Chris Maury's Blog

A .gif I made on cinemagr.am. People seemed to like if, so I...

Tue, 01 May 2012 22:29:34 -0700

A .gif I made on cinemagr.am. People seemed to like if, so I decided to archive it here in case the app ever goes away.

It's not death of conversation, its death of small talk

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:50:44 -0700

This is part of an ongoing conversation I have with my girlfriend as well as a response to a recent op-ed in the New York Times: The Flight From Conversation.

The crux of the argument is that technology and always being connected is killing real conversation, and even as we become more and more connected online, we are becoming more isolated and alone in an absolute sense.

The quality of conversation on Facebook sucks, because it’s where people go to make small talk.

Limiting your view of online conversation to Facebook and Twitter is like using conversations between two teenagers talking about the “popular kids” to represent all in-person communication. You’re missing all of the important stuff.

The internet provides outlets of expression and community support to people isolated in the physical world. It’s not just in oppressive countries where activists are only able to organize online, it’s also for women to socialize without judgement, or transgender individuals to give each other support. These connections are made possible by the internet, and saying that these conversations are less fulfilling than in-person ones, ignores the reality of these peoples lives.

By moving small talk to Facebook an Twitter, it frees up time for richer, more substantive conversation in-person. The conversations I do find myself having are more substantive than before, and this is partially enabled by all of the conversations I participate in online.

In this environment, physical connections become more important not less. These are the people you have actively chosen to be a part of your life. These are the people you communicate both on Facebook and face to face. These are the people you want to—and feel comfortable with— sharing experiences and thoughts you would normally keep inside you head, not posting to Facebook or Twitter.

Granted, I no longer have family dinners involving teenagers sitting around the table more engaged with their iPhones than talking with their parents. But, hasn’t this always been the lament of parents: disengaged, inattentive children? Technology hasn’t exacerbated this generational divide. The answer isn’t banning cellphones or laptops, it’s improving communication with your children. Finding ways to communicate, and topics to communicate about. And, guess what is the easiest way to do that? Engage them where they are communicating and discussing what interests them: The internet.

Yes, Technology is changing the way we communicate. Yes, we talk less around the water cooler, or in public forums, the bus,the airplane, in line for the movie. But, this doesn’t represent some tragic tearing of the social fabric which binds us all together; rather, these bonds are moving from the physical world to the digital. And, I would like to think, becoming even stronger.

The accessibility of eBooks

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:53:04 -0700

The debate between Dead Tree books and ebooks has been waged since before the first Kindle was released, and I’m not going to be able to convince anyone one way or the other. I’ll just add one more point to the debate.

Accessibility.

I have Stargardt’s desease, which means over the next few years it’s going to be harder and harder for me to read.

For printed books this poses a major problem. If I’m lucky I can find the book I want in large print. More likely, given the types of books I read, I would be forced to by an unwieldy print magnifier.

With eBooks, this is a completely different story. with a few taps I can increase the size of the font to make it comfortable to read. Even better I can invert the colors, reading white text on a black background, further easing eye strain.

When it comes to the visually impaired, there is hesitation in choosing eBooks over print.

It's time to level up headphone tech

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 10:25:00 -0700

As we are eagerly awaiting tech for augmented reality, the tools already exist to merge another of our senses discreetly and completely. Headphones.

Headphones?

Yes, headphones, well more specifically hearing aids.

Right now there is a big gap in technology between hearing aids and the shit you buy from best buy. Beats by Dre anyone? Existing hearing aids have directional microphones, can distinguish between talking and background noise, and connect pretty seamlessly with other devices.

But hearing aids are for the hearing impaired, aren’t they?

That’s just bad marketing. Imagine if you could wirelessly connect to your iPhone, your computer, or your tv, and not bother the people around you. Imagine listening to music, and not have to pull out your headphones to hear when someone is talking to you. All this is alredy built into so called hearing aids.

With all this fancy tech, why are we all suffering from having to listen to other peoples music on the bus?

If hearing devices can distinguish between people talking and background noise, couldn’t the mute people blasting music on the bus?

The one thing the Beats phenomenon has shown, is that consumers are willing to spend big on headphones. $300 is a lot less than the $1200-$6800 price tag of hearing aids in the US, but this price is artificially high since insurers are the ones paying for them. In other countries hearing aids are much more affordable.

There is a huge potential market waiting for the next generation of headphones, and they are willing to spend. All it will take is an entrepreneurial hearing company willing to take a chance.

Here’s a list of hearing aid makers:

My new gig: Product Manager at Klout.com

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:02:43 -0700

Klout.com is a very, very interesting company. Not only as a place to work, but of what they might be able to do in the next few years. What now looks like a Social advertising company can in the next few years evolve into the reputation mechanic for the social web.

I’m very excited to be a part of the team that is working towards bringing that future about. Here’s hoping we’re successful, and have some fun along the way.

What if there were a $1 fee to post to HN?

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:13:35 -0700

What would happen?

First, there would clearly be fewer posts. But, would they be better?

I think that they might be.

Here are the rules:
1. $1 to post an article/comment
2. $1 to up vote, which goes to the OP.

Charging to post increases the cost of submitting an article, and forces the less serious from creating crap content.

Charging for up votes functions like flattr. It still allows for the best content to rise to the top, while at the same time creating a means for monetizing quality content.

Maybe Hacker News isn’t the best forum for this experiment. Perhaps it would work better on Reddit or other more generalized forums.

The general rule for online communities trying to get off the ground is to make it as easy as possible for people to create content. Content creation and sharing provide the juice that help these community grow.

But at what cost? Anyone who has ever been to the /new page on Reddit understands the vast amount of garbage that is generated in order to create the passable content on the front page.

The problem is that the market doesn’t support the cost—measured in time— required to create quality original content, so what we are left with are image mashups, rage comics, and links. If all a content creator has to look forward to are upvotes, its difficult to imagine them spending the time to create something too time consuming.

Im considering this as my next project, but haven’t decided if the mechanics work. What are your thoughts?

You don't go to McDonalds for the Chicken Sandwich: Why Yelp needs to innovate

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:13:58 -0700

Picking a restaurant sucks. It sucks so much that even after the success of Yelp, there are still dozens of apps trying to make it better:

Urban Spoon
Foodspotting
Forkly
Ness

Just to name a few..

All of these fail to solve the largets remaining problem: What do I eat once I get there?

Menu’s are big, they have dishes you or the people at your table have never tried before. The waiter tells you everything is good when you desperately ask them for guidance. So you end up sticking the the usual.

Eventually you get to the point where you are making decisions on where to eat based on “the usual,” thus exacerbating the whole where to eat problem.

Like trying to find a good song by looking at album reviews, picking a place to eat is as much about individual dishes as it is about the quality of the restaurant as a whole.

Yelp doesn’t help. Luckily there are two apps trying to solve the problem.

Nosh and Tasted Menu.

As painful as the problem is, they both have a content problem to solve (how do you get all the reviews?). Of the two apps, Tasted Menu is opting to build critical mass before moving to new cities, as well as leveraging the network voodoo of SXSW.

Yelp needs to take these apps seriously and start competing or acquiring. For the sake or diners everywhere.

Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 08:59:00 -0800

I was walking around downtown Philadelphia earlier today and seeing all the people walking around with nothing to do or panhandling, it got me thinking.

How can we inject money into this ecosystem in other ways than welfare or charity? For all the success that micro-lending has had in India and other countries, we haven’t really seen those benefits in American Urban areas. This can probably be explained by the lack of internet access/ or awareness.

What other alternatives are out there?

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provides access to a large market of simple tasks that a human can do better than a machine. These tasks range from tagging objects in photos to writing brief sentences.

Doing some quick Googling, I found a few people doing experiments on Mechanical Turk and found that you can make about $7/ hour. Compared to welfare payouts that’s a 5x increase of monthly income. Not too bad.

Let’s build a Turk station with a built in cash machine. Someone can walk up do a few tasks and pay out right there. No need to have a computer, set up accounts, or anything which would keep urban poor out of the market.

Single stations don’t scale very well. They are more expensive to produce and maintain. However, they are a good proof of concept which can inform the creation of turk shops, small computer labs where people can work indoors and at a desk. Think a library computer room but with a cashier.

Of course there are hurdles and inefficiencies, but they are nothing compared to the systems already in place. And, think of the impact they could have in those areas of town you avoid walking through.

The Rise of the Subcultural Economy

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:19:15 -0800

This is a response to Venkatesh Rao’s post Peak attention and the colonization of subcultures. It’s a great article, a long read that I recommend everyone take a look at.

The TLDR of the post is that the Internet has connected subcultures to such an extent that in the near future we’ll see a corporate takeover of even the smallest cultural entity.

***

I don’t entirely disagree with Mr. Rao; I do see a near future where the smallest interaction between groups of people will be exploited for some form of profit. But, where he sees this capitalistic force coming from the next evolution of Bieber Corp, I find it much more likely to see it come from members of the subculture themselves.

No matter how much data you have about the future direction of a subculture, only a member of that subculture can convince them to move. People hate astroturfing.

We can already see subcultural trends being monetized by members on services like Etsy and Kickstarter. These tools have allowed subcultures to focus the demand that has been generated inside a subcultural community by enterprising members.

The future is much more likely to bring about a flowering of creativity from diverse subcultures, than a centralized control of subcultural desires.

***

If we are to see a corporate domestication of subcultural converstaion, it is going to be a degree removed from directly participating. The problem isn’t in creating the cultural items, but rather in the fact that those items have a lifespan, often far longer than the amount of time it is used by a given cultural group. Skateboarding moved from surfer bums, to skater punks, and eventually to urban centers. The context required to stimulate demand in anyone of those groups makes it very difficult to operate in another.

Rather, I think what we will see is more of an investment model, where saavy investors (either institutional or crowd sourced) fund subcultural members to create their own cultural artifacts. This outcome would be greatly facilitated by the passage of either of the crowdfunding bills currently in congress.

***

The Internet has enabled the blossoming of diverse communities all around the world, and n the coming years, like Mr. Rao said, we will see a vast commercialisation of this space. A commercialization that I hope will be more organic than corporate.

If you want to beat hollywood...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:14:00 -0800

Shocking that I would be writing about hollywood in the wake of SOPA?PIPA. AMIRIGHT?

No, but seriously. If the world is to defeat the monolithic behemoth that is Hollywood, who spends so much money on lobbying, more than the marketing budget of Fuck Buddies Two: Birth Control, they are going to have to do something drastic.

Paul Graham says its not about content, but if you’ve been to the movies lately, or looked at a movie trailer, you know that it absolutely is about content. What was the last movie you saw in theaters? Was it actually worth the money? Probably not.

Television is worse. The most popular shows are stereotypes of geeky intellectuals or worse, Two and a Half men.

If we are to liberate american culture from Hollywood we are going to have to create the tools that allows independent film makers to release quality content. There are already some companies who are helping, but there are other needs to be met.

Here is a breif drunken overview:

1. Distrify.com

Distriy allows filmakers to distribute films simply and easily. All Distrify does is creat a video plug-in that allows publishers to embed trailers, rentals or purchases into any site on the internet. It’ amazing. You can look at Gary Hurstwit’s Urbanized as an example. So cool.

2. Network of filmakers, actors, etc.

I don’t know of any websites that connect directors with actors and make up artists, but I’m sure they exist. There has to be a network outside of LA to connect all the people necessary to make a film. It’s not that hard.

3. Screen testing.

Hollywood is all about the mass market. They don’t want to offend the soccer moms or the bible belt. If indy film makers of the internet want to be able to create content that attracts large audiences and by extension large ad buys, they have to create content that “tests well”. In order to do that, there has to be a cheap way of testing content with focus groups. Let’s create a service that allows filmmakers to get feedback on individual scenes to help them throw the editing process.

4. Community theatre

Movie theaters make all their money off of popcorn and Coke. I know because my first job was at a concession stand at Tinseltown 17. Hurray! Filling seats during the week is difficult, and a biopic about Edgar Allen Poe staring John Cusack isn’t going to help. If there was a service that allowed the local movie goers to vote on which films, hollywood of indy, that were to be screened, it would help create new sources of content as well as boost attendance at theaters. Win win.

Anyway, if we are to create content alternatives to Paul Blart and King of Queens, the internet has to create services which bring down the cost of content creation for film makers. It’s going to happen. Let’s hope its just sooner rather than later. I for one am not looking forward to Battleship or any of the other “franchises” which pass for engaging moviemaking…

My iPhone’s HDR overlaid a protest sign over city hall...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:13:16 -0800

My iPhone’s HDR overlaid a protest sign over city hall during the SOPA protest with Craig Newmark and the head of Hackers and Founders. Oh, MC Hammer also had a cameo.

Being a Star Wars fan has jumped the shark

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:23:40 -0800

It pains me to say it, but it’s true. Quoting Star Wars is no longer the secret hand shake between geeks that it once was.

Star Wars references have become so pervasive that they have lost all meaning.

Where once a witty “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” showed that someone shared the same interests as you, and wasn’t afraid to share them in public; now the offhand reference only shows that you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 10 years, and you know what the internet is.

I’m not yearning for some idyllic past where nerds could feel accepted just by quoting movie lines to their close friends, or know a poser for their failure to know the proper shibboleth.

Rather, Star Wars serves as an example of how we build community and create bonds through shared experiences. When that shared experience loses its exclusivity, the community it represents breaks down.

The ways in which Star Wars is being used today, are so far removed from the original sentiment, that it is almost comical.

So next time you see someone wearing a Star Wars t-shirt, don’t expect to be able to bond over your hatred of Jar-Jar, or debate whether or not the Rebels committed Genocide against private contractors when the blew up the second death star.

A much more better phrasing of what I am trying to say can be found in Patton Oswalt’s essay on the death of Otaku.

My Newest app: ClinicalTrialsHQ.com

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:01:58 -0800

I’ve been working on a new project, ClinicalTrialshq.com. It’s still a work in progress, but It’s coming along.

ClinicalTrialsHQ allows patients to search over the National Institute of Healths database of open clinical trials across the world. Additionally, patients can provide their email and receive notifications when new trials become available for a given condition.

The idea for the application came from a personal need. I was diagnosed with a disease that has no cure, and only a few treatments in clinical trials. A few Google searches later led me to clinicaltrials.gov. An open database of clinical trials geared towards researchers and practitioners. I wanted to build something that patients could use more comfortably.

There is stil a lot of work left to do. I have to finish the front-end, and the search is not nearly as good or fast as it could be. I should have it finished in the next few days.

The code is available at github.com/cmaury/clinicaltrialshq.

Let me know what you think.

Airbnb + Springstar: A new model for international expansion

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:07:30 -0700

Last week we saw AirBnB announce a partnership with Springstar, a relatively unknown incubator (at least in the US) to help with international expansion. I happened to be in Berlin with BASES and EBS visiting Springstar when they made the announcement (crazy, right?).

Here are two insights I gleaned from the trip:

First of all Springstar is not an incubator; at least, not like the ones here in the US.

Secondly, this type of partnership is the first of many we will be seeing in the near future.

Springstar is not an Incubator

If Silicon Valley is about Innovation, Europe is about copycats. And, while we may scoff at their lack of fresh ideas, they aren’t in the business of new ideas. They are in the business of building companies.

The investment environment in Europe is not the same as it is here. Investors are much more risk averse. This has, then, changes the focus of VCs and so-called incubators. Rather than focusing on discovering new business models, they instead focus on executing and scaling proven models.

Calling Springstar an incubator is somewhat of a misnomer. They are better termed holding companies who have internalized all of the core functions of running a tech company: Search engine marketing, Management, development. They have done their utmost to minimize execution risk.

Leaders in international expansion

By focusing on execution instead of innovation firms like Springstar and Rocket Internet are spending resources on opening markets, not iterating on product design, thus creating a comparative advantage in setting up shops in multiple countries.

They’ve been to Sao Paulo, New Delhi, and Dubai. They know how to set up office spaces, how to hired local talent, and how to market effectively. They have experience with the idiosyncrasies of the local markets and are familiar with the regulatory environments.

These European incubators are minimizing execution risk and are very attractive options for any US company looking to tackle the international market. Expect AirBnB to be just the first of many to take this route in the future.

Discussion

Do you think the European model incubator could work in the US?

how do I download your Google reader extension for chrome? My computer can't recognize what to open it with?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:05:43 -0700

You should open the file from the extensions page in the chrome browser

See step 4 in this link:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/getstarted.html

Here is what the Google Reader Extension looks like

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:06:28 -0700

Here is what the Google Reader Extension looks like

Making Google Reader Easier on the Eyes

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:05:21 -0700

Google Reader hurts my eyes.

It could be the fact that I’m looking at it the majority of the time that I’m awake, but I like to think its because it’s not the most readable website.

12 pt font; black on a white background. It hurts.

So, rather than cut back my Google Reader time, and spare my eyes, I made a Chrome Extension.

Inspired by Readability, the extension increases the font size, darkens the background, and brightens the font.

It’s just a few lines of CSS, but it does the trick.

If you are as addicted as I am, feel free to try it out. You can download it here.

Fair Use?

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 13:29:54 -0700

I finally found a store to sell my design! A Little expensive though… Sorry.

Follow the link below:

README

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:01:06 -0700

I Like to Make things.

You could say it’s what drives me.

To have an idea and see it made is a pretty solid feeling.

It’s why I made this shirt. This website. This Blog.

What’s an even better feeling is seeing someone else use what you’ve made, to see someone’s life made better by the work of your hands (One can dream, right?).

Making things isn’t easy though. Bills to pay and whatnot. So, when I see something that is really well made, I try and appreciate it. Even if I don’t necessarily relate to it.

Thinking about the way things were made can change the way you see the world. Asking yourself, why something was made the way it was can really help you to appreciate things like this and this (and see through things like, this, this, and this).

Yeah, so go out and make something, or something like that.

What if your iPod could read your mind?

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:01:06 -0700

IT CAN!

Well, it could.

There is a company that makes headphones with a built in EEG reader. What’s even better is they have an Software Developer Kit (SDK) for people to build applications for them.

I have an idea.

Combined with the Echonest APIs, the Mindset can be used to play music depending on your mood. Angry? The app will #mce_temp_url#play the perfect song to calm you down. Tired and need to study? It’ll play something upbeat.

The only thing between us and the future of music listening… the $200 price tag of the Mindset. A little steep for a side project…

Maybe Kickstarter can help…