SharedBook: On Demand

These Guys Get It!

The Internet and personal computers have certainly ushered in a new era. Digital content is here to stay and may even be the medium of choice for creation, storage and at least initially … consumption.

Many of you music aficionados have been ripping your CDs, purchasing digital downloads, subscribing to all-you-can-eat Web based music services, and even satellite radio, and I’m sure you’ve come to realize the ease and viability of listening to your music can very much be limited by your venue, device and service.

How do you listen to your iPod in the house? Do you walk around with ear buds? Do you have a dock in the kitchen? How do you change the song from the living room?

Do you sit in front of your computer listening to your Rhapsody music service? What about your Sirius subscription for the car? Does it play in the house too?

I’ve been on the hunt to unlock my digital music library and came across Sonos. They’re based out in Santa Barbara, CA. and have been around for a few years. These guys get it: existing digital content (your music, and subscription services) and a multi-zone home audio system that’s moderately priced, sets up in roughly 15-20 minutes and has the reliability of dial-tone. Not to mention that the UI on the controller will knock your socks off.

In short, you can play your digital music on your traditional analog stereo equipment, bookshelf and/or in-wall speakers. You have complete control over volume and song/playlist selection on a per zone(room) basis and can even select party mode so all zones receive the same tunes.

The Web is great and digital media is liberating, but somehow as we move forward our content gets locked into the digital world and the traditional consumption models get lost!

To me, Sonos reminds me of SharedBook: Web to Print, Reverse Publishing and Blog2Print!

Good to Great

Back from the Fourth, this is a beautiful photo of the Manhattan skyline that Michael Cairns of PersonaNonData posted last night. From what I hear, our developers made some major progress while the New York office was off celebrating yesterday. Stay tuned for updates regarding new features including for you know what.  In the meantime ...

When I read Mor’s post the other day, it reminded me of a book that I’ve found really useful and turned to from time to time - Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins. Good to Great offers a research-based common sense approach to business that includes identifying and focusing on what a company does best and empowering your team to pave the way to greatness. There are many principles highlighted within the book that can apply to startups and more established companies. If you haven’t read the book already, I highly recommend it. Jim Collins also wrote Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, among others.

The Power of a Good Team

Lately we have been very busy here in SharedBook with our new Blog2Print widget. It all started just a few weeks ago, with a short POC (I wrote about POCs earlier here), and now it has become a real product, which is attracting a lot of attention (as it should, seeing the end result: my family’s vacation blog just turned into a fabulous book, but of course, I am biased J). I’d like to take this time and share with you a little bit about what’s been going on behind the scenes these days within our R&D team.

As we get lots of feedback on this project, and want to give the first beta users the best experience, we have setup a team to make sure that we provide fast, on time solutions and feedback to our users, as well as to introduce the production version of this product (with many goodies to come!) on time.

Seeing this team in action is amazing. Everyone is joining the effort, asking to help. Developers are courageously entering unknown code (Collective Ownership) and extending it. Our pair programming (another agile development practice) rooms are busier than ever as people team up to solve difficult problems. And the feeling is one of moving forward very fast!

As a manager, I keep asking myself, how do you build productive teams? As a book lover, I naturally turn to books for advice. We have used this blog to recommend other Web sites, blogs and even podcasts (I truly recommend seeing Ze’ev’s list here: The Red Queen and Podcasts and Podcasts (part 2)). As a book lover, I want to take the opportunity to recommend a great book this time: Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams.

This is a classic project management book, it claims that the main problems of software projects are sociological, not technological. With simple to adopt principles, this book lays the ground for successful team work. I can’t count the number of times I have read this book. Every few months or so, I go back to the book and read it again. Every time, I find something new to adopt and experiment with. I guess you just can’t digest it all at once!

Here in SharedBook we have all heartedly adopted this book’s approach, from team interviews for candidates, to emphasis on prioritization, working environment (hence our pair programming rooms), and creating a bonded team. And now is the time we reap the fruits of all this effort. 

As I keep telling everyone here: with a team like this, I know that even the impossible is possible!

Podcasts (part 2)

This is the second part of my podcast recommendation list. You can see the first part here.

Here at SharedBook, we started developing in agile methodologies from day one and I have found The Agile Toolkit Podcast to be a very good resource of interviews, conversations and panel discussions related to agile. Some of my favorites are: Peter Coffee's informative and inspiring keynote from the Agile 2006 Conference, Tim Lister's Introduction to Agile Leadership from the APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) Leadership Summit at the Agile 2006 Conference, and an interview with Alistair Cockburn who talks among other things about the cost of communication which is very well known to us here.

Being part of SharedBook from its initial days has exposed me to the realm of entrepreneurship (although I'm not one, yet), so my second recommendation is Venture Voice which is a podcast about entrepreneurship with very interesting interviews with entrepreneurs who "made it." I also recommend listening to their Venture Voice Startup Workshop Coverage (part 1, part 2).

My last recommendation is Science Talk which is not technologically related, although technology is mentioned there from time to time. Science Talk is a weekly podcast produced by Scentific American and hosted by Steve Mirsky that explores the latest developments in science through interviews with scientists and journalists.

What podcasts do you listen to?

The Red Queen and Podcasts

In Lewis Carrol’s "Through the Looking Glass" there is a part where Alice and the Red Queen are running on a giant chessboard but don’t seem to be making any forward progress. While Alice is frustrated by this struggle, the Red Queen says, “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

Technology innovations nowadays are so fast that I sometimes feel like Alice while trying to keep up with them. One way I've found to cope with the enormous amount of new stuff is to listen to podcasts. The main advantage of podcasts is of course the fact that you can listen to them while you are doing something else. I listen to them while I commute to and from work which can be between 40 minutes to more than an hour every day (since I'm driving my car I can't read any printed material).

I listen to a lot of podcasts (I am subscribed to more than 10 podcast feeds) and this time I would like to recommend two of them:

1. The first one is The Java Posse - this podcast is a discussion about Java related technologies between four veteran Java software architects. These podcasts have a nice mix of news, discussions and interviews presented with good attitude and a lot of humor. Every week there is a new episode, usually a news roundup with commentary from the posse members. From time to time they have special podcasts that include excellent interviews and special events like the JavaOne BOF session and the Java Posse Roundup.


2. My second recommendation is ITConversations which is actually a portal for a lot of high quality podcasts that include interviews, special collections and presentations from events such as O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit and the Emerging Technology conference. Some of my favorites are : the funny and sometimes provocative Paul Graham, Tim Bray on the the Atom Syndication Format and publishing protocol and Kent Beck on developer testing.

More podcast recommendations in one of my upcoming blog entries.

Enjoy your listening...