Friday, August 22, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
arcologistics
DO NOT READ
The product I want to deploy is a web tool that will make it much easier for people to collect large amounts of content, and not only that, to regularly review all of that content and to manage, edit, and share it. Today, looking back into the history of a large archive, of photos, say, or screenshots, or rather both - a mixed archive, just to make it more difficult - is, indeed, difficult. My tool will allow any user to manage much more content than even the most expert users can manage today.
And, yes, it's a CMS, even a free personal online data warehouse.
The programming is straightforward but not without its challenges. It's 100% JavaScript on the client side and PHP or something on the server side. A standard user accounts system would be fine but I also have an alternative user accounts concept I want to explore. Some sort of display ad system needs to be incorporated, which could be sort of out of the box - it should integrate fine - but there's something I want to try there, too.
So, funds must be secured to do the development work, and the project needs to be shaped into a legitimate company, a legitimate investment vehicle.
I think it might be important to patent the concept, which includes a system for displaying collections of images, a system for displaying selected images at various levels of magnification, a system for placing images on pages, and for locating and sizing images on pages, a system for capturing screenshots, a system for managing browser cache, a proprietary user accounts system, and a system for managing display ads.
For the first ten years or so, we'll be the source for the tool, but part of the plan is to gradually move users towards more independence from us, which we'll achieve, in part, by publishing information about the system, and its construction and operation. The goal is to eventually ensure that everyone without exception has dependable independent access to these capabilities, with complete control, up to and including creating their own ad based media with the tool. With that done, we'll move on to other things, because there are other things to move on to.
I can barely socialize at all, and might not be much good in casual negotiations, but I can read legal and technical documents, so, might do OK in more formal meetings, and I do have a demo version which only I can operate, and I hope to use it to give an illustrated talk on the concept.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Really inspired by an article in this morning's USA Today (Arizona Republic) about Google, and how their policy from the start has been really taking care of the worker and investing ambitiously in long term projects.
Then again, I'm supposed to be out on errands, but all I feel at all like doing is drinking, and writing in my affirmations journal, and now, writing in my corporate book. And I'm writing in my journal, and thinking over all the awkward aspects of my present moment, and how writing that I can barely socialize isn't going to sell my brand very well. I am not, and this is true, unsociable. I really like people, and I like socializing, though I'm just awkward myself, and that makes me ... a little bit difficult to take. And here's the thing: I don't feel like fighting that. I don't want to set up awkward situations just to try to get things done. Principles of management, I was thinking, require total engagement on the part of the CEO with everyone at all levels of the organization. If we set up an office where programmers are developing our software product, don't I need to be very much in the office? But I don't want to commit to that! I want to see how it goes as far as being in the office goes. I'm in my office, and I don't really want to switch offices. My office can only minimally accommodate anyone but me, and, besides, I'm too shy, generally, to invite people over. My affirmation journal is for recording my ultimate dream, and I wrote, just now: "The radical idea of running a company entirely from my house."
A group of computer engineers needs to gather every day in some very pleasant location and work all day there, and into the night, in order to pull this off. Some of them need to be not like me at all. Where I'm shy and want to completely hide, they need to be outgoing, and like going out, at the drop of the hat, and popping in on people, and having a beer. And all of them, and everyone who works for the company, needs to understand the initiative, what it takes to seize the initiative, and what that means needs to be defined within the company, and it means, in a sense, reporting back. The vision, of course, gets very sci-fi. This is, of course, completely crazy, but it just might work. The engineers are gathered in a spacious board room - the studio, really - and the Internet is on a big screen. Another screen next to that is just a blank screen. That's our blank slate, where we're going to make things happen. Oh, I might as well get on Skype. The reason I'm not there in person is because it would be awkward, I would feel cooped up, and that's just two less things to worry about. Put a smallish screen at the back of the room and I'll do Skype from there. We are, by the way, becoming an organization of teleconferencing experts. As a company, we want to capitalize on that. I'm assigning someone to document teleconferencing technology right now, and I'll be talking to that person continually about what I'm looking for from the product.
OK, so the blank slate is before us, and it is, in fact, a browser window. Now, via that window, we are going to create, right here and now, a web hosting account, or a cloud computing account, or, I don't know, both. Let's discuss it. And we are also going to buy some domains, and we're going to talk about names, and our lawyers are here, so let's name this company and its products. Let's take a half hour to do all that. OK, Fiona, you're in charge of domain management. Are you set up to work on the screen? OK, who's gonna provide us with server space? Amazon? Is that good with everybody? Fiona, how long is it gonna take to set up an account on the Amazon Cloud? Half an hour? Fantastic. Get to work. Fiona, you've got a mike, so give everybody a play by play on what you're doing. Meanwhile, Richard, you start working on our domain. The domain name is ***FPODW.org***. OK, guys, Fiona, Richard, each of you has a screen up here, and everything you're doing is up on your screen, and also, it's all being recorded, live action. If you have questions for me, just ask, and Art and Raoul (our layers) will huddle with you and make sure all the legal stuff is under control. Fiona, Richard, you're the process managers. Process managers, get the legal team copies of all TOS type documents immediately, and, legal guys, it's your job to organize all those documents for future use, and present use, for that matter. Tell you what, at the end of the first half hour, we'll take a break, and then we'll all review all the legal documents. Now I'm going to huddle with the build team chief, Apple, and we're going to map out some things to put on the server as soon as it's set up, and a couple or three hours we'll present that plan to everybody.
OK, before we get started, I want to talk about the business some. First, let me talk about my needs a little. I need tree trimming work, and other landscaping and home improvement work, done, and I need it done by someone who really cares, and will really take their time doing it, and do it right, and do it the way it's been mapped out and described, and so it needs to be mapped out and described, and so one of our team members, Jacqueline, to do architectural work. We're going to start building a book about architectural process right away, and we're going to become, as an organizations, experts on architectural method. You see, building the FPODW tool is our mission, but it's only going to happen because of our company, and the company is 100% people. Companies exist as a way for people to share resources, including, in a way especially, knowlege. The knowlege of how to do things. Also, focus. Since there are many tasks in life, we share them out, so that each of us can really focus on something. For these reasons, we have created kind of a homie environment here at headquarters, right down to the availability of sleeping arrangements, and then there's the kitchen, which is so critical to everything we're doing. Actually, it's the kitchens. I learned by experience that a community of people probably needs multiple kitchens, of different types. We're going to have at least a kitchen that feeds the staff, or persons present for work, on company projects, and a coffee house. How about that? It's a little muddled, but it introduces the idea. And so, part of the staff is kitchen staff. Say hi, kitchen staff! And kitchen work is going to be so important to what we're doing as a company. Kitchen staff, you will be under constant video survailance, laugh out loud. We're going to write books about how to set up and manage various kinds of kitchens, OK? They're going to be super detailed and process oriented, so we want to build a document around that idea of the whole kitchen process.
And so, yes, we have on hand a team of videographers. They are going to be a huge resource for every part of our venture - the architural component, by all means the cooking component, even the programming component. "Hey kitchen staff" - I've switched in some part of my brain to actually being there - I could use a beer! By the way, another kitchen is the brewery, and Kitchen Guys, you are to begin work immediately on brewing an abundance of beer for us, OK? We'll talk.
Finally, I need to mention the gardening team. I don't know why I'm saying mention. You guys are SO important. Video team, part of your job is to set people throughout the org with cameras, and get their feeds linked into the the corporate book, right?
I need to zoom out a bit. There are going to be people on campus who come for the day and go home at night, so, commuters. Well, a very significant part of corporate mission, here, is minimizing commuting, and there are two kinds of commuting that require most of the commuting resources, in life, which is going to and from work and shopping. So, to some extent, we're going to participate in the world of being a work place, with employees commuting in for the day, but we want to address this question of commuting about for shopping. In an efficient society, we would do that using public transportation or on foot, but special provisions need to be made in a car based living environment, or, to put it better, in a dispersed living environment, where distances to ... whatever ... are beyond the range of travel by foot. So we're going to be practicing a shopping service kind of service, providing the service for people who visit the campus. That's part of Kitchen Staff's work. People visit us here, and they can leave with groceries. We're also going to practice delivering groceries, starting very, very small, so we can work on the logistics of it. I need to mention, about the coffee house, it's so important that people can come here and just have a coffee. It's an easy way for people to slip into the rhythm of the place. And then we are, with emphasis, going to offer classes, so if 11:11! someone has a coffee, and checks out the class offering, they can just decide to take a class. That's my marketing plan for HQ.
On the software side, in order to synthesize all this record keeping, we're going to build a system of categories. This is definitely relevant to the ***FPODW*** product, it just approache the problem from a different angle. So let's say you're documenting something like, oh, say, making wooden bowls. That's a category of information, where you can start to collect content. How about sawing timbers into thin sheets? This gets to what some of the early ***FPODW*** work is going to look like. Within a category (in addition to other categories) we'll be creating slide shows, and the categorization system and slide show software are really the first orders of business. Let's see. Everyone with an account can start building their own collection of categories, and then they can edit that and mail it to somebody, or, that is, friend it to somebody, in other words, if you and someone are friends on the network, the version of your categories that you post for them will be updated, it's synchronized. And visa versa. Yup, that sounds right. Wow, I'm so excited, because that's realy doable.
Now, another division I haven't talked about yet is our ad division. Let's acknowlege these advertising people! We are an ad agency, and we are also an order fulfillment house. We're especially promoting mail order art, and sort of generally a really custom kind of mail order. Instead of trying to get sellers to sell a lot, we're going to really get to know our sellers. We're also going to design lines, like certain kinds of frames that come with custom packaging, and custom packaging for certain kinds of sculptural objects. We're going to work to introduce lots and lots of sellers, as people, to the whole world, which is going to have to be done with a certain kind of discretion, but also in a really friendly way. We need to also encourage sellers to commit to a well ordered inventory, which is a kind of virtual store, though it's also very real. We're getting into the box business, no ifs ands or buts about it, custom boxes. The Jeans box. The box of shorts. The clothing repair service. As a seller, you will ship to our warehouse, and then we will forward to the purchaser. Oh, yes, there's the problem of the quality of the art. Hmm. Acquiring stacks and stacks of middling art work. Am I too picky? We could ship stacks, assortments, in big boxes and see how it goes. Advertise to curio shops. CAD software that allows the buyer to select items and virtually fill a box.
And I just had the most amazing idea for a sewing product!
When it's big, start small. Test ideas inside the org. Another design line is clippings. We're going to start a clippings collector movement.
August 20, 2014
Every product needs its own custom marketing, and then, if you can customize the marketing, you can sell anything. We're building a marketing company. We are gathering marketing expertise into one organization, and then we're going to apply it to all sorts of products. There are a lot of legitimate products that aren't marketed because people think, for one reason or another, that it can't be marketed. That's never true. If you customize the marketing, you can sell the product. And lots of people in marketing, thinking you can't market legitimate products, market not-legitimate products instead. So, there are lots of legitimate products not being marketed, and lots of not-legitimate products being actively marketed. We are not going to market not-legitimate products, and we are going to market legitimate products that nobody else is selling, that people aren't even thinking about selling. We will not, however, be too insistent that we know the difference between not-legitimate and legitimate products. One of our products will be research and reporting on the world of products, generally.
Again, the goal is to create a company, and have on board every kind of relevant expertise and capacity. From there we move toward selling a lot of products, which means, first, doing a lot of marketing type work. And what makes a company? It's people, but people need facilities, to work, so, it's facilities, and then people need plans, to work, so, it's planning, which is related to direction, which people also need, to work. You can mine my writing for specifics about the kinds of work we will be doing, but we ARE generalists. The specifics are an essential foundation, not the whole program.
Headed out on errands in the morning. Very much scrambling, these days, everything seeming on the edge of flying out of control. Just trying to do my best not to react to things, things like worries. If you react, they grab you. Try to drive steady, even when there's crazy traffic. Where's that place on the road where you're safe? How can you move to stay in or be in that place? Sometimes you can see it, far ahead of you. Other times, it appears, all of a sudden, and you know what to do. Rain, yesterday evening, and quite a bit of it, and very sunny, muggy, a clean, clean blue sky, today. Everything washed, warm, and mellow. Thought going through my head, ideas buzzing, as I drive around ... my driving adventure, making the car twitch all the time, constantly testing its ability to do that, watching the city scenery go by, and the funny cars. Whoozy, dizzy. Pancake breakfast, and what was I thinking about? Got my accounting done. To the car wash, giving it a quick spray down, to the hardware pallace for a spare key. What were those ideas?
What I can remember is this: our team is going to equip cars with video capture. Every member of our team, maybe, will, eventually, be fully equipped with video capture on their cars, on their persons, even. It will be one giant multi-camera video feed. And then we're going to edit all of that into, what? Sure, it will be like Google's Street View, but not impersonal like that. It'll be very personal. When I drive around, it's a huge seeing-things experience. A thousand (is it that many) gorgeous, fascinating images impress themselves on my mind. There's the general scenery passing by, and then there's the things I notice, OMG images ... and then they're gone. Street View captures the street, we are going to capture our experience of the street. This is a whole product area itself. What is the camera of the future going to look like? It's a dashboard cam that just sits on your dash and captures hours and hours and hours ... hundreds of hours ... of video. Nobody thinks you need hundreds of hours of video, and nobody builds cameras to capture hundreds of hours of video, because they don't think it's needed. Well, it is. But what are you going to do with hundreds of hours of video? You are going to edit it. You are going to distill it into minutes of video that are completely compelling and capture everything. So, video editing is so important. People think of it as a specialist tool, but it's not. Lots of people need it, everybody needs it. Also, mapping technology, where your day's adventures appear on a map. The key to marketing these kinds of things is useability, and the key to useability is understanding what people are going to want to do with these tools. This is not a technical problem. The technology is already really advanced. It's an information problem: how does one use these tools? What does one use them for? They're used for creating shows, is the first answer, and the first of all audiences is ourselves. Even if we never show anything to anybody else, creating shows for ourselves is extremely important, and then, it's also the basis for creating shows for other people. There's huge potential in that. By the way, another version of the camera of the future is cameras that capture 3D maps of an environment. Everyone has a camera, now, for vacation photos. I predict everyone will have one of these 3D mapping cameras, in the near future. We want to get into that business.
So I'm driving around and I'm thiking about where we would put our headquarters. Somewhere in these neighborhoods? It's a bit of a weird idea. But I'm for working to dissolve the arbitrary boundaries between work environments and home environments. Yes, it's partly because of my shyness, and my sensitivity to, say, the harshness of the work place, but it's also a legitimate sustainability imperative. Yes, we are going to continue to need factories, with big setbacks from residential areas, and lots of people are going to continue to be willing to immerse themselves in those environments ... but, there are ways. Creating beautiful places for people to live - and, I'm extending that - work, is an industry. In some sense, that industry isn't focused on the beauty equation. What is the deepest, most profound kind of beauty? And this is closely related to one person's favorite, Frugality. This idea of finding beautiful houses, already built, for a song, and then finding uses for them. I'm thinking, like, a network of lovely suburban houses, each operating as some kind of FACTORY. 100 box making factories, or 1000. Maybe 10,000. One million composting factories, in the back yards of suburban houses, networked together, each equipped with specific tools to turn the product of the Urban Forest into ... pure abundance. Thousands of hospitality sites, but they're not like hotels, they're more like retreat centers, where you stay to participate in the activities of the house, except if you are a visiting dignitary, working on your own projects, and expert in the protocols. So, training people to be wandering monks, or dignitaries of the best kind, and that's our customer base. And we start off very slow, with any hospitality associate. We make sure there's a sense of purpose in every visit, right from the start. And doing these things is going to innitially take a lot of resources, but, later, there will be a payoff, and, too, it's not the kind of resources you all think: it's talk, and looking at things, and drawings, and thinking things over, and then more drawings, and more looking at things, and more talk. It's little adjustments to architecture, well planned, completely thought out, that take the house away from being the air conditioned bubble it is today, towards being ... more like a sponge ... with nooks and crannies, air and light filtering through, cold spots and hot spots, but very well planned and localized, so they're small but work extremely well, innumerable pocket gardens, a kitchen and laundry paradise, cellars for warehousing good goods, and towers for that purpose, too, and, always, well equipped shops for industry, and even commerce, even a year's worth of water.
Little adjustments, I'm saying. It's possible to move in these directions by doing, in fact, almost nothing. And then we get to participate in the real-estate market, just for fun.
But is this an environment for industrial development? Well, the enviroment for industrial development is sort of a virtual environment. Somebody with a real, deep knowledge of business needs to be lured into the picture, and then we can sit down, a gathering of programmers and business people, and prototype a product.
HMMMM. What is the proper rhythm for work? We know a guy who works for six months and then takes six months off. During the six months when he's working, he's really focused, and really relaxed, and does fantastic work, and then what does he do when he's not working? He doesn't actually go anywhere, he just stays at home and watches movies! That's a kind of rhythm we want to promote! But there's also a rhythm where someone works, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and quite contentedly. We want to study that kind of rhythm. How does a person get into that kind of rhythm? And what other kinds of rhythms are there, especially ones that work really well?
Donor at the $20 level get a mail art post card. Donors at the $100 level get two mail art post cards and a screen sculpture. Donors at the $1000 level get five mail art postcards, one screen sculpture, and a book of drawings.
Someone - a prodigious ceramic artist - just friended me on Facebook. Amazing. Which reminds me, ceramics is very much an industry, and art form, I want to promote. Equipping houses with quiet, clean burning kilns ... even wood fired ones ... and then equipping the resident crafts people with designs from a design line, so as to make a market for their work ... I've actually experimented with wood burning kilns, and they're more manageable than you would think. JUNGLE GARDENS is something I want to promote, but JUNGLE GARDENS are hard to maintain. That's what the 3D cameras are for, and what the 3D modeling is for, so everyone can model their own houses, and their own gardens, down to the branch. Then you can tell Tree People, please cut here, and please set up this pulley here, and you can tell the plumbers, please put pipes like this here, and pipes like that there, and on and on. Home Services Planning is an almost completely neglected industry. Talk about a niche.
Oh, man, what an insight into economies I just had. A very large amount of economic activity cycles within its own small sphere, like creating art work, craft work, cooking, and the like, and then, if there's a lot of that kind of activity, it sucks in resources from industries like farming, and forestry, and mining, and engineering. Promoting small cycles will build the whole economy. But should we build the whole economy? It's a behemoth. Should we make it even bigger? Well, it probably will get bigger, but also it will change. Its texture will change. Changing the texture of economies is our business.
Ad response: living on the beach ... everybody should live on the beach! Make it so.
There's an approach to architecture, to life where you don't go to the beach, you create the beach, right where you are. Again, that's called Frugality, and also Imagination, or Theater. First you get into the spirit of being at the beach, and then you create ... things ... that reflect that spirit ... in the city, in the desert. Media, broadly understood, are essential to this process. I just looked at this guy's pottery, and it was like being at the beach.
This idea of ... the suburban house project ... is, in a way, optional. It's essential that things be optional. You have to be able to respond to circumstances. Being optional is the key, in the way, to something being innevitable. You do test cases, and you do research. There is a market for houses. Really great houses sometimes, or often, sell really cheap. And there are urban infill opportunities. It's like a resource, that, if you know how to mine it, you can mine it. I went to the head shop, I mean, the smoke shop, for smokes. It's in this shopping mall on the corner that used to be this amazing 60s modern building. They've - it was totally shocking - replaced it with some kind of post modern facade. But in the corner is my smoke shop, a very cheerful place, and next to it was a vacant store, that was, pretty recently, kind of a grocery. The space looked stark, exciting, perfect for a project. There's endless opportunities of that sort, and what people want, and need, is fun, and serenity.
My buddy all of a sudden was talking about ... oh God, I've forgotten the name ... Geek Central ... maybe they are going out of business, but they are a billion dollar company, that's their annual sales, and the creditors don't want them to close stores, and the stock is at some absurdly low price, relative to its history. If they make it, if they pull through, a $1000 investment will return $50,000. Or, you could buy the whole company, really cheap. Then you would have to run it, and the secret to success there is letting it run itself ... but that's not as simple as it sounds.
Pouring it all out, here. The goal is to raise 1 Million Dollars on Kickstarter, and then another $2 Million from other sources. Then we'll talk about all the incredible things we can do.
We also need to reach out to people who don't have the skills. I can't say more about that now, but in a way, it is the agenda item.
The product I want to deploy is a web tool that will make it much easier for people to collect large amounts of content, and not only that, to regularly review all of that content and to manage, edit, and share it. Today, looking back into the history of a large archive, of photos, say, or screenshots, or rather both - a mixed archive, just to make it more difficult - is, indeed, difficult. My tool will allow any user to manage much more content than even the most expert users can manage today.
And, yes, it's a CMS, even a free personal online data warehouse.
The programming is straightforward but not without its challenges. It's 100% JavaScript on the client side and PHP or something on the server side. A standard user accounts system would be fine but I also have an alternative user accounts concept I want to explore. Some sort of display ad system needs to be incorporated, which could be sort of out of the box - it should integrate fine - but there's something I want to try there, too.
So, funds must be secured to do the development work, and the project needs to be shaped into a legitimate company, a legitimate investment vehicle.
I think it might be important to patent the concept, which includes a system for displaying collections of images, a system for displaying selected images at various levels of magnification, a system for placing images on pages, and for locating and sizing images on pages, a system for capturing screenshots, a system for managing browser cache, a proprietary user accounts system, and a system for managing display ads.
For the first ten years or so, we'll be the source for the tool, but part of the plan is to gradually move users towards more independence from us, which we'll achieve, in part, by publishing information about the system, and its construction and operation. The goal is to eventually ensure that everyone without exception has dependable independent access to these capabilities, with complete control, up to and including creating their own ad based media with the tool. With that done, we'll move on to other things, because there are other things to move on to.
I can barely socialize at all, and might not be much good in casual negotiations, but I can read legal and technical documents, so, might do OK in more formal meetings, and I do have a demo version which only I can operate, and I hope to use it to give an illustrated talk on the concept.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Really inspired by an article in this morning's USA Today (Arizona Republic) about Google, and how their policy from the start has been really taking care of the worker and investing ambitiously in long term projects.
Then again, I'm supposed to be out on errands, but all I feel at all like doing is drinking, and writing in my affirmations journal, and now, writing in my corporate book. And I'm writing in my journal, and thinking over all the awkward aspects of my present moment, and how writing that I can barely socialize isn't going to sell my brand very well. I am not, and this is true, unsociable. I really like people, and I like socializing, though I'm just awkward myself, and that makes me ... a little bit difficult to take. And here's the thing: I don't feel like fighting that. I don't want to set up awkward situations just to try to get things done. Principles of management, I was thinking, require total engagement on the part of the CEO with everyone at all levels of the organization. If we set up an office where programmers are developing our software product, don't I need to be very much in the office? But I don't want to commit to that! I want to see how it goes as far as being in the office goes. I'm in my office, and I don't really want to switch offices. My office can only minimally accommodate anyone but me, and, besides, I'm too shy, generally, to invite people over. My affirmation journal is for recording my ultimate dream, and I wrote, just now: "The radical idea of running a company entirely from my house."
A group of computer engineers needs to gather every day in some very pleasant location and work all day there, and into the night, in order to pull this off. Some of them need to be not like me at all. Where I'm shy and want to completely hide, they need to be outgoing, and like going out, at the drop of the hat, and popping in on people, and having a beer. And all of them, and everyone who works for the company, needs to understand the initiative, what it takes to seize the initiative, and what that means needs to be defined within the company, and it means, in a sense, reporting back. The vision, of course, gets very sci-fi. This is, of course, completely crazy, but it just might work. The engineers are gathered in a spacious board room - the studio, really - and the Internet is on a big screen. Another screen next to that is just a blank screen. That's our blank slate, where we're going to make things happen. Oh, I might as well get on Skype. The reason I'm not there in person is because it would be awkward, I would feel cooped up, and that's just two less things to worry about. Put a smallish screen at the back of the room and I'll do Skype from there. We are, by the way, becoming an organization of teleconferencing experts. As a company, we want to capitalize on that. I'm assigning someone to document teleconferencing technology right now, and I'll be talking to that person continually about what I'm looking for from the product.
OK, so the blank slate is before us, and it is, in fact, a browser window. Now, via that window, we are going to create, right here and now, a web hosting account, or a cloud computing account, or, I don't know, both. Let's discuss it. And we are also going to buy some domains, and we're going to talk about names, and our lawyers are here, so let's name this company and its products. Let's take a half hour to do all that. OK, Fiona, you're in charge of domain management. Are you set up to work on the screen? OK, who's gonna provide us with server space? Amazon? Is that good with everybody? Fiona, how long is it gonna take to set up an account on the Amazon Cloud? Half an hour? Fantastic. Get to work. Fiona, you've got a mike, so give everybody a play by play on what you're doing. Meanwhile, Richard, you start working on our domain. The domain name is ***FPODW.org***. OK, guys, Fiona, Richard, each of you has a screen up here, and everything you're doing is up on your screen, and also, it's all being recorded, live action. If you have questions for me, just ask, and Art and Raoul (our layers) will huddle with you and make sure all the legal stuff is under control. Fiona, Richard, you're the process managers. Process managers, get the legal team copies of all TOS type documents immediately, and, legal guys, it's your job to organize all those documents for future use, and present use, for that matter. Tell you what, at the end of the first half hour, we'll take a break, and then we'll all review all the legal documents. Now I'm going to huddle with the build team chief, Apple, and we're going to map out some things to put on the server as soon as it's set up, and a couple or three hours we'll present that plan to everybody.
OK, before we get started, I want to talk about the business some. First, let me talk about my needs a little. I need tree trimming work, and other landscaping and home improvement work, done, and I need it done by someone who really cares, and will really take their time doing it, and do it right, and do it the way it's been mapped out and described, and so it needs to be mapped out and described, and so one of our team members, Jacqueline, to do architectural work. We're going to start building a book about architectural process right away, and we're going to become, as an organizations, experts on architectural method. You see, building the FPODW tool is our mission, but it's only going to happen because of our company, and the company is 100% people. Companies exist as a way for people to share resources, including, in a way especially, knowlege. The knowlege of how to do things. Also, focus. Since there are many tasks in life, we share them out, so that each of us can really focus on something. For these reasons, we have created kind of a homie environment here at headquarters, right down to the availability of sleeping arrangements, and then there's the kitchen, which is so critical to everything we're doing. Actually, it's the kitchens. I learned by experience that a community of people probably needs multiple kitchens, of different types. We're going to have at least a kitchen that feeds the staff, or persons present for work, on company projects, and a coffee house. How about that? It's a little muddled, but it introduces the idea. And so, part of the staff is kitchen staff. Say hi, kitchen staff! And kitchen work is going to be so important to what we're doing as a company. Kitchen staff, you will be under constant video survailance, laugh out loud. We're going to write books about how to set up and manage various kinds of kitchens, OK? They're going to be super detailed and process oriented, so we want to build a document around that idea of the whole kitchen process.
And so, yes, we have on hand a team of videographers. They are going to be a huge resource for every part of our venture - the architural component, by all means the cooking component, even the programming component. "Hey kitchen staff" - I've switched in some part of my brain to actually being there - I could use a beer! By the way, another kitchen is the brewery, and Kitchen Guys, you are to begin work immediately on brewing an abundance of beer for us, OK? We'll talk.
Finally, I need to mention the gardening team. I don't know why I'm saying mention. You guys are SO important. Video team, part of your job is to set people throughout the org with cameras, and get their feeds linked into the the corporate book, right?
I need to zoom out a bit. There are going to be people on campus who come for the day and go home at night, so, commuters. Well, a very significant part of corporate mission, here, is minimizing commuting, and there are two kinds of commuting that require most of the commuting resources, in life, which is going to and from work and shopping. So, to some extent, we're going to participate in the world of being a work place, with employees commuting in for the day, but we want to address this question of commuting about for shopping. In an efficient society, we would do that using public transportation or on foot, but special provisions need to be made in a car based living environment, or, to put it better, in a dispersed living environment, where distances to ... whatever ... are beyond the range of travel by foot. So we're going to be practicing a shopping service kind of service, providing the service for people who visit the campus. That's part of Kitchen Staff's work. People visit us here, and they can leave with groceries. We're also going to practice delivering groceries, starting very, very small, so we can work on the logistics of it. I need to mention, about the coffee house, it's so important that people can come here and just have a coffee. It's an easy way for people to slip into the rhythm of the place. And then we are, with emphasis, going to offer classes, so if 11:11! someone has a coffee, and checks out the class offering, they can just decide to take a class. That's my marketing plan for HQ.
On the software side, in order to synthesize all this record keeping, we're going to build a system of categories. This is definitely relevant to the ***FPODW*** product, it just approache the problem from a different angle. So let's say you're documenting something like, oh, say, making wooden bowls. That's a category of information, where you can start to collect content. How about sawing timbers into thin sheets? This gets to what some of the early ***FPODW*** work is going to look like. Within a category (in addition to other categories) we'll be creating slide shows, and the categorization system and slide show software are really the first orders of business. Let's see. Everyone with an account can start building their own collection of categories, and then they can edit that and mail it to somebody, or, that is, friend it to somebody, in other words, if you and someone are friends on the network, the version of your categories that you post for them will be updated, it's synchronized. And visa versa. Yup, that sounds right. Wow, I'm so excited, because that's realy doable.
Now, another division I haven't talked about yet is our ad division. Let's acknowlege these advertising people! We are an ad agency, and we are also an order fulfillment house. We're especially promoting mail order art, and sort of generally a really custom kind of mail order. Instead of trying to get sellers to sell a lot, we're going to really get to know our sellers. We're also going to design lines, like certain kinds of frames that come with custom packaging, and custom packaging for certain kinds of sculptural objects. We're going to work to introduce lots and lots of sellers, as people, to the whole world, which is going to have to be done with a certain kind of discretion, but also in a really friendly way. We need to also encourage sellers to commit to a well ordered inventory, which is a kind of virtual store, though it's also very real. We're getting into the box business, no ifs ands or buts about it, custom boxes. The Jeans box. The box of shorts. The clothing repair service. As a seller, you will ship to our warehouse, and then we will forward to the purchaser. Oh, yes, there's the problem of the quality of the art. Hmm. Acquiring stacks and stacks of middling art work. Am I too picky? We could ship stacks, assortments, in big boxes and see how it goes. Advertise to curio shops. CAD software that allows the buyer to select items and virtually fill a box.
And I just had the most amazing idea for a sewing product!
When it's big, start small. Test ideas inside the org. Another design line is clippings. We're going to start a clippings collector movement.
August 20, 2014
Every product needs its own custom marketing, and then, if you can customize the marketing, you can sell anything. We're building a marketing company. We are gathering marketing expertise into one organization, and then we're going to apply it to all sorts of products. There are a lot of legitimate products that aren't marketed because people think, for one reason or another, that it can't be marketed. That's never true. If you customize the marketing, you can sell the product. And lots of people in marketing, thinking you can't market legitimate products, market not-legitimate products instead. So, there are lots of legitimate products not being marketed, and lots of not-legitimate products being actively marketed. We are not going to market not-legitimate products, and we are going to market legitimate products that nobody else is selling, that people aren't even thinking about selling. We will not, however, be too insistent that we know the difference between not-legitimate and legitimate products. One of our products will be research and reporting on the world of products, generally.
Again, the goal is to create a company, and have on board every kind of relevant expertise and capacity. From there we move toward selling a lot of products, which means, first, doing a lot of marketing type work. And what makes a company? It's people, but people need facilities, to work, so, it's facilities, and then people need plans, to work, so, it's planning, which is related to direction, which people also need, to work. You can mine my writing for specifics about the kinds of work we will be doing, but we ARE generalists. The specifics are an essential foundation, not the whole program.
Headed out on errands in the morning. Very much scrambling, these days, everything seeming on the edge of flying out of control. Just trying to do my best not to react to things, things like worries. If you react, they grab you. Try to drive steady, even when there's crazy traffic. Where's that place on the road where you're safe? How can you move to stay in or be in that place? Sometimes you can see it, far ahead of you. Other times, it appears, all of a sudden, and you know what to do. Rain, yesterday evening, and quite a bit of it, and very sunny, muggy, a clean, clean blue sky, today. Everything washed, warm, and mellow. Thought going through my head, ideas buzzing, as I drive around ... my driving adventure, making the car twitch all the time, constantly testing its ability to do that, watching the city scenery go by, and the funny cars. Whoozy, dizzy. Pancake breakfast, and what was I thinking about? Got my accounting done. To the car wash, giving it a quick spray down, to the hardware pallace for a spare key. What were those ideas?
What I can remember is this: our team is going to equip cars with video capture. Every member of our team, maybe, will, eventually, be fully equipped with video capture on their cars, on their persons, even. It will be one giant multi-camera video feed. And then we're going to edit all of that into, what? Sure, it will be like Google's Street View, but not impersonal like that. It'll be very personal. When I drive around, it's a huge seeing-things experience. A thousand (is it that many) gorgeous, fascinating images impress themselves on my mind. There's the general scenery passing by, and then there's the things I notice, OMG images ... and then they're gone. Street View captures the street, we are going to capture our experience of the street. This is a whole product area itself. What is the camera of the future going to look like? It's a dashboard cam that just sits on your dash and captures hours and hours and hours ... hundreds of hours ... of video. Nobody thinks you need hundreds of hours of video, and nobody builds cameras to capture hundreds of hours of video, because they don't think it's needed. Well, it is. But what are you going to do with hundreds of hours of video? You are going to edit it. You are going to distill it into minutes of video that are completely compelling and capture everything. So, video editing is so important. People think of it as a specialist tool, but it's not. Lots of people need it, everybody needs it. Also, mapping technology, where your day's adventures appear on a map. The key to marketing these kinds of things is useability, and the key to useability is understanding what people are going to want to do with these tools. This is not a technical problem. The technology is already really advanced. It's an information problem: how does one use these tools? What does one use them for? They're used for creating shows, is the first answer, and the first of all audiences is ourselves. Even if we never show anything to anybody else, creating shows for ourselves is extremely important, and then, it's also the basis for creating shows for other people. There's huge potential in that. By the way, another version of the camera of the future is cameras that capture 3D maps of an environment. Everyone has a camera, now, for vacation photos. I predict everyone will have one of these 3D mapping cameras, in the near future. We want to get into that business.
So I'm driving around and I'm thiking about where we would put our headquarters. Somewhere in these neighborhoods? It's a bit of a weird idea. But I'm for working to dissolve the arbitrary boundaries between work environments and home environments. Yes, it's partly because of my shyness, and my sensitivity to, say, the harshness of the work place, but it's also a legitimate sustainability imperative. Yes, we are going to continue to need factories, with big setbacks from residential areas, and lots of people are going to continue to be willing to immerse themselves in those environments ... but, there are ways. Creating beautiful places for people to live - and, I'm extending that - work, is an industry. In some sense, that industry isn't focused on the beauty equation. What is the deepest, most profound kind of beauty? And this is closely related to one person's favorite, Frugality. This idea of finding beautiful houses, already built, for a song, and then finding uses for them. I'm thinking, like, a network of lovely suburban houses, each operating as some kind of FACTORY. 100 box making factories, or 1000. Maybe 10,000. One million composting factories, in the back yards of suburban houses, networked together, each equipped with specific tools to turn the product of the Urban Forest into ... pure abundance. Thousands of hospitality sites, but they're not like hotels, they're more like retreat centers, where you stay to participate in the activities of the house, except if you are a visiting dignitary, working on your own projects, and expert in the protocols. So, training people to be wandering monks, or dignitaries of the best kind, and that's our customer base. And we start off very slow, with any hospitality associate. We make sure there's a sense of purpose in every visit, right from the start. And doing these things is going to innitially take a lot of resources, but, later, there will be a payoff, and, too, it's not the kind of resources you all think: it's talk, and looking at things, and drawings, and thinking things over, and then more drawings, and more looking at things, and more talk. It's little adjustments to architecture, well planned, completely thought out, that take the house away from being the air conditioned bubble it is today, towards being ... more like a sponge ... with nooks and crannies, air and light filtering through, cold spots and hot spots, but very well planned and localized, so they're small but work extremely well, innumerable pocket gardens, a kitchen and laundry paradise, cellars for warehousing good goods, and towers for that purpose, too, and, always, well equipped shops for industry, and even commerce, even a year's worth of water.
Little adjustments, I'm saying. It's possible to move in these directions by doing, in fact, almost nothing. And then we get to participate in the real-estate market, just for fun.
But is this an environment for industrial development? Well, the enviroment for industrial development is sort of a virtual environment. Somebody with a real, deep knowledge of business needs to be lured into the picture, and then we can sit down, a gathering of programmers and business people, and prototype a product.
HMMMM. What is the proper rhythm for work? We know a guy who works for six months and then takes six months off. During the six months when he's working, he's really focused, and really relaxed, and does fantastic work, and then what does he do when he's not working? He doesn't actually go anywhere, he just stays at home and watches movies! That's a kind of rhythm we want to promote! But there's also a rhythm where someone works, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and quite contentedly. We want to study that kind of rhythm. How does a person get into that kind of rhythm? And what other kinds of rhythms are there, especially ones that work really well?
Donor at the $20 level get a mail art post card. Donors at the $100 level get two mail art post cards and a screen sculpture. Donors at the $1000 level get five mail art postcards, one screen sculpture, and a book of drawings.
Someone - a prodigious ceramic artist - just friended me on Facebook. Amazing. Which reminds me, ceramics is very much an industry, and art form, I want to promote. Equipping houses with quiet, clean burning kilns ... even wood fired ones ... and then equipping the resident crafts people with designs from a design line, so as to make a market for their work ... I've actually experimented with wood burning kilns, and they're more manageable than you would think. JUNGLE GARDENS is something I want to promote, but JUNGLE GARDENS are hard to maintain. That's what the 3D cameras are for, and what the 3D modeling is for, so everyone can model their own houses, and their own gardens, down to the branch. Then you can tell Tree People, please cut here, and please set up this pulley here, and you can tell the plumbers, please put pipes like this here, and pipes like that there, and on and on. Home Services Planning is an almost completely neglected industry. Talk about a niche.
Oh, man, what an insight into economies I just had. A very large amount of economic activity cycles within its own small sphere, like creating art work, craft work, cooking, and the like, and then, if there's a lot of that kind of activity, it sucks in resources from industries like farming, and forestry, and mining, and engineering. Promoting small cycles will build the whole economy. But should we build the whole economy? It's a behemoth. Should we make it even bigger? Well, it probably will get bigger, but also it will change. Its texture will change. Changing the texture of economies is our business.
Ad response: living on the beach ... everybody should live on the beach! Make it so.
There's an approach to architecture, to life where you don't go to the beach, you create the beach, right where you are. Again, that's called Frugality, and also Imagination, or Theater. First you get into the spirit of being at the beach, and then you create ... things ... that reflect that spirit ... in the city, in the desert. Media, broadly understood, are essential to this process. I just looked at this guy's pottery, and it was like being at the beach.
This idea of ... the suburban house project ... is, in a way, optional. It's essential that things be optional. You have to be able to respond to circumstances. Being optional is the key, in the way, to something being innevitable. You do test cases, and you do research. There is a market for houses. Really great houses sometimes, or often, sell really cheap. And there are urban infill opportunities. It's like a resource, that, if you know how to mine it, you can mine it. I went to the head shop, I mean, the smoke shop, for smokes. It's in this shopping mall on the corner that used to be this amazing 60s modern building. They've - it was totally shocking - replaced it with some kind of post modern facade. But in the corner is my smoke shop, a very cheerful place, and next to it was a vacant store, that was, pretty recently, kind of a grocery. The space looked stark, exciting, perfect for a project. There's endless opportunities of that sort, and what people want, and need, is fun, and serenity.
My buddy all of a sudden was talking about ... oh God, I've forgotten the name ... Geek Central ... maybe they are going out of business, but they are a billion dollar company, that's their annual sales, and the creditors don't want them to close stores, and the stock is at some absurdly low price, relative to its history. If they make it, if they pull through, a $1000 investment will return $50,000. Or, you could buy the whole company, really cheap. Then you would have to run it, and the secret to success there is letting it run itself ... but that's not as simple as it sounds.
Pouring it all out, here. The goal is to raise 1 Million Dollars on Kickstarter, and then another $2 Million from other sources. Then we'll talk about all the incredible things we can do.
We also need to reach out to people who don't have the skills. I can't say more about that now, but in a way, it is the agenda item.
Friday, August 8, 2014
the winds
the winds of crimilality
blow over the land
sometimes they spawn tornadoes
that destroy whole communities
and other times and places
the rain comes down
the sun bakes the desert brown
the desert dweller too ...
blow over the land
sometimes they spawn tornadoes
that destroy whole communities
and other times and places
the rain comes down
the sun bakes the desert brown
the desert dweller too ...
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