B.Yetman

Artist turned tech entrepreneur using spatial tools to solve problems... with robots... in NYC

[byetman]

Sprint naming strategies to get the whole company involved

Them: I don't care, just grind the sausage faster. 

Also them (at release time): Wait did I say sausage, I meant filet 

Working on a product is hard, especially when a large part of any product company is focused on other aspects of the business and can't always stay engaged with ongoing development. One of the most effective engagement hacks I've seen work at product companies involves one of the simplest concepts: Sprint Names 

In the world of agile software development, a sprint is the only real measure of time that matters. Technically that's not quite true if you count keg-stand timers, but that seemed to have tapered off somewhere in 2018 when WeWork started regulating beer consumption... 

Anyway, for those who may have stumbled here from the outside world (or one too many keg-stands) one of the fundamental principles of agile software development is to break problems down into smaller digestible stories instead of the behemoth uber-system projects of the past. You take these smaller problems and prioritize them for work during a small period of time and then come back to planning to adjust priorities for the next small period of time. This means an agile team focuses on what’s most important now instead of trying to plan for lengthy waterfall development (where you usually don't know enough about the problem to accurately estimate what it would take to solve it). 

This works great for the folks actively involved in product development day to day but can be harder to follow from the outside. Because the rest of the business is focused on, well, the rest of the business, we try to use sprint naming as a way to get people involved in what might otherwise feel like a mile-marker on the autobahn. 

Here are a couple of the strategies we've used to keep it engaging: 

Choosing a Good Theme

Put more accurately, choose a really good ridiculous theme that everyone can laugh at. The past couple years we've used these themes, and have scraped a set of rather remarkable SQLite databases to present candidates each sprint... feel free to download them! 

One Hit Wonders 

Tiny Towns under 100 Population 

B-Movies 

Demo Days with Voting

Leading up to Demo Day at the end of a sprint, we usually open up the polls to the rest of the company for voting. If you win? Well, if you happen to choose the winning theme then one of your stories, ideas, bugs, etc goes to the top of the list for Sprint Planning the next week. If nothing else, this gets people that need something engaged and while they're distracted by ridiculous voting candidates they are usually also paying attention at demo day to all the things we're working on. 

Release t-shirts based on the Theme 

We've done this a couple of times and it always seems stupid at the time, but a year or two down the road those t-shirts become classic. 

On the development side of the house, we also set up a competition whose winner gets to choose the naming theme for the following year. This competition is usually merit-based, because like I said earlier, our friends at WeWork kind of put the kibosh on the one true universal measure of greatness...

[byetman]

My most valuable Product lessons came from a Vegetable Peeler

I was walking through Union Square Greenmarket this weekend and was reminded of one of the most important Product lessons i ever learned: find your Vegetable Peeler. 

This particular lesson came from a guy who was a fixture around NYC for decades, the enigmatic Joe Ades . An old-school grafter born in Manchester, Joe spent years pitching his wares all over the city, from his usual spot in Union Square all the way down to Wall Street and Brooklyn. 

His pitch was incredible!

He always sat low to the ground which drew in crowds to see what was going on. Impeccably dressed, he kept a singsong banter going throughout his demonstration and usually had newspaper clippings of himself in the background to add to his credibility. His feature-focused demonstration was somewhat Ogilvy-esque, showing how you could do make everything from french fries to veggies for kids. Just as quickly as he'd started he'd pull out a wad of cash and start selling them... and i can tell you firsthand that people

clambered over each other to buy one.

You can see one version of it here:

As impressive as his sales-pitch was, what always intrigued me was the product he chose to sell. Truth be told, Joe could sell anything... and over the years he tried a variety of goods. But when he found the vegetable peeler he knew he had the perfect product, and stuck with it the rest of his life. There are a couple principles that made this product amazing:

Simplicity - so simple that everyone can instantly understand it, and anyone that has ever cooked knows they've needed one. 

Design - A couple smart design choices meant it could slice different ways, building on the foundation of the core function. It's like the one you have, but better...

Quality - He always pointed out that it was Swiss manufactured stainless steel, and that it would last a lifetime. He also bragged that he never got a complaint. He also relied on passersby to confirm it's value.

Price - He knew his market. He sold the peeler for $5, a price that most anyone on the street could afford. I sat and watched him for close to an hour one day in 2005, and he sold over 80 by my count.

Demonstrability - A simple product meant he could deliver a razor sharp pitch very quickly. As he told Vanity Fair in 2006, "If you saw the peeler hanging up in a store—for a dollar—you’d walk right past it. It has to be demonstrated.”

One could write a book about his sales approach (as many articles have done so previously), but I think there's much to be learned from the product he dedicated much of his life to. Keep your product simple, honor quality and design integrity, and most importantly there's no substitution for showing people why it matters. Joe's story was one of a kind, and you can read more about him here:

Vanity Fair

NYTimes

Gothamist

There's also a lots of photos of him on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/gentleman_peeler/pool/

[byetman]

Serious flooding in buildings and subways around the southern tip of Manhattan, here's One New York Plaza the morning after the surge. Our building flooded as well, though the only thing that was really terrifying was the sound of water flooding our elevator shafts... sounded like Niagara Falls all the way up on the 9th floor.

[byetman]

Mapping Hurricane Sandy

I'm hunkering down today waiting for Sandy to arrive here in NYC, and i thought I'd take a quick look at who's mapping it. Here's a quick cartographic countdown as the storm approaches (click on any image to launch link).

MSNBC

A pleasant surprise from our friends at

Stamen

, nice clean design with some animation and wind infographics.

** **

Esri

Esri has a couple Sandy maps up and running, including their

Public Information Map

and a whole gallery of additional maps

. Nice limited set of layers and social media.

** **

Google Crisis Map

Lots of data, high performance, and well design for a large public audience.

The Weather Channel

Built on Bing with a set of quick vital statistics on the top. I had a tough time negotiating layer visibility as i zoomed into NYC, but do like the wind speed chart on top.

** **

MEMA

I stumbled onto the Maryland Emergency Management Agency webmap, and as you can see it's built on Esri Flex and has tons of layers available. It's a bit kitchensink for me, but for Maryland residents it lots of important data to drill through.

** **

**New York Times **

Very clean minimal aesthetic from the folks at NYTimes, this map does a great job of conveying key forecast information without hitting you over the head with TOC layers.

** **

NOAA

Here's the gold standard for Hurricane forecast from NOAA, and while it may make our eyes bleed it does effectively serve the purpose. Their static cartography publishing approach means it doesn't get overwhelmed like NYC's

Evacuation Zone Finder

did yesterday.

** **

** **

Because the storm is mostly in track-mode currently we haven't seen much activity on the

Ushahidi/Crowdmap

front yet... but guaranteed that will follow in Sandy's aftermath.

Let me know if there's any cool ones i've missed...

[byetman]

Contoured Intensity

Remember the first time you saw @mraad's heatmap of MBTA card swipes? Ok well i do, and every so often i see something that generates that same 'dude that's so cool' nostalgia. Enter they guys at Vizzuality who made me grin with their recent CartoDB traffic intensity map. They created this in collaboration with the Change Administration and Tomorrow Lab and it maps out the data from their DIY traffic counter. The Red is the most busy area and each line of the contour represents 10 meters and 10% decay in traffic. 

File this under awesome! You can read their whole blog post

here

.

[byetman]

Treadmills, Tides, and the Staten Island Ferry

Like many, exercise is one of those essential activities to keep me going... so a couple times a week i wake up way to early and drag myself to the gym. I used to pass this time watching the morning news , but over the years i've learned to zone out and just think... a practice which i've found produces some of my most creative unpredictable thinking. 

My gym happens to look out over the Staten Island Ferry, and I love watching the waves of people pouring into lower Manhattan every morning as the Ferries arrives. Counting down the minutes on the teadmill clock i've noticed that it takes almost 4 minutes after the Ferry docks to see the first people trickle out of the building, then the floodgates open and a massive crowd charges up Whitehall towards Wall Street. It only take 7 minutes for this mad dash to to run its course, and then it's quiet again. Everyday over 60,000 people pass through this narrow channel to and from the Ferry in these short bursts.

Another thing in my workout view is the New York harbor. Anyone that's ever spent time around the waterfront has witnessed the tides that rip back and forth, making it treacherous for watercraft and surfriders. These tides are incredible in their power and fluctuation, and the connected waterbodies around Manhattan generate many 'hydraulic currents' . There have been projects to try and harness this energy in the East River, and earlier this year the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission actually approved the first  commercial license for a U.S. tidal energy project there to Verdant. Lots of potential, and if you're interested here's an interactive map of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams across the Country.

So, what does running on a treadmill have to do with the Staten Island Ferry and Tidal Energy potential? 

One of those exercise induces ideas that keeps coming back to me is concept of the Energy Production Potential of those waves of commuters. Crowd-harnessed energy of some 60,000 people a day. Obviously there are lots of challenges in the capture method, storage, and transmission of this energy but I think there's some really interesting approaches both passive and interactive. While it's not a new idea (see Pavegen and PowerLEAP ), there's huge potential for innovation around the way we approach capturing it, and how it supports the community around it.

[byetman]

Election Map Magic – 10 Maps that rocked the 2008 results

Every election we see a bunch of red and blue patchwork maps, usually displayed as states are being called, and of course on the front page of the paper the next morning.  This election however, interactive maps were used in a bunch of new ways to help display and query election results, exit polls, and projections. The volume of these tools was suprising, but here are a few that really wowed us…

The New York Times Election Results Map – link

Ability to visualize results data at the state and county level, as well as graduated symbols for county specific results. A very intuitive and well thought out interface with easy drilldown capabilities.

NPR Election Map – link

Though it didn’t get as much use as it might have, the NPR Election Map let you create your own scenarios and visualize the outcomes. The drilldown into historic data was interesting, though it tended to jump away from the map interface. I liked that you could sort states by poll closing times, and then revise your scenario.

 USA Today, Behind the Results - link

A late addition to the list (thanks Joe Francica for the link), USA Today’s map interface is one of the the most interesting for analysing demographic data by county results with breakdown and timeline. The flash interface has the most unique interactive tools of any i’ve seen this election…. a must see.

Google Maps Election Results – link

This one was embeded on countless blogs, and served as the basis for hundreds of election result mashups. Pretty simple in overall design, allowing you to jump to an individual state for focused viewing.

CNN Results Map – link

Very similar to all the other election maps, providing the ability to view exit poll results at the county and state level. The focus on historic data query and visualization was one of the strong points of this map.

FiveThirtyEight – link

Amazing coverage, even if the focus on interactive map display wasn’t the vehicle of choice for delivering it!

Twitter Vote Report – link

All day twitter stream covering voting conditions on the ground, this mashup also provided one of the more interesting visualizations of hypersocial information flooding in from around the country.

CNN Magic Wall – link

Multitouch interface, seamless state to county results drilldown, and onscreen markup capabilities, this tool was  the most impressive data dissemination platform of the night for me. Near real-time county drilldown provides a whole new understanding of the race, and the ability to overlay historic results provided a whole new perspective to the coverage.

 270 to Win – link

Simple, effective, with the ability to speculate and see the results…

And for an interesting cartographic perspective on the election results you can view Mark Newman’s work – link

.

[byetman]

Tunnel to Towers Run - 2008

On September 11th 2001, off-duty firefighter Stephen Siller abandoned his gridlocked pickup truck at the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and ran the 3.5 miles to the World Trade center with 70lbs of gear on his back. He was one of the brave souls who made the ultimate sacrifice that day, perishing as he searched for his Squad.

You can download the KML here and see it for yourself. Video coverage of the event.

[byetman]

Spatial Search takes a voyage to the desktop

You know that neurotic data czar down the hall that’s always bragging about his GIS data organization skills… yah, get ready to blow his mind. Modern-day mapmakers and classic cartographers alike can now bring search 2.0 to their neo-spatial production workflows: introducing Voyager. Voyager is a desktop crawler designed specifically for indexing a wide array of spatial data formats.  Let it loose and it catalogs everything from feature classes to layer files, giving you a holistic list of raster to mxd and everything in between.  Think Google Desktop designed specifically for spatial data.

Voyager indexing supports:” scanned maps, satellite imagery, elevation models, vector data, CAD formats; as well as server resources, such as data stored in ArcSDE© technology, ArcGIS Server© and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) formats such as KML, WMS, WFS.”

As one user reflected “it’s like iTunes for your GIS data”…

Voyager’s desktop interface let’s you search your data by keyword or type, and then drill down . Within the detailed view you can see what the dataset is, and everywhere it’s being used. Some of the benefits include:

See what data a map document is using without having to actually open it.

Better harness cartographic design investments that you’ve already made by finding layers from all your maps.

Quickly find thematic spatial data on your local machine, or a network share drive.

Determine which documents have broken datasources, dependencies, and beyond.

Creators Brian Goldin and Ryan McKinley have hit a homerun with this first super beta release. Besides the initial indexing processor overhead, it’s a totally smooth experience. Voyager is currently available in 3 versions  for personal, workgroup, and enterprise users.

[byetman]

Solar Energy, MIT, and GIS

What do Water, Sunshine, and stereos blasting music at Night have in common? Thanks to MIT, not just Spring Break in Florida anymore…

MIT released news today of a “Major Discovery” that could change the way solar energy is collected and stored, making solar energy available at night and splitting water molecules in the process. The idea takes a page out of old mother nature’s book, using a conceptual approach similar to how plants manage to store all that sunlight they convert to energy.

from the article: “In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.”

Click To Play

Daniel Nocera describes new process for storing solar energy (courtesy of MIT) or View video post on: MIT TechTV

Skeptics point out that the question of process efficiency still remains to be answered, as well as how they propose to store such volatile gasses (particularly in domestic settings). While the answers to these  underlying technology questions are worked on (thank you MIT beard-power), there are dozens of commercial groups trying to figure out how to monetize the evolving consumer solar energy markets.

One of the most interesting i’ve seen to date isSolarCity, a group that is rapidly installing a network of solar panels to residential, commercial, and government markets. Their approach is to offer cooperative solar panel deployments to consumers at no cost, and then charge them a monthly utility fee just like your current power company does.  On average, the monthly cost for this “SolarLease” model is significantly less than previous utility bills, and they also offer more traditional equipment purchase arrangements.

The underlying process for understanding the potential for solar energy collection is one near and dear to all GIS-heads… Spatial Analysis at it’s finest. There have been some very elegant models built for this analysis (opensource and proprietary), though they tend to be quite localized in accuracy (dependant on data resolution). The group that can turn that spatial analysis into an easy to consume web service with convenient API’s stands to become very successful.

On the government side, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has published a map service that allows site visitors to search for a location,  feed that location into a Solar Potential model, and then pull out a report similar to the one below:

[byetman]

Re-writing the history of Manhattan through maps

I recently had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Joel Grossman cover a bunch of work he’s done in recent years, and as usual i was totally blown away!  Using historic maps and methodical research, he’s been able to stitch together a historical snapshot of colonial Manhattan that’s totally shattered the widely accepted geography of the early Dutch settlement. If you haven’t had the pleasure of checking out his work, do yourself a favor and view these projects now…

An internationally renowned archaeologist, he’s developed a fascinating picture of prehistoric New York and how the landscape was altered by Native Americans and the Dutch and English settlers.

Dr. Grossman has worked in such diverse places as Peru, the Caribbean, and Russia, but some of his most interesting projects have been right here in New York. Among these were the excavation of the Dutch West India Company headquarters in Lower Manhattan as well as one of New York City’s earliest municipal buildings, the 1734 Alms House, in present-day City Hall Park. Dr. Grossman has used 3D terrain modeling and historic map correlations to reconstruct the subsurface survivals of former Native American roadways and settlements throughout Manhattan Island. His work includes discovereis all over the island of Manhattan, as well as 3D  reconstructions of prehistoric and Revolutionary War-era encampments in Inwood Hill Park bordering Spuyten Duyvill in northern Manhattan.

“These archaeological applications of advanced technology serve both as high-precision “targeting” tools to locate buried sites, as well as people-friendly graphic aids which help make the distant past tangible and understandable for present generations.”

Dr. Grossman frequently presents his work around NYC, and also provides walking tours from time to time. You can contact him at jwg *AT* GeospatialArchaeology.com

[byetman]

Outside.in Launches GeoToolkit beta

Outside.in has taken another huge step down the path of location based innovation, bringing us one step closer to better connecting content with geo-context; introducing the GeoToolkit.  Launched yesterday, this beta program aims at helping content authors better pinpoint the geographic relevance of their work through a simple online toolset. The core of the GeoToolkit service takes submitted blog feeds and automatically scans them for information related to place.  It then gives the author a set of tools to better refine the levels of associated places, which includes adding place/neighborhood information, viewing stats of content locations, and the ultra-intuitive map views of where they are writing about . From their announcement:

“outside.in’s GeoToolkit New , the first service to help web publishers like you analyze and promote your local content. We’ve been using these tools here at outside.in for a while and decided it was time to share with our neighbors.”

Strangely enough,  when the toolkit processed my blog feed it skipped a number of posts that had numerous place names, and chose instead to identify others that had the same geographic descriptors for no apparent reason. It is a beta release afterall, but I hope this process gets better at identifying correct spatial context.

Digging deaper, the 5 ways they are processing place from a feed includes:

You can link to a Place Page outside.in place page

Include a GoogleMaps location in your content (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=NYC&ie=UTF8&ll=40.714509,-74.00713&spn=0.001441,0.002079&z=19)

Add Zipcode as a tag or category: 10024

Add a Where Tag to the copy: [where: Manhattan, NY]

GeoRSS

These guys are doing some really smart stuff in the LBS space, look for them to release some compelling version of hyperlocal content delivery on the iPhone very soon.

[nickdouglas]

My experience living in New York was that all the interesting people came from somewhere boring.

Jennifer Kelly, interviewing Langhorne Slim (via nickdouglas)

[byetman]

Living Walls sprouting up around NYC

Around the 5 boroughs there are an increasing number of Living Walls beginning to sprout up, giving a more literal meaning to the phrase urban jungle . This technique of building construction is said to improve thermal efficiency,  increase air quality, and improve the overall visual aesthetic of the design. Most of these are pre-grown soil based modular tiles which get installed on the building facade. Irrigation often incorporates roof runoff catchments and backup, though some still take a hydroponic approach.

One of the main groups greening up building facades around NYC is Green Living Technologies . Some of their more recent work includes the green building face of Oulu in Williamsburg, and the new Pure Yoga being built on the Upper East Side.

Another group flaunting their botanical building prowess is Elevated Landscape Technologies . These guys have an impressive list of pre-grown plant compositions, including various species of blossoming succulents.

With the greenbuilding industry still charging ahead full steam, it should be interesting to see how many organizations take the plunge and start wearing their lawn on their building. I’m also wondering what kind of psuedo-hemp Living Walls the guys in Boulder, CO are gonna be growing… heady i’m sure.

[byetman]

Caution, Falling Water around Lower Manhattan

At 7am this morning the water started flowing, and from now till October you can see it in 4 different locations around lower Manhattan . The New York City Waterfalls is a collaboration by artist Olafur Eliasson  and the Public Art Fund, and was pulled off with the support of a long list of City, State, and private contributors. The 4 sites pump water out of the East River at a rate of 35,000 gallons per minute, and after a filtering process the water travels up through the scaffolding where the waterfalls are born. The electricity used for operating the Waterfalls is being offset 100% by “green power”, and with the 2,100,000 gallons pumped every hour that’s a lot of juice!

Mayor Bloomberg commented :

“The Waterfalls are an unbelievable sight: four cascades ranging in height from 90 to 120 feet rising out of New York Harbor” … “And what a beautiful symbol of the energy and vitality that we are bringing back to our waterfront in all five boroughs. “  

Not sure how long some falling water can hold your interest? Fear not! There’s a new temporary park at Pier 1 in Brooklyn that provides a vantage point for all 4, complete with a well stocked bar if you happen to get bored…

[fred-wilson]

[byetman]

fred-wilson:

Europeans prefer complexity, the Japanese revere minimalism. But Americans like size, preferably supersize.

[byetman]

Google Street View car busted – in more ways than one

Thanks to Damian Spain’s recent photos of the Google StreetView car getting pulled over, we’ve all had a good laugh at some poor driver’s expense. But, taking a closer look at the sensor array mounted on the vehicle we also gain some new insight into the evolving immersive video capture method Google is using.

Notice the 4 tan/black sensors below the camera heads? Those are actually SICK Laser Range Finders, sensors which are used for 180 degree distance range measurement. Often used in the machine automation world, they are also a core component of SLAM robotics. You’ll see that two of them are mounted vertically, while the other two are doing a horizontal swath capture. What does this mean?Google is capturing 3D point clouds of the streets it’s driving down!

3D point data could mean a couple things:

Google wants to scan your body to fit you for a new Super Search Suit (probably made of Spandex – the material of the future)… um, yeah.

Enhanced image post processing algorithms use it to better mitigate frame overlap

Google is going to present some new textured 3D interfaces in GoogleEarth/Google Maps, beyond what they already model

Don’t confuse it with terrestrial LiDAR, this is much lower resolution and has a shorter range (over 50 meters it’s pretty much useless). Should be interesting to see the sensor array continue to evolve, it’s come a long way in just over a year.

Photos Courtesy of damianspain Thanks Damian!