, I can't wait to see what comes our way in the new year.

*I haven't seen ICS yet, so these comments are for older versions.

The King's Speech (and me)

Tonight, I finally gathered the courage to watch The King's Speech. Why did I need courage to watch a movie, you might ask? The reason is both simple and intricately complex:

I'm a stutterer, and I have been for as long as I remember.

Well, there it is - I've said it. To be fair, I actually don't remember stuttering when I was little. My first very distinct memory of stuttering was sometime in seventh grade, when I had trouble saying "nosotros" (we/us) in Spanish class. But I also remember knowing I was going to have trouble saying it, because we were going around the room, and I counted ahead to see what I was going to have to say. Which means by that point I was already stuttering. When did it start? That's a question for another day.

So why am I publicizing this fact now? First, I'm in the midst of a lifelong attempt to "cure" my stutter. Except this time, rather than hoping it gets better on its own, I'm actually being proactive about fixing it. In an irony of ironies, I love language, and speak six different languages to varying degrees of proficiency. Yet the main thing that prevents me from speaking them better is not my inability to learn languages, but rather my inability to voice what I want to say. Getting rid of my stutter would remove the primary obstacle I have in becoming fluent in all of these languages.

Second, I'm sick of the lack of progress in stuttering research. Not much has really changed in the last few centuries. At least people for the most part tend to no longer believe that stutterers are possessed by demons (although I think they still do in some parts of the world). But has there been much progress on identifying the actual causes (and treatments/cures) of stuttering? I'd argue no. With the exception of a study identifying potential genes associated with stuttering, no one really knows what's going on. For a condition that affects between 0.5% and 1% of the Earth's adult population (and up to 5% of children), it's sad that there's been so little progress.

So I've decided to treat this as an engineering problem, and figure out how to hack my brain. I used to be able to speak without any dysfluencies, so why can't I again? And arguably, I'm already an above-average communicator. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture to 300 students in a foreign country. I coached my high school gymnastics team my sophomore year of college, have friends across the world that I speak to in multiple languages, am frequently sought out for advice/consultation from friends and professionals alike, and honestly, generally like talking and telling stories. Which is why becoming more fluent is that much more meaningful to me.

One last thing for now - I'd like to give some words of advice to non-stutterers. First, stutterers are not intellectually less-capable than non-stutterers. I remember with clarity and pain my 11th grade English teacher "helping" me with words when asked to read something aloud if I had more than a quarter second delay before beginning a word. As if I didn't know how to pronounce the word! I remember equally well the embarrassment just last week of saying "um" twice before being able to produce my name for the cashier at a coffee shop (stutterers almost invariably have trouble saying their own name). Stutterers are normal people who think just like the rest of the world. They just happen to have some bug in the connection between neural messages and actual speech. If you are conversing with a stutterer, do not offer advice (trust me, you don't know how it feels), do not complete sentences or fill in words for them, and obviously, do not make fun of the way they speak (stuttering is probably the only mental disorder that is still socially acceptable to laugh at - I can't even begin to describe how much this disgusts me). Stutterers already have inordinate amounts of guilt, fear, embarrassment, and anguish that they place on themselves, so the best thing you can do is relax and be patient with them.

And with that, let's embark on this adventure. I'll post my learnings, history, thoughts, and answer any questions that people have. Thank you for joining me on this quest - after all, without people to talk to, what's the point? =)

Modern Technology Attention Deficit Tipping Point

I recently got back from a two and a half week trip abroad, and the comparative lack of connectivity was refreshing. I often feel that here in Silicon Valley, we're progressing ever more rapidly to a world in which no one looks up anymore, and relationships and friendships take place entirely in the unfulfilling desert of the virtual. Getting out every now and then is a good way to reset your perspective.

For instance, during the nine days I spent in Korea, I had a phone that was "merely" capable of sending text messages and making phone calls (to be fair, it was an iPhone 4, but the 3G was disabled). Knowing that you can't check your email even if you want to is glorious! I ended up checking my email once or twice a day at the hotel, and didn't miss it. The main thing I really missed was GPS. But believe it or not, it's possible to find things without it. And people tend to be helpful if you ask them for directions!

I then went to China, where G+ and Facebook are blocked. Facebook got so nervous about the sudden drop in attention I was affording it that it sent me an email informing me of all my unread notifications. Surprisingly, the world kept spinning without my attending to those notifications! Crazy but true.

Then I spent last weekend in Beijing with a group of friends who all had old-school tier-3 candy bar phones. You know what? They're way more fun to hang out with than the smartphone-wielding masses. They look up way more than their iPhoned compatriots. They don't pull out their phones to check Facebook or check-in on Foursquare in the middle of a conversation. And they seem to be generally happier people.

I wonder if we're reaching an inflection point in our technology-driven attention deficit disorder. Will we humans be able to figure out a healthy way to coexist with technology? Will it consume ever more of our attention until we live most of our lives in the hyperactive snapshot world we've created for ourselves? Or will we break out of our self-imposed chains and demand more real and less virtual? I don't know the answer, but it will certainly be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Piano, Language, and the Brain

I decided at the age of 30 that I wanted to learn how to play piano. Unfortunately, that's about 25 years beyond the optimal age if you ever want to get "good". But since I'm fascinated by both neuroscience and music, I figured it was at least worth a shot, plus I'd have the added benefit of being able to observe my brain as it tries to learn this new skill.

I think it was this TED talk that finally convinced me to start playing. Benjamin Zander speaks about music and passion, and how classical music can tell a story. At the time, I was living in my friend's basement, and there was a beautiful Kawai grand piano in the living room that went largely unused. One day, I went up to the piano, sat down, and opened one of the books to a random song. Although I knew how to read the notes (at least the ones close to the staff), I couldn't fathom playing two independent parts (left and right hands) simultaneously, while also keeping track of the pedals, tempo, volume, let alone phrasing. Impossible.

So I wisely bought a beginner's book, Alfred's Basic Piano Course for Adults or something, and set off to learn. It became clear pretty quickly that learning piano is similar to learning a foreign language. At first, for piano, you work with notes. Notes by themselves don't really do much for you, just as single characters of phonetic languages don't do much for you either. Then you start combining notes into chords, just as letters combine to form words. Yay, I can play a C-chord! Yay, I can say the noun for "beer" and the bartender understands me! Same thing.

Words turn to phrases, just as notes and chords turn to phrases. And just like when you're learning a foreign language, you struggle over how to put the sounds together to make the word sound right, and then how to put the words together to make the phrase sound right. I found that learning piano was similar - I couldn't play a whole phrase well at first because so much mental energy was expended reading the notes and matching my fingers to the right places. Once I did it enough times, though, I started to "feel" how the phrase worked together in my mind. It felt surprisingly similar to repeating a sentence enough times in a foreign language until you think of it as a block rather than a collection of words.

But the two hands thing. Well, that's just weird. How can one hand be speaking a sentence that's totally different from the other? Who invented this thing?

Anyway, one day, about two weeks into this experiment, I got sick of playing little "toy" songs, and went through my friend's music. I found Beethoven's "Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor", a.k.a. "Für Elise", or "the song that they play in every subway station in Seoul". I discovered to my delight that I could play something roughly resembling the most well-known (and also the easiest) part of it, although it was incredibly slow, and took considerable effort. But it seemed within reach. I decided I was going to learn the song as my first "real" song.

Fast forward a year. Didn't play any piano in Korea, but I missed it the entire time I was living there, so when I got back to San Francisco, I bought myself a digital piano. I decided again that I needed to learn how to play this song, so I practiced both hands separately and slowly tried to start putting them together.

Then sometime last week, something in my brain just "clicked". All at once, I understood how the pieces were supposed to fit together. I was no longer just approximating a song, I was legitimately making music. Not only that, but I started to remember the song in big chunks rather than notes. And if I got to a phrase that I wasn't entirely sure of, the "shape" of the phrase had left an imprint in my mind, and I could map that shape to notes on the piano. How incredibly fascinating to feel those new neural circuits arise!

Now, I can almost play this song that most kindergarteners play at their first recital, but somehow I've managed to trick my brain into creating those circuits that spring up almost magically for kids. And I'm positively fascinated by this.