I ended up at a Baywood show on Friday at Larimer Lounge - Baywood was amazing, as expected (check out ‘I Can Breathe Again’ for some sing-along-clap-along). The surprise, however, came from one of the opening bands out of Boulder who call themselves The Yawpers. The lead singer/guitarist rocking cowboy boots was an all-out entertainer with great talent. I picked up a copy of their new EP and thought I’d stream it here for ya’ll to hop on board the Yawp-train.
Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:
Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.
I’m a huge fan of TED, so I’m delighted to hear that their facebook page just reached 999,999 other fans. TED is one of those things that I wish more people knew about. Ideally, all 230 million adults in the US would be fans. They cover topics that will be sure to reach every single one of us in some way. It’s about pushing the World to a better place through individual motivation. While some speakers do cover some political topics, they manage to bring people together to find solutions that actually work. If you stay out of politics because you think your voice doesn’t count, I would invite you to pick a few TED talks to listen to and see how you feel after. They are free to watch so next time you catch yourself watching a reality show just turn it off and watch a 10 minute TED talk instead. You might just get hooked like I did.
Right now most of the daily deal sites require you to put in your email before you can even view the deals for any particular city. This is so they can send you daily reminders of what the deal of the day is; this isn’t exactly the best user experience in my eyes. It’s certainly best for the daily deal companies, I understand, as it’s putting their content in front of you without you having to do anything different from your normal daily online behavior. You’re going to check email, twitter, facebook, and a few news sites likely every time you connect. If a company can put their content in one of these mediums (or all of them) they have a higher chance of clicking with you, pun intended.
What I didn’t want to do with preVU was what I hated with the other sites and force-require an email address for this sole purpose (I would, however, like to at least provide that option in the future if a user desires the daily emails). I set out to come up with a creative solution that is both effortless but not aggressive and landed on this: gadgets - or widgets, whatever you want to call them. Starting with iGoogle & Gmail as well as the iframe solution that website owners can install on their own sites if serving a local crowd.
It’s a simple 1-click install to add the gadget to your iGoogle home page: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=ig.pre.vu/prevu.xml
It takes a few more steps to get it working in Gmail, but it’s well worth it: How to add gadgets to Gmail
This is what shows when you click on the title of the gadget (“preVU »”)
I launched a new project this week that acts as an aggregator for the plethora of daily deal sites on the Internet. If you were one of the 111 million viewers of the Super Bowl last Sunday you were exposed to two of the major players in the arena: Groupon & LivingSocial.
Visit the new site here: preVU
Part of the idea for the site is to make it easier for people to get this information without having to subscribe to a dozen different emails. But making them visit another website not normally in their daily routine (ie. email, facebook, twitter, news, rss reader, etc…) is not exactly conscious as well. So I’ve developed a widget that will allow sites such as local ISP’s/newspapers/tv stations and the like to drop on their sites and give their readership an added bonus they’re likely interested in - everything likes 50% off, right? If you find the widget useful, please request your local news site to get in touch with me and I can custom-make one to fit their requirements.
Steal this widget for your own site (change attributes as desired):
<iframe src=”http://w.pre.vu/denver” frameborder=”0” width=”300” height=”300” style=”border:2px solid #222;”></iframe>
Some of the important pieces of preVU came from the following sites:
I’ve been using a lot more of Index & Match functions together instead of Vlookup because it’s a faster calculation for Excel, faster for me to put in and copy across (especially multiple columns of lookups), and can go pull back values both right & left of the lookup column (as well as a matrix lookup).
I ran into a sang recently, though. By default, Index/Match doesn’t play nicely with sorts. It almost hard-codes the formula into the cell so your values get completely mixed up after a sort and is now looking up the original value that is likely on a different row.
Google found me the solution. Simply remove the sheet reference (bolded) of the lookup value right after the match: =index(sheet2!B:B,match(sheet1!A2, sheet2!A:A, 0). It will put all sheet references in by default, so type the formula, hit enter, and then correct it…and then copy it down.
Go USB; the results speak for themselves…
iPhone 4 (AT&T) over bluetooth:
iPhone 4 (AT&T) using USB:
I also have a Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) that I use for work, so I tested the same theory…
Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) over bluetooth:
(dial-up modem, no user/pass, dialing #777)
Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) using USB/Sprint Smartview:
charity: water caught my eye earlier this year as an organization that I felt was running their 501(c)(3) nonprofit the right way. There are a lot of different types of charities - many who also do amazing things, but what I really like about this particular one is how they provide long-term solutions as well as how the finances are handled.
charity: water makes it clear that they are not a relief organization (like, for example, Red Cross). When the earthquake hit Haiti and many people were in need of clean water, the organization directed them to their sister nonprofits who were more focused on providing immediate relief, however, charity: water now has wells in Haiti - which you can see because they tag each one with a GPS location on Google Maps.
Their finances work differently than any nonprofit I’ve seen as well. One of the goals of the then 30-year-old founder, Scott Harrison, was to not only to focus on providing a basic need to those who struggle to get it, but he wanted to add accountability to the process so every donor was able to understand every dollar was truly helping. So he setup the organization as two separate accounts: one to cover the costs of running it and another that goes towards building the wells. All public donations are sent to the latter and they take on private donations to cover the costs of administration salaries and even the transaction costs paid to the credit card companies. If you watch the video below you’ll hear Scott talk about how they went broke, but had millions of dollars in the donor account (the organization was saved by the founder of Bebo).
I work in a corporate office that has a very nice cafeteria which provides locally bottled water. What’s startling, however, is that in order to get to this bottled water people walk past a drinking fountain (filtered), a bathroom faucet, a sink faucet, a water/ice machine (also filtered), and a fountain drink machine that serves water. People say they like the taste of the bottled water. We apparently have 6 “flavors” of water to choose from just 30 steps from each other and 1 in 8 people worldwide don’t even have access to potable water.
My challenge to all of you is this:
I must admit, the thought of this challenge came after hearing about an 8-year-old who gave up her dinner and instead ate rice & beans for a month.
I was inspired to write this post after watching Scott give a presentation during Big Omaha in May of 2010. His “a ha” moment came after a friend bought him a $16 margarita in NYC - the same price that can feed a family in Liberia for a month.
I’m not the only one thinking about this issue - Matt Cuts, a famous Googler, just wrote a wonderful piece describing how he personally cares about charity:water as well as what Google is doing to help save clean water.
[video]