They were both right, of course.

It is easy to discard anything you are good at as nothing special. You make something and when someone praises you it sounds unfair. You reply “Well, I don’t deserve credit for that. It didn’t take any effort. I just happen to know how to do that”

If you are talented (and everybody is) the things you ‘know’ don’t seem that special. You just know things and they seem to come natural. Why brag about it?

Please do brag about it. Make a list of things you can do. Brag all you want.

You might think “everybody knows how to do that”. Chances are you are wrong. What you know (and the combination of things you know) is special and extraordinary. Often we say “As we both know…”. In most cases, we DON’T both know. Even when it seems logical to you that what you know is common knowledge, it probably isn’t.

The girlfriend in the story above knows her boyfriend very well. One of his talents is that he knows how to prepare a good dinner. Didn’t seem to take much effort. Doing what you like doing never feels like work. Although she was dividing what had to be done by input (the chores that take effort) he was diving by output (the result of all the chores put together).

What are your talents, skills and what unique knowledge do you possess?

My parents….

You set a goal, pack your bags, board the train, and the only variable between you and your goal is the speed of the train. Unless the whole thing derails, you end up where you were planning on going.

Unfortunately software development is more like hitchhiking:

You set some general goals (somewhere sunny), pack your bags and after that where you end up depends on a whole lot of variables: who will pick you up and where will they be heading to? Along the ride your goals can change at every turn. You might end up pretty close to your goal but the further you are planning on traveling the greater the chances that you won’t.

I do and have learned to accept it as a warning sign.

‘That will do’ means you are about to deliver something below par. If you find yourself about to walk away from a job that seems just good enough you should stop yourself and think about what you could add to turn your job from ‘That will do’ into ‘This is it!’.

The ‘quick fix’ is seldon a real fix, the ‘Good enough’ solution is never good enough and ‘that will do’ never does.

I thought “Well, maybe it is. Quinine is a fever-reducing chemical and the first effective treatment for malaria“.

But I didn’t know if it was bad for children so I simply said: ‘Look it up’.

We both own an iPhone so within seconds Tessa could tell me that non-medical Tonic water contains a medically insignificant amount of quinine and was perfectly safe for children. A few minutes later Tessa said “This is probably one of the last hot days before autumn starts”. So I asked her “When does autumn start?”. She simply replied: “Look it up”.

So I did. It started September 22, the next day.

No Excuse for Ignorance

When Loïs was 4 she demanded cookies on a Sunday. I told her we were out of cookies. She told me to make new ones. I told her I didn’t know how. She became irritated and exclaimed “Sure you do, just look it up on The Internet!”.

She was right and I was wrong. I do know how to make cookies and I also know how a battery works and even how to build a nuclear bomb. I just have to look it up. I have no excuse for ignorance.

As technology advances, internet becomes ubiquitous and portable devices like the iPhone are distributed to billions of people, we all get access to more information then ever before.

Sometimes you hear people complain about ‘Information Overload’. They say that there is too much information to handle. What they actually mean is that they have too little time to handle the tasks that get thrown at them in the form of email. There can never be ‘too much’ information.

If you pick up a dictionary you won’t complain that it is too complete will you? Do you think Google indexes too many pages? No, the only thing you might complain about is that you can’t find the information you need. Once you do, there can never be TOO much information to choose from.

Achieving Perfect knowledge

If you look up “Perfect” in a dictionary it will say something like this:

“Lacking nothing essential to the whole; complete of its nature or kind.”

One day, we will have Perfect Knowledge. Although we won’t know everything there is to know, our knowledge of the world will approach a perfect state. It will be ‘lacking nothing essential to the whole’.

Will scientists know everything there is to know? No, certainly not.
Will we know everything about the past up to and beyond the origins of the universe? No, certainly not.

What we will know is everything we could possibly want to know in the course of a lifetime as will be practical for a normal human being. We will be able to answer 99.999% of all questions we can expect to ask ourselves. All we will need is a second or two to formulate the question and look it up. This will present us with new issues to deal with. Right now our lives and societies are focused on the pursuit of knowledge. Our schools, universities and companies all work on finding our more, about more. We want to ‘Know’ it all.

What happens if one day we do? What if technology makes knowledge accessible everywhere for, almost, everyone? What if we reach Knowledge Nirvana? How would we deal with an abundance of knowledge and the responsibility to deal with it.

A girl in a candy store

In an interview a famous candy store owner was asked if he ever had trouble with employees stealing candy. His reply: “We tell our new employees to eat as much candy as they want when they start. They all eat a lot of candy the first day or two and then become so fed up with candy that they never eat, and steal, again.”

Could the same be applied to information and knowledge? If suddenly you would be able to know everything there was to know, would you become bored with the whole thing after a few days? Would you start concentrating on other things than the pursuit of knowledge and just focus on being happy? But happy with what? How does it feel to know everything?

The Horn of Plenty

Of course you can’t contain, freeze or finish knowledge. Information tends to multiply if combined and shared. If I know something and tell you about it I don’t get poorer but we both get richer. I know what I know and I know that you know what I know and I know part of what you know. Information increases in mass as more is gained. Information grows as magically as Van Helmont’s tree:

“A 17th-century scientist by the name of Van Helmont planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces—from just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree.”

Add information to information and you will get more information back than you have put in.

Absolute & Perfect Knowledge and the End of War

Knowing everything includes knowing everyone. Knowing everything and everyone changes your relation to everyone. It is difficult to hurt someone you love and easier to kill someone you don’t know.

People who hate foreigners are often very friendly with their foreign neighbors, or foreign evening shop manager or security guard at their company. They will say “yeah, they ALL have to get the hell out of MY country. Well, except my neighbors because those are really hardworking decent people. The rest, gotta go!”

The truth, of course, is that ALL foreigners are really hardworking decent people once you get to know them. The whole basis of that problem is a lack of knowledge. Nobody would kill anybody if they really know them, and their mothers. Lack of knowledge starts wars and ends marriages: ‘we never really talk anymore’ and ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’.

It seems highly unlikely that Navy Captain William S. Parsons (“Deak”) would have dropped “Little Boy” if he would have known any of the people on the ground and the devastation they were about to cause. In fact, he said “I knew the Japs were in for it, but I felt no particular emotion about it”. You need a large amount of ignorance to kill another person.

Unfortunately there is more media attention for people killing each other over MySpace profiles than there is for the positive effects of everybody being connected to everyone via Social Networks right now. I’m sure that will change as soon as the first bomber returns from its mission because they checked out the Facebook pages of the people in the city they were about to bomb.

Living with Perfect Knowledge

Not long from now you will carry a little machine with you that will be able to answer any question to throw at it. There will be no excuse for ignorance for any and all of us. You will know where you are, what the rules are for the place you are in, what happened there 5 minutes ago to whom and what happened there 5, 50, 500 and 5.000 years ago. Oh, and what the weather will be like tomorrow. You will look at something or someone and instantly be presented with everything ever documented about that thing, event or person.

What if that moment, that little machine, was here tomorrow. Isn’t the iPhone that machine? How does that influence us as human beings?

I think we have an obligation to start thinking about this state of Perfect Knowledge so we will know what to do when we realize that it is here.

“Let’s cross the ocean together! We could do that! We could discover undiscovered countries and become rich! All we have to do is build a boat. We are qualified, experienced and motivated. Jim, you have experience with the open sea and know how to navigate. Bob, you know about construction and materials, and I would be an excellent skipper because I know how to motivate people and set a course. Let’s just do it!”

And so they do. After months of hard work, they have a good looking boat. It is a bit heavy and during the construction process they had to sacrifice some of the more interesting features they had planned for lack of money or resources. Bob found some bugs in the hull but thinks these will disappear once they start sailing.

Unfortunately, they do have one serious problem. They spent all their money on the boat, and forgot to plan for food. They know the entire trip will take a few weeks so they need to bring plenty of water and food. Fortunately, Bob has a rich Uncle, and they decide to ask him to invest in their plan. They prepare a few sheets that guarantee a nice return on investment for Uncle Bob should he decide to invest.

One fine morning Uncle Bob comes walking up the pier to inspect the boat and talk about financing their trip. The boys are nervous and are waiting next to their vessel with their hats in their hands. Uncle Bob, an experienced entrepreneur who became rich from selling office furniture, looks at the ship approvingly and then turns to Bob and says:

“Why didn’t you build an airplane?”

Bob is speechless. He looks at his partners for help but they seem to just stand there – staring into the distance – as dumbfounded as he is. They all seem to realize it that instant; if the only goal was to cross the ocean, an airplane would have been a much more efficient way of doing it!

But there they are, standing at the end of the pier next to a shiny new boat, with no supplies, with their hats in their hands.

After Uncle Bob leaves, the three partners retreat to the nearest bar for an emergency meeting, and a few beers. Deep down they understand that the obvious thing to do, the only sensible thing really, is to forget about the boat, start all over and just build an airplane.

But Jack was looking forward to the trip and his role as skipper, and Bob spend so much time polishing the hull, and Jim has learned everything there was to know about currents, ocean navigation and the weather that they just can’t bring themselves to even suggest doing that.

So they decide to take what they have, and adapt to the new circumstances. They take all the components from the old plan and try to apply them to the new plan. This is what they ended up with:

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends.

Yep, I’m serious. The other reasons for wanting an iPhone are valid too and apply to me too. It is the mother of all shiny objects, a great tool and a nice phone and you just want one as soon as you hold one in your hands. But besides that the iPhone platform is also clearly the start of something new. And I want to be a part of that.

Early Apple computers (before the Macintosh) had serial ports and something called a Game Port. It could be used for digital and analog input and output and was very powerful. People would buy an Apple I or Apple II and hack around with these ports to build exiting stuff like printers or home automation tools. Back then it was clear to people that you could build practicably anything with these machines if you had some basic hard- and software knowledge and that was an extremely exciting prospect.

Now we have the iPhone. A lot of people are complaining about the closed character of the iPhone but I see it differently. Sure, things could improve a lot. The NDA should go and the App store should work more transparent and all that. But look at the possibilities for a moment and you will realize just how empowering this little computer is!

The early Apple computers had serial ports that let people do anything with their computers which was cool. The box itself could do a few basic things which were exciting but still fairly limited. Now look at the iPhone: developers have access to the Internet, the GPS chip and all the motion sensors. The touch, tilt and move interface is all there waiting for you to take advantage of. All you have to do is come up with an application that uses a few of these, freely available, technologies and built it.

Better yet; you don’t even have to worry about setting up an eShop, coming up with license fees, promotion, illegal copies or how to make your invention available to users. The App store handles everything for you.

So what you have is a phenomenon with unlimited possibilities, free tools to build applications, an app store that handles distribution, promotion and security and millions of eager users who can’t wait to play with your products, and pay for them too.

It is not often that a revolution takes place where you get a chance to participate. It happened, and is still happening, with the Internet and now it has just started with a new platform called the iPhone.

I just couldn’t resist becoming a part of that.

Lately I have been experiencing an interesting side effect of giving feedback during pitches; the opposite of what I’m predicting happens because of what I am predicting.

What happens is that someone will casually pitch me a rather simple and raw idea. I think about if for a minute or so and, sensing a lack of real determination in the person pitching it, realize that the idea will never take off. I explain my thoughts and pessimistic view of the idea to the person doing the pitch. He or she feels slightly disappointed and maybe even insulted a bit.

A week passes by and this person comes back to me with more determination. He or she pitches their idea one more time and again I will respond negatively. Of course I will sense the entrepreneurs more determined attitude towards the idea but I will still see some major flaws. But by highlighting them I will maybe just inspire the entrepreneur to find solutions and become even more determined.

So, in both instances I am right that the idea won’t work. But by explaining this I change the situation and the chances of the idea working out.

I could of course simply say ‘Yeah, that will work’ to any idea I’m being pitched. But besides being impractical it would also probably have an adverse reaction and doom the project.

I don’t mind being wrong and I wish everybody all the wealth and successful projects in the world so there is no problem there. But what should I do when someone I like comes to me with an idea I really don’t think will work out?

Basically it is a small example of the Hawthorn Effect. The basic idea here is that people change their behavior when they know they are being observed.

What I’m wondering about is what I should do with this information. By influencing people I end up contradicting myself and I like being right about stuff. So, what is your advice?

That is a short version of that story as I have talked about it a lot before. What I wanted to talk about is how similar V3.com was to TwitterCounter.com. Don’t get me wrong: they served completely different purposes and technically they were very different too but there are a few very distinct similarities which I would like to show you:

V3.com	TwitterCounter.com
Yes, both services have a button. With V3 only people who were really happy with the service (a lot!) added this button to their homepages. At TwitterCounter you could say that the button IS the service so that makes this viral growth aspect even more powerful.
generated money from advertisement	generates money from advertisement
Well, that sorta makes sense right? The funny thing is that most people (now and then) don’t realize how powerful this service is when it comes to advertising. Both services are pretty low maintenance and with every new member you get a few extra new ad views a day. All you have to do is increase membership and with it ad views will increase as well.
Disgarded as ‘funny but not a real business’	Disgarded as ‘funny but not a real business’
Not that I’m complaining here but this one keeps amazing me. When I was working on V3.com I had to defend myself all the time. When I explained the concept I would either get a blank stare or people would say “You are out of your mind, this isn’t going anywhere, who would be interested in THAT’. I never understood that people couldn’t see the potential for the service. Same goes for TwitterCounter. Yeah, it’s a funny little thing I threw together in a few hours. But with every new member I get another banner, and link to TwitterCounter generating a few more visitors a day, generating a little more advertising revenue, and new members. Repeat that last sentence 10 times and you might get an idea of the potential behind TwitterCounter.
Weak spot: Domain prices?	Weak spot: Twitter future?
Another similarity is that there was a big weak spot that is easily recognizable in both services. At V3.com it was clear that as soon as domain names would become really cheap we wouldn’t really have a business left. At TwitterCounter I am completely depended of Twitter. If they stumble, close down, change their policies and become less open, or even lose their market share because of the Next Twitter I’m gone.
Excitement: high!	Excitement: high!
I’m really excited about Twittercounter in a very similar way as I was with V3.com. It is very exciting to browse the web and just randomly see your own product featured on blogs and websites. My partner in V3 (Hans-Poul) once told me he was driving around in his car and felt slightly depressed for no particular reason. When he stopped for a red light he looked out of his side window, through the rain, and saw a sign on a restaurant. In big yellow letters they had printed “Surf.to/Shoarma” on their window. He felt a lot better right away! I get a similar feeling when I brose to Leo Laporte’s website and see a TwitterCounter (leolaporte has 51,738 followers!) displayed prominently.

Ok, I hope that gives you some insight into what I liked about V3.com and currently like about TwitterCounter.com. To finish this post I will answer a question that you might have right now: Do I think that I will sell TwitterCounter for a lot of money (or shares) just like I did with V3.com?

The answer: I don’t know, but lets find out…