I’m blown away and humbled by the collective intelligence and spirit of adventure and curiosity in every single participant and presenter at the first Quantified Self Conference today. In the afternoon I’ll be co-presenting a short talk entitled Agile Self Development, on borrowing ideas from Lean Startup and Agile Software Development for optimizing personal development, experimentation and productivity.

Seth Roberts suggested in his opening plenary that professional science is stagnating, while personal science is about to revolutionize the advancement of knowledge and human health, productivity and happiness. Hooray for progress!

Shuttle Discovery on pad 39a, night before her final launch

My visits to NASA for this launch were an amazing experience, but I also noticed a valuable lesson for company founders and leaders.

Innovation and reliability sometimes compete, but they matter differently to each of the things you do. At any stage and any size, your company can be more nimble and accepting of failure where needed, and more risk averse where needed. The trick is knowing the difference and taking advantage, rather than succumbing to the temptation to always favor one over the other.

Perhaps a more interesting way to look at it might be that we’re always engineering a reduction in different kinds of risks. Focus on the right one to reduce for each problem, and we can meet our most important and appropriate goals. Beware the temptation to manage the wrong risks.

More about the lesson and the launch, with a few of the snapshots I took on this trip (all are unedited/uncropped from my point-and-shoot Canon sx30is), after the break…

The world's most famous clock?

“Tears.”

That was all I could think to Tweet after Discovery lifted off as I stood feet from the world-famous countdown clock.

The physicality of the launch from that distance (as near as any are allowed to be, and miles closer than the public), is enough to change your emotional state. The sound of the SRBs and main engines reverberates in your chest at least as much as in your ears.

Discovery's last launch (STS-133)

I was also intensely aware of how many people had worked tirelessly to make one of the world’s most complex machines ready to fly one more time. I was lucky enough to talk to many of the astronauts and managers during the programs NASA put together for us.

Even when things go well, the Shuttle is amazingly complex. So much goes into planning and carrying out a launch and mission under the best of circumstances.

Last November, I was here for a series of delays and an eventual scrubbed launch attempt. After that, cracks were found, and Discovery pulled off the pad to make modifications to her External Tank (note the lighter orange band on the ET — those are the repair). For me, this meant the inconvenience of a second trip to Florida. For countless NASA employees and contractors, it meant significant parts of the 100 elapsed days working around the clock weekends and holidays throughout that time to investigate the problem, come up with solutions, run the math and execute the plan. Thousands of people were involved. The layers of procedure they work through and documentation they create to come to agreement about root cause, to understand risk, confidently eliminate it and generate flight rationale is stunning.

Last trip, a turkey vulture, this one, a Huey, flies in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Really though, they added a drop in the bucket to the enormous history of human energy that has accumulated in the shuttle program. When she took off, I could feel all that blood, sweat and tears, all that amazing capacity we as a species have to reach beyond and do what should be impossible. And to be safe and reliable at that.

Remember that moment in the Apollo 13 movie where the engineers work all night to figure out how to put a square air scrubber in a round hole (or was it vice-versa)? It may not always be so obvious, but that’s practically a day in the life. NASA always has to solve problems with lives in the balance, before and during missions.

In the week after the launch date was made official, the countdown started and went smoothly, but we still ended up with a nail-biter. The Range computer went down, resulting in a No-Go and an unplanned hold at T-5 minutes. A verbal OK and override was given by RCO with just seconds before another scrub would have been forced. Even the professional media gathered to cover the event let up a cheer when the countdown resumed.

All that, and the knowing that this would be Discovery’s last flight before she retires to a museum. There were few dry eyes after liftoff.

That’s what it feels like when we have a new product launch, too, doesn’t it?

During the dot-com boom, we mostly built startups the way NASA builds rockets. Acting as if we knew exactly where we were going, we layed out elaborate plans to get there and set huge teams of engineers to multi-year projects building out software to do it. We often ended up with robust solutions no one wanted to buy.

Zoom.

We’ve learned a lot about how much we usually don’t know in a startup. The first risk to manage in most new products is that we don’t know enough about our customer and what the product would look like that they’d really use.

Better tools make it easier and faster to build web startups with smaller, more nimble teams. The welcome trend is toward doing better customer research up front, incorporating good user experience design, and Lean Startup methods. You can reduce risk by getting to know customers early and often, putting low-fidelity prototypes in front of them early and then getting actual usable software into their hands as quickly as possible. Then you repeat the process, iterating on making changes and looking for customer feedback, constantly learning, proving assumptions and getting new insight and inspiration.

When you get a good product/market fit, then you face the problems of building to scale and refactoring the prototype code that customers are actually using. You have to create a more robust implementation. Now you start to get into the situation where people really are depending on your code and downtime or failures are much more costly. You get to do both at the same time, sometimes focusing on enhancing reliability and maintainability, sometimes focusing again on innovation and customers and market. The more flexibility you have to do both, the better off you are.

It starts happening much earlier, but it’s easiest to see at the extreme: If you’re lucky enough to get to be the size of Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft), you’ll run into the problem that the temptation is to use large teams and build everything to work with your scalable architecture (see Why Google can’t build Instagram, for great insights about their innovation problem). When you want to try out a new feature or product, rather than prototype it with the fastest available tools and try it with a small audience, you’ll build it more slowly so that it can scale if you turn it on to the firehose of traffic you can send to it. When you acquire a new startup, you’ll let them spend their first year integrating their code rather than continuing to innovate. You’d be better off keeping more teams separate longer, running skunkworks operations to prove new concepts before handing them off.

BBQ.

One way NASA demonstrates that it is nimble enough to use different rules in different domains is in how it handles social media. Despite all the beauracracy of a large government organization and the heritage of “Failure is Not an Option” engineering, in this area, they’ve managed to take more risks, embrace test and learn, and allow for public mistakes and a human face that people want to engage with. In a recent study, NASA ranked first of 100 public sector organizations based on the effectiveness of their websites, social media use, mobile sites, and digital outreach. In fact, they came in 26 points ahead of its next closest competitor. The biggest risk most companies face in social media is the risk of not engaging in authentic conversation with customers, of being too afraid of mistakes and failure, and too conservative in what they’re willing to try.

Be mindful with any problem set. What don’t you know? What risks can you afford to take in order to learn more quickly? How can you better connect with your audience by being open and transparent? Often, you are best off trying things and failing as fast as possible to learn more quickly. At other times, slowing down is valuable, and sometimes, you’ll need adopt a more risk-averse stance. In a startup, you’re likely to move between problems in each of these areas every day. Godspeed.

(See also my earlier posts about my November trip and my history as a Rocket Scientist. Thanks to NASA for inviting me back a third time and for access to so many sites and people along the way. Shout out to all the media and Twitter folks I met along the way, and special thanks to Stephanie Schierholz (@NASATweetup) for all your hard work and facilitating so much kind hospitality for us! Catch her SxSW panel in a couple of weeks.)

I think it will result in more discussion and views as they post both here and on folk’s Facebook walls. It’s really cool to see a comment show up in both places.

If it goes well, I’ll look into hiding or disabling Disqus (or better yet, Disqus and Facebook will come to some agreement that lets them integrate and pull in Twitter as a login option).

The plugin I used is at http://grahamswan.com/facebook-comments/ and includes clear instructions for how to install (including setting up a Facebook application key). (I also PayPal’d the author a quick donation.)

What do you think?

We were at a party, so I didn’t have time to find out more about what he had in mind before giving him the general answer of what anyone in his position needs to hear…

I said I knew several Bay Area app developers who have released great apps and are available for hire, but he should know that it can be expensive to develop native apps for any mobile platform, and developers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley who are good don’t come cheap. In general, it’s more difficult and costly than web development by far. He nodded, already knowing from first-hand experience what it takes to get a commercial app out, and how common delays and overages are.

I mentioned that there are many services who provide overseas programmers at a fraction of the cost, but their quality and flexibility might not be to the same standard. I have yet to work directly with any of these services for iPhone, but have worked with offshore developers in other mobile and web settings. At CTIA earlier this month, I spoke again with Shishir Danani, CEO of MobilePundits, this time about how his firm does iPhone app design and development. I’m sure I have other cards in my rolodex from folks representing coders in India, China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Shishir is confident that his firm does good work with design and all kinds of apps, my sense with offshore firms generally is that they are best for an app that needs more code than design, especially one that is database driven and/or can draw on open source. He added that his teams are often called upon after a project has gone wrong and someone has to clean up.

Back to Doc, I suggested that rock stars and Internet personalities often have apps built by various services that allow you to get an app into the store without a programmer. They have limited functionality to choose from, but perhaps they’d serve a useful purpose for the price. There are at least four choices here:

• My friends Robert Scoble and Brian Solis are among those who have iPhone apps is built by MobileRoadie.
• Yapper won a Macworld 2010 Best of Show.
• Other options include AppMakr and MobileAppLoader.

But getting an app designed, coded and into Apple’s App Store is only a small part of what makes a succesful app.  Of the 300,000 apps already in iTunes, the vast majority never exceed hundreds of downloads.

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” -Thomas A. Edison.

“App Store success is 20% development, 80% the right product for a receptive market you engage effectively.” – Dale L. Larson

While hardly an insider, I’ve been to Facebook’s offices a couple of times over the years, and I’ve met some of the people from the film in person. I wanted to know what other people, closer to it, had said about film, Facebook, and what comes next…

Harvard professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig writes in his review of the movie for The New Republic that ‘The Social Network’ is wonderful entertainment, but its message is actually kind of evil. Lessig’s writing is more intelligent and almost as entertaining as Sorkin’s. He makes an important point about the true (unsung) hero of this tale.

After one screening of the movie, Silicon Valley insiders engaged in a panel discussion and revealed “That’s Not the Zuckerberg I know” [GigaOm].

Who is Mark Zuckerberg’s Most Valuable Friend? The New York Times reports, “If all of that sounds a bit touchy-feely, well, it is. [She] is known for her interpersonal skills as much as for her sharp intellect. And her regular meetings with the famously introverted Mr. Zuckerberg have helped to keep one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual business partnerships working wonders for Facebook.”

In a fantastic guest post to TechCrunch, Adam Rifkin bets that Facebook will eclipse Google within five years. He shares a similar sentiment to Lessig: the open, democratic Internet is the real hero here. Rifkin goes further in suggesting that the door is still open to unseat Facebook and change the world, and that an entrepreneurial young engineer may yet out-Zuckerberg Zuckerberg.

With our offices in our live/work loft we rely on high speed internet to do our work and live our lives. Slow service or poor connections means reduced productivity. The demands of digital media also weigh in–having disconnected our cable last year, just about anything we watch now is via download or streaming such as Hulu and Netflix, with a bit of digital broadcast on the side.

My wife Laura has long been a SpeakEasy DSL customer. Last year we upgraded to their highest level of service: 6mbps down and 786kbps up. SpeakEasy has rock solid Internet great phone and email service. They are worth paying extra for. But we can’t get anything faster through them. And when troubleshooting problems with my AT&T Microcell, AT&T complained that we couldn’t configure things the way AT&T would prefer. Even though it wasn’t reasonable, I hated the finger pointing non-sense that always comes with mixed vendors.

So when we got an AT&T U-Verse flyer saying we could get high speed fiber direct to our loft, I jumped at the chance and gave them a call. As is usual with my calls to AT&T, they were long and full of transfers to other departments, call backs, and mistakes and misinformation. I was eventually told that I couldn’t get the speeds promised in the mailing (which clearly stated that it was what was available to my address–the one printed at the top of the letter!). But I was promised that what I would get would not be DSL and would be fiber on U-verse. Even though the speed was limited now, it could be raised later. This sounded fishy, so I repeated my question in different ways and kept being reassured that fiber was being pulled and a new jack installed, that I was not going to have any copper in the loop.

Well, you can guess how that went….

I ended up with a new AT&T DSL connection. Copper. No fiber.

How does their DSL compare to SpeakEasy? Well, they both have the same speed for upload and downloads–both rated and what I measure with DSLReports. But AT&T’s service seems glitchy. I find myself often having to load a web page twice (with an error the first time), something I never noticed with SpeakEasy. On the other hand, AT&T is charging about 1/3 as much as SpeakEasy. Apparently, in quality and service, you still get what you pay for.

Hopefully I can now cancel the AT&T DSL and get a refund of their installation charges since they did not provide what they promised. I’ll give an update after I make that call.

So I finally decided to go back to Comcast and order Internet only service. It seems like even in the center of high-tech San Francisco, they are the only home option for better than DSL speedd. For $114 a month, their Extreme 50 will provide downloads up to 50Mbps and uploads to 10mbps. That’ll be almost 10x faster than what I have now, at a price only slightly more expensive than SpeakEasy, but 4x more than AT&T charges for 10x slower DSL. It was pretty easy to order from Comcast online in the middle of the night, though I wasn’t thrilled with their online chat system required to complete the process.

I’ll write an update next week about how my install goes and how the Internet compares.

(I’ve also been meaning to update my review of the AT&T 3G Microcell… but I’m still waiting for another return call from AT&T tier 2 support. I’ve spent hours on the phone with AT&T over the past month.)

(via @scobleizer/@ChrisPirillo/@shadoestevens)

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We asked our friend Yiying Lu to make for us the opposite of the Fail Whale for our wedding invitation.

She calls her new design “Win Penguins”

We combined the new and the old when we got engaged on Twitter. I asked Laura to marry me on bended knee with ring in one hand, iPhone in the other, in a room that included many friends as witness. In the same way, our invitations include Yiying’s new design and Laura hand-wrote the text of each one  with a fountain pen. They were mailed last week.

Thanks, Yiying! (And thanks to our friend Bob Meyer of Galaxy Press for printing them.)

UPDATE
Our friends at Laughing Squid blogged about our wedding invite, then Mashable.com posted about it, as did Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and the Huffington Post, too.

AT&T 3G Microcell

Yesterday I read on Mobile Crunch that the AT&T 3G MicroCell went on sale. I ran out and bought the last available one from the AT&T Store nearest me. I’ve tested it in two San Francisco homes and can report on how it works for me.

The theory is great. I pay AT&T an extra $150 to fix service that I’m already paying more than $100 a month for. They give me a cute little orange and white box by CISCO that connects to my broadband internet and makes a micro cell site out of my house. Voila, a little bubble of reliable service in the wasteland that is trying to make iPhone voice calls in San Francisco.

Or so I hoped.

I desperately need this. You see, I still want to be able to make and receive voice calls on my iPhone. AT&T has done everything possible ton convince me that it isn’t actually necessary. I live in San Francisco, near 16th and Harrison. Repeated long conversations with AT&T support about my inability to use my phone as a phone on their network have resulted in a little more understanding, but no better service. While I have great signal from multiple nearby towers, they are so congested that while standing in one place my phone switches constantly between Edge and 3G, and goes everywhere between one bar and five. My phone frequently doesn’t ring at all when someone calls, and often drops if I do manage to get connected. Using data works less well than voice, but it’s not as disruptive when it drops out for a minute. Still, I love my iPhone, haven’t been able to make the switch to Android on T-Mobile stick, so I stay connected to WiFi whenever I can and try to text instead of using voice. Thus, when I heard the Micro Cell was on sale, I made some calls and braved a rainstorm to grab one immediately.

Buying the MicroCell was easy, and they helped me log in to my AT&T account from a store computer. Besides entering the device serial number and address where it will be installed (necessary for 911 service), you have to program the AT&T numbers that will be allowed use the cell site (up to 10, but only 4 simultaneous). Instead I wish there were an option to let anyone near my house could use AT&T to make and receive calls.

I took the box home and plugged it in, where it took nearly an hour online before it was ready to use. The manual tells you to expect this delay while it gets a good GPS fix (again, for 911) and configures something for their network.

Once the light stopped flashing, I was disappointed that my phone phone’s display hadn’t changed from “AT&T” to “AT&T M-Cell.”

I looked through the manual. I turned the phone on and off. I thought about it for a while. I went to settings on my iPhone and re-enabled “3G.” AT&T support tells you to turn it off if you have problems with dropped calls. Apparently, switching from 3g to Edge and back is one of the things the iPhone does poorly, and it’s a place where you’re likely to drop a call. One less thing to switch means one less thing to go wrong.

Having made that switch, my phone’s display changed. Yay! I was now connected to “AT&T M-Cell.”

I immediately made a call that dropped. I had switched back to “AT&T” while walking around my house.

Disappointed, I re-read the directions and moved the Micro Cell further from my router/wifi, hopeful that this would keep me better connected to the working cell. It worked a little better, but I could still drop my micro cell for the outside towers when inside my home and well within 50 feet of the Micro Cell.

I now understood that your phone tries to always pick the strongest network signal. As soon as you are far enough from the MicroCell that an outside tower presents a stronger signal, you switch. Worse, while you’re on a call, your phone won’t switch back to the MicroCell.

This may not sound like a big deal, but if so, that means you don’t understand the network problem in San Francisco. Poor signal strength is not usually the issue. From my home in particular, I should have fantastic coverage. Congestion and switching is the issue. So as a bunch of other folks use their iPhones constantly (especially as they move around while doing so), their demand for voice and data bandwidth means the load on the towers is continuously fluctuating. I don’t need a stronger signal, I need a signal that is always ready for my calls.

What I want is to be able to tell my phone to prioritize the M-Cell. Don’t be so ready to change over to the regular network. Be willing to drop a call first. I’d rather know that I’m likely to drop a call if I leave my house than to know that I’m going to keep dropping them while in my house.

Instead, I now have the same old problem at home, except my phone is now switching between more things than ever. I’m forced to be in 3G mode, so I get Edge/3G iPhone switching problems, and I switch back and forth between the MicroCell and the outside network.

So it sounds like the iPhone and MicroCell might work wonderfully at a location with poor reception, but less so at an urban site with great but congested reception.

Since I have a friend in San Francisco with exactly that situation, I decided to test that theory out. She has a topography problem at her house so that there is poor to no signal on any network (not just AT&T). I asked her if she wanted to try the MicroCell at her house, and she was excited for the chance. I’d already added her number to the configuration web page while at the AT&T store, so I grabbed the gear and drove it up to her house. I plugged it in and waited about 30 minutes before I saw “AT&T M-Cell” on my iPhone. But hers refused to connect. I fiddled for a while before I thought to check her 3G setting. Of course, she had it set to Edge-only to try to get more reliable (if slower) service from AT&T’s crappy overloaded San Francisco network.

That fixed it, and she immediately popped up on “AT&T M-Cell.” It worked much better at her house, having a better tendency to stay on, but it was still ridiculously easy to loose a call to “AT&T” network. Just stepping out onto the deck would do it. Despite the fact that it was almost certain you’d drop your call from out on the deck.

Did AT&T actually test these things in it’s worst problem area, San Francisco?

To be fair, I’ve had the box at two locations for less than 24 hours and haven’t yet made a support call. Perhaps the box would work better with more effort put into placement and more geeky understanding and tweeking.
Really, no one should have to do that.

Apparently, the MicroCell signal needs to be stronger, and there should be some way to set your phone to prefer it more strongly over other signals.

So far, It looks like the MicroCell has made using AT&Ts network in San Francisco more complicated and more expensive without making it more reliable.