You may ask yourself: well… how did I get here?
You may ask yourself, where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself this is not my beautiful house!
You may tell yourself this is not my beautiful wife!

..or is it?

There’s one way to tell now. Go to Pummelvision.  They’ll turn your Facebook, Flikr or Tumblr photographs into a speeding video slide show that will leave you watching your life flash before your eyes.  …and you don’t even have to die first! (Bonus.)

After filling out 3 simple fields on the site, Pummelvision will automatically post your video to Vimeo or YouTube for you.  As an example, here’s my life so far:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The more photos you have, the longer your life will seem.  Even if your life looks short through the lens of photos streaming at light speed, it’s a fun way to share your life with your friends. I’d love to see a Pummelvision of National Geographic photographs over the last 100 years.  Just sayin’.

Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission took the first steps towards creating a Do Not Track feature to allow internet users to opt-out of having companies obtain data on their online surfing habits. This mechanism is being designed in the spirit of the Do Not Call registry that regulates the activities of telemarketers.

On the surface this sounds great. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, besides a telemarketer, who preferred life before the Do Not Call list eliminated those annoying sales calls that interrupted your dinner. But online advertising and telemarketing are very different animals, so let’s look a little deeper into what the reality of a Do Not Track bill would look like.

In theory implementing a Do Not track mechanism will allow consumers to have more control over their personal information that is shared online. Internet privacy has been a hot topic for awhile now, so it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to supporting anything that will protect online privacy. The more prudent way to analyze the implications of a Do Not Track bill is to look at what it will actually accomplish.

Eliminating or decreasing the frequency of internet users receiving targeted advertising while they surf websites is the result that the Do Not Track bill. Building individual profiles of how we search, surf and interact online for the use of targeted advertising, based on behavioral targeting and contextual advertising, is assumed to be a problem that needs solving. …but is it?

Common wisdom tells us that people hate advertising. Is this true, or is this is a myth when it is thrown out as a blanket statement?

People don’t hate advertising; they hate advertising for stuff they don’t want.

People love advertising that tells them about a new cool product they will use. We are psychologically wired to connect with other people and seek their validation. Therefore we love to be the first one to tell our friends about something that we think is cool, and that we think they will think is cool.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With this in mind, why wouldn’t you want to see targeted advertising when you’re online? You’re going to see advertising anyway, so what’s bad about it being for products and services that are aligned with your historical online profile of interests?

Why should anyone be afraid of marketers using this data to offer you more things that you want? This isn’t the same as someone using your private information for identity theft. This is a way for you to find out about things you’ll probably be interested in rather than finding out about things you don’t care about.

The word ‘privacy’ is a trigger word. No one wants to give up their privacy. If the Do Not Track bill goes into effect you can choose to keep a little bit of your privacy in exchange for continuing to receive nonspecific advertising instead of targeted advertising online.

Either way, this issue is not anywhere near the problem it’s made out to be and your life as an American consumer will continue on. You just may have to wait longer to discover cool new products and be stuck with seeing diaper advertisements when you don’t have any toddlers or ads for singles websites even though you’ve been married for 10 years.

This article was originally posted in the Huffington Post.

Photo via flightlessxbird365 via Flikr

2010 is the year that the world started to wake up to how technology, and social media in particular, is fundamentally changing how we live, behave and interact.  As early adopters joined Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006 they were chided by friends and family who thought they were just goofing off online.  In reality they were laying the foundation for how personal and professional worlds are connecting and expanding today.  There are three major changes from which we can never go back.  Let’s explore them, shall we?

1. There’s a new meme in town. Either/or thinking has been replaced with both/and thinking.  When social media first hit the scene all you read about for a few years was “Traditional Media vs. Social Media,” “Online advertising and blogs are putting the smackdown on newspapers,” “Traditional media is dying and new media is the only way to go.”  This pseudo-battle makes for good headlines, but it’s complete B.S.

Starting from these simplistic and juvenile perspectives of “new = good so old = bad” was based on people feeling scared.  The older you are and the less you use technology, the more this world may not make sense to you and, like it or not, it is where the world is today and where it will be tomorrow.  But there is no need to be scared.

The truth is that our world is full of “both/and” propositions.  You’ll both watch TV and use the internet, but you’ll watch less TV and will be Twittering on your TV screen while you load a YouTube video. Advertisers will reach more people with more trackable data through social networks, and they’ll still be placing Super Bowl ads.  You’ll still make friends at work, and you’ll make friends in other countries when you participate in social networks.

Do More Faster

2. Innovation and creativity are helping us to do more faster. The interwebs have crushed the barrier to entry for starting a company and creating new products and services.  I stole the Do More Faster line from the new book by Brad Feld and David Cohen of Techstars.  Read their blogs and the new book to get great insights into how innovation is exploding like never before.  The creative class is finally hitting a tipping point where we are making the business world more collaborative, fun and dynamic for everyone.  Some exclusivity will always be around, but inclusivity is on the rise. (Remember the new meme?)

3. Privacy is dead. Lets start with the study revealing that 92% of 2 year olds in the U.S. have an online record.  Imagine a 2 year old of today when she is 30.  Everything from her sonogram, emails, text messages, and browsing history to her YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, World of Warcraft and Club Penguin use will be archived.  Now add to that geo-location enabled pictures and videos that other people tag her in.  This is where we are headed.

Brian Solis believes that “we are the last generation to know privacy as it was and from now on, it will have to be taught. We are entering a new era of publicness or publicy, where we are solely responsible for creating and defining our online persona.”

I think he’s right and the people that understand this, accept it and take responsibility for their online persona will be better for doing so.  Watch the interview he did with Michael Fertik of Reputation Defender for a deeper analysis of what it means to live online when you didn’t opt-in to have your information sold and shared without your permission.

These are the top 3 changes I’ve noticed while looking at the world through my personal filter. What are you seeing changing and where do you think we’re heading as our online and offline lives continue to merge?

This article was  originally posted at Oxstein Labs.

A friend sent this to me on Facebook and it struck me.  We talk about how things have changed so much in our lifetimes, but we usually reference things like 8 track tapes and vinyl records switching to compact discs and bytes on an iPod. Did you realize that the patent for the compact disc was filed in 1966 and the first one wasn’t produced until 1982?

But think about how much your life has changed just in the last 10 years from advances in technology.  Can you remember life before you had an email address or a cell phone?  This video is from a newscast in 1981, almost 20 years ago.  Look how how far we’ve come with the advancement of Moore’s Law.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What made watching this even funnier to me was that I saw my friend’s email on my iPad and clicked a link to go to Facebook to read the message.  Then I clicked into YouTube and watched this on a thin crisp iPad screen.  That’s normal today.  ‘Normal’ when this was broadcast was to move the rabbit ears on a TV the size of a bank safe to get good reception and cable TV was a new phenomenon.

I’m not enough of a fanboy to already own an iPad, but most of my friends have one already and love them.  If I was a gamer or wanted it for watching Netflix movie streams maybe I would have been an early adopter.

Instead, I’ll wait 6 months and they’ll probably release one with a camera, video capabilities or more features.  For now I’ll enjoy learning about what’s fun and great about the first version by playing with my friend’s iPads.  So far it  just seems like a larger screen to enjoy apps on, but I’m sure that theory will be proved wrong.

Follow my friend Matt Emmi’s blog as he documents his experience of using the iPad to replace his crashed laptop.  He’s moved all of his data to the cloud through Mobile Me and others apps and feels confident he can pull this off.

For now, we can all enjoy a moment of zen from our friends at Blendtec who have blended everything from glow sticks to Chuck Norris.  Now, it’s the iPad’s turn…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century.  Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems.  These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone.  What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Startup Weekend is a conference bringing together developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.  Sounds cool, right?  It is.

The concept grew from an idea by  Andrew Hyde in 2007 and now there have been over 49 Startup Weekends with 65 cities and 11 countries signed on to host more.

Rather than your typical conference of watching speakers and panels, these conferences are designed to facilitate learning through organically forming teams and getting into immediate action.  It’s a conference with some unconference elements that facilitate cumulative collaboration creating community and companies.

It kicks off with all the participants sharing their backgrounds and answering the question, “What’s your problem?”  Over the years I’ve discovered what a crucial question this is to ask for any business or proposed project, product or service.

A classic mistake most entrepreneurs and companies make is that they get excited about an idea and invest valuable time and money into creating a product or service they think is great.  Then they take it to market and try to convince the public to be interested in it.  This is why so many of them fail.  If people aren’t interested in what you’re offering then you don’t have a business.

It’s much more effective to ask people what they want and provide that.  Or even better, ask them what problems they currently have and provide simple and powerful solutions to those problems.  That’s where the sweet spot of helping people and making a profit lie.

Jason Janelle, Tom Markiewicz & Harry Love build an internal media sharing solution; Ron Bronson makes a Twitter-based baseball application; Neil Simon creates WordPress Plugins

In the case of this Startup Weekend, after identifying problems we all broke into teams to immediately start building the solutions.  Through conversations covering design, development and marketing things moved very quickly.

Within the first 3 hours of meeting this morning one product was a ‘fast fail’ (Rosetta Stone already has a similar version of how to connect people who want to practice their second languages with people of equal levels of skill), and a name and WordPress Plugin were created for SpotGrab – a product to connect renters with available apartments.  And that’s just what happened for two of the projects.

Though products, projects and companies are birthed at Startup Weekends, the first focus is on community.  Regardless of any outcome, the conference provides an environment for internet creatives to meet and share their skills with one another.

About a month ago I volunteered to help with business development, marketing and PR for iVolunteer which is a product born from the last Boulder Startup Weekend.

We’re developing a website, iPhone app and WordPress plugin that enables you to find local volunteer opportunities aligned with your interests easily anywhere.  There are over 30 volunteers working on this.  Most of us found out about it after two guys met at the last Boulder Startup Weekend and saw an unfulfilled need.

I’m wondering how similar conferences can be created outside of the tech world to generate collaboration and community.  The registration fee goes entirely to the food budget and the space rental (unless it’s donated like it was this weekend.)  Aside from this, participants are welcome to drop in and out as their schedules demand.  This makes it easy for people to contribute in whatever ways work for them.

How could you create an event like this in your community based around your interests to share your influence and bring people together in fun and productive ways?  Or an easier way to look at it is, ‘What’s your problem?’  Just asking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology has rocked our world repeatedly in profound ways. This will happen many more times and is about to happen again with Google Wave.  It’s going to be a tidal wave!

Imagine email, instant messaging, document sharing and much more integrated into a real time platform.  Or don’t imagine it and just wait a few months because that’s when you’ll be using Google Wave. TechCrunch has a great overview explaining why this is a game-changing product.

With Google Wave being announced it seems like a good time to shine a spotlight on how our world has changed from the release of disruptive technologies.  Some of my favorites have been:

• Smart Phones – before them we actually used a phone for making calls.  Now we use our phones as watches, computers, Rolodexes, calendars, cameras, alarm clocks, jukeboxes, photo albums, yellow page directories, news resources, email clients, video game consoles and a hundred other devices-in-one.
• Pagers – First drug dealers used them with pay phones (remember those?  …pay phones, not drug dealers) and parents used them to get their kids to call home.   With their arrival we began to move into a world where we could be found at any moment aside from being in the shower.
• Mobile Phones - Remember when phones were used connect with a specific location?  Now they are used to connect to a person in any location.  This created a major shift in how we communicate.
• Satellites – Before 1957 there were no satellites.  Fifty-two years later we use them for many purposes across industries as varied as radio, television, telecommunications, navigation, meteorology, land mapping, business & finance, climate & environmental monitoring, space science to name a few.  When is the last time you used a paper map instead of Google Maps on your phone or computer?
• Cable news – I don’t watch it, think it’s moronic and a tabloid distraction, but when it first debuted it was a positive revolution to have 24 hour news.  It killed the habit of tuning into the evening news and broadened possibilities before imploding into itself and beginning to be killed by my favorite disruptive technology so far…
• The Interwebs – Also know as the intertubes or the internet.  Since you’re reading this on the internet you probably know how transformational the internet and personal computers have been.  Pause for a moment and try to remember what your life was like before owning a personal computer, much less a laptop or smart phone.

Some technologies that were revolutionary and became extinct include the betamax, laser discs, vinyl albums, Polaroid pictures, PDAs, 8 Track tapes, cassette tapes and floppy discs.  The thing is, they were all necessary bridges to our modern world of digital convenience.  Much like how email and verbal voice mail may be out of use in 10 years, but they are necessary and interesting to us today.

The key to new innovative disruptive technologies is to look for the opportunities rather than being afraid because the old ways are passing away.  Dinosaur industries like music, TV and newspapers could have done much better than they have in the last 10 years.

They are still blowing it by blaming the world for changing rather than blaming their antiquated hierarchical business models.  The old models had large overheads and made a ton of money for few people while taking advantage of many others.  The new models value human, social, financial and environmental capital equally while collaborating to benefit many through innovation with low costs of entry.

There are tons of great examples like Amazon that have changed our personal and professional lives in deeply profound ways by unleashing innovative products, services and distribution models to an unsuspecting public.  Google Wave is just the next best thing, but lets welcome the changes it will bring to help us to do life in better and more collaborative ways.