SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks). We’ve had great fun, and results, teaching kids to program with Scratch. Now, Berkeley has “an extended reimplementation of Scratch … that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. It also features first class lists, first class procedures, and continuations. These added capabilities make it suitable for a serious introduction to computer science for high school or college students.” I’ve only played with it a little - but getting started with Snap!

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O’Reilly and Eric Ries are doing an interesting webcast - Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step. Having recently waded into this end of the pool - I’m getting a lot out of the whole lean startup idea. No great surprise, since it extends what I’m familiar with, from within product development, to all the streams of work that makes up a startup

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Check out ”The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project. It describes a radical approach (at least from my POV) on how to operate a business. I’m not a business operations person, so I don’t have the chops to completely evaluate the proposition here ahead of time. However, there are some intrigiung ideas in this article and I love where this could lead (not to mention the potential to upset the apple cart).

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I’ve always wanted some simple ‘personal relationship manager’, i.e. the problem is that I’ve got friends and acquaintances I want to keep up with - but I am lousy at reminding myself to follow-up when I don’t see them regularly. I want a way to: get a dashboard that shows me what’s new with people in my social networks organize the dashboard based on some heuristics on what social networks are more important than others (e.

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Hot off the press - an iPhone app to accelerate the Obama ‘08 campaign! Thanks to my friend (and open source guru) Raven Zachary, I had the privilege of beta testing the new Obama ‘08 for iPhone application. The idea, the potential and the implementation is tremendous - create grassroots opportunities to participate at the ‘edge’ of the internet. In other words, let people participate in the campaign from their perspective, instead of uploading their data to a central place or getting anonymous instructions from a central place.

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I think that my recent purchase of the iPhone has tipped the balance in quandry I’ve had. It goes something like this: I’ve wanted a better tool to manage my professional relationships (something I’ve been thinking of as a personal CRM). As a result, I’ve been looking for what Mac apps fill that niche - and there are some nice candidates (e.g. Contactizer, Daylite, even Crm4Mac). At the same time, I see web-based solutions as well (and here’s the ‘in the clouds’ part), such as Highrise, Etelos, even a customized SugarCRM.

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So I’ve made the plunge and bought an iPhone. Half the joy is in using such a beautifully designed product - every aspect of the experience shows so much thought.I can only add my kudos, and continue to be frustrated at how low the standards are for so many products.

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Great idea - how to get TV shows, not how to see a bunch of randomly named bittorrent files. Another “so obvious after I saw it” moment. http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/ (thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog www.tuaw.com/2007/04/1…)

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Two beautiful interfaces: a time machine Etsy Time Machine and a shop by color as novel ways to navigate.

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I think it’s pretty easy to convince ourselves that in many contexts, especially work, we are becoming more specialized, moving away from being generalists. As an evolutionary process, it allows us to better fill more niches. However, with this specialization, the complexity of communicating across contexts is increased. With a decrease in communication, the opportunities for leverage are similarly decreased. For as long as I remember, I’ve been convinced that the only way to solve the “really big problems” is with multi-disciplinary teams.

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