I received the following quotes in an email from my personal tax accountant, Buzz Rose from B. Rose CPA. I enjoyed reading them, and so figured they would be worth sharing here (with Buzz’s permission of course):

Rajeev Motwani

I was in complete disbelief when I read the first tweet yesterday evening that Stanford Computer Science professor Rajeev Motwani had passed away. I was still incredulous and hoping that it was untrue until the sad news was verified in a email sent to the department. Even now as I write this with Rajeev’s picture on my screen, it’s still hard to believe.

In March of this year Rajeev agreed to be an advisor to K9 Ventures. I was very excited to have Rajeev on board as an advisor for K9 and as a personal mentor. His untimely passing is a shock that will reverberate through Stanford and the Valley.

My introduction to Rajeev began as a student in the PhD program at Stanford CS. Rajeev was the head of the PhD program when I joined, and he was the defacto advisor to all incoming students until they found their own advisor. He was responsible for making sure that every student find a new home within the department in a timely manner. I can still remember Rajeev’s advice to all the students — that your only job in the first quarter is to find an advisor. And to not worry about requirements like Comprehensive Exams and Qualifying Exams and focus on the research. His mandate to us was that a PhD should make an incremental contribution to human knowledge. That phrase stuck in the back of my head throughout my PhD work and proved to be a good filter to test potential thesis topics.

Even Rajeev didn’t know that in my first few interactions with him, I felt quite intimidated. Intimidated because of the immense respect I had for his intellect, his ability and his judgment. Even though my research interest was in the field of Human Computer Interaction, since my advisor (Terry Winograd) was on sabbatical at Google for the first year that I was at Stanford, I was fortunate to interact with Rajeev a little while longer than I otherwise would have.

When I decided that I wanted to enter the field of Venture Capital, Rajeev was one of the first people I contacted. He was instrumental in opening several doors for me and made valuable introductions to other VCs and firms on Sand Hill Road — leading to several valued relationships. As just one datapoint, it was through Rajeev’s introduction that Refocus Imaging obtained its funding.

Rajeev truly was a pillar of Stanford Computer Science and of Silicon Valley. He touched and helped so many people — as students, advisees, entrepreneurs, colleagues and friends. He directly or indirectly contributed to the formation and the success of numerous startups (Google being the most notable, but there are many, many more). I am incredibly thankful to Rajeev for this advice, his mentorship, and the role that he played in guiding me in choosing my path not only as a student, but for life.

I feel truly fortunate to have interacted with and learnt from Prof Motwani. At the same time, I am deeply saddened at his sudden and untimely passing. I sincerely wish Rajeev’s family all the best in this difficult time and beyond.

All hyperbole aside, Web 2.0 has been a wonderful thing. Today, we can search human knowledge using Google, we can communicate instantly with friends and family using Facebook, we can publish our thoughts and share our opinions (like I’m doing here) with the world using WordPress and we can publish/receive news (like a plane landing in the Hudson river) while it happens on Twitter, all among a myriad of other things. For the record, I love Web 2.0 (as a user) for its ease of use and for the so many immensely useful services it provides (though I must admit I’m not a fan of the business models that often accompany Web 2.0 companies, especially advertising related models).

Image from ConnectionCafe

But, “Houston, we have a problem.” The problem is what I would call “information fragmentation” in the world of Web 2.0. Yes, each Web 2.0/social media site in isolation may be very easy to use, but to try and get all of them to cooperate and more importantly keep track of all our information is becoming a complete nightmare. Here is just a short list of just some of my information assets:

• Personal Blog: www.sneaker.org
• Professional Blog: www.k9ventures.com/blog
• Twitter: @manukumar and @k9ventures
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Plaxo Pulse
• Flickr
• Google Reader
• Google Talk
• TwitPic
• FriendFeed
• Netflix

Gosh, I can’t even keep track of them in a list, and I certainly don’t want to link to all my accounts on various services for privacy concerns. Just recently, I discovered that I had a MySpace page! I didn’t even know I had a MySpace page, and in fact, I used to take pride in saying that I didn’t have one (they built their network by being spammers in my opinion). Until I discovered that I did — probably one I set up years and years ago, and never thought about it twice after that. (I have since promptly deleted the MySpace page, so that I can stick to my assertion that I do not have a MySpace page!)

Our bits are spread out all over the web. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that bits of us are spread out all over the web. Subtle difference. The deluge in the number of services out there has now resulted in new services (like FriendFeed and Ping.fm) which try to help you take control of all your media and interactions. However, aggregators only work in theory. In theory, the pitch for an aggregator is that “We will be the one stop shop for X.” The problem is that there are a dozen one stop shops. And so you ultimately end up building an aggregator to aggregate the aggregators! The travel industry is a great example of this with the airline sites, then sites like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. Then sites like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Vayama. I’m just waiting for the next level up (Update: Didn’t have to wait too long, as soon as I finished this post and went back to check on my feeds, I found this on TechCrunch: Travelzoo’s Fly.com Launches Yet Another Travel Search Aggregator). It’s the Madoff scheme (Ponzi is becoming too old for people to know what it means any more!) of aggregators.

Likewise in social media, everyone is trying to aggregate everyone else. Till recently, I had my Twitter tweets being cross-posted to my Facebook status. I recently severed that connection. Now I have FriendFeed aggregating my tweets, my Google Reader shares, my blog posts all together. Oh, and I also have a FriendFeed tab in my Facebook profile. Everything is going in circles, I guess that must be the true indication that I have embraced Web 2.0 and social media, and more so, that I feel caught up in its embrace. An embrace of so many tentacles that it’s like being caught in, oh, oh, wait for it… a Web!

Lets make this more concrete with some examples:

1. Blog comments: When you post to a blog, you typically have comments on the blog. But then you also have trackbacks and pingbacks. And now you also have tweetbacks. The conversation has been splintered. I can get comments on the post, I can get tweets back in response to the post, I can get an email, I can get a phone call, a direct message on twiter, a like on FriendFeed or now even on Facebook, a comment on Facebook. It’s just all over the place. Fred Wilson has argued in his posts that (paraphrasing) comments should be treated as a first class citizen — as a true part of the conversation that is ocurring. But, comments are now being splintered all over — on Twitter, on FriendFeed, on Facebook, on blogs, in emails and in direct messages. Capturing that conversation has become and continues to become more of a challenge. There have been some good steps like Disqus integrating FriendFeed comments, but that is only the beginning.
2. Status messages: Status messages are everywhere. And the buzz on the web is that status is the hot thing, popularized by Twitter and Facebook’s “What are you doing?” question. (Fred Wilson says that “Status is the ultimate social gesture”) But there is also GoogleTalk status. When I update my GoogleTalk status it is seen by people in my contact list who are also on GoogleTalk. But there is no (simple) way of connecting that to my Facebook status (emphasis on simple, though Xoopit recently announced GMail and Facebook integration through a plugin), to my Plaxo status, to my LinkedIn status. Ping.fm provides some hope of being able to do this. And I’m sure if I took the time to figure out the map of where all I want my status messages propagated (and avoid any circular references) it may very well do the trick. But, all of these services are supposed to be mass-market services. It shouldn’t require this much effort and thinking to make it all work right. While on one hand I am pleased by the diversity of options, on the other hand I lament that there are simply too many options.
3. Pictures: I made a conscious choice to not post pictures on Facebook. Even though Facebook is intended to be for friends, there is a huge amount of intermingling of family, friends, teachers, co-workers, professionals and business contacts on Facebook. Yes, they provide a way to keep all these lists separate, but it just takes to much work. So I have my pictures on Picasa, in private albums that I share selectively. But then I also have a Flickr account and I also have a TwitPic account for posting images to Twitter.

I think the point is clear by now and so I won’t keep beating a dead horse. Web 2.0 and Social Media are wonderful and great, but at the same time they provide us with a plethora of options accompanied by a lack of easy interoperability (the kind that my mom could figure out). Information is being produced and created in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented rate. It is being shared in unprecedented ways at an unprecedented rate. But, it is being fragmented in unprecedented ways. This is problem and an opportunity (as always). However, this is one case where I’m skeptical if just yet another technology (Google!?) will be able to help vacuum together all our digital bits from all over the Web.

The change in arithmetic started happening when we started giving kids calculators. When I went to school, calculators were banned. You had to learn how to do math in your head, at least basic math. But I won’t dwell on the poor state of basic math skills since that’s not the core point of my post.

The bigger realization has been in how reading and writing are changing. When was the last time you picked up a pen/pencil and wrote a page full? How about a paragraph? Or even a full sentence? The pen, though metaphorically mightier than the sword, is becoming useless for anything more than signing our name on the credit card receipt, on a check or on a legal document. Yes, we may hunt for one when we need to scribble down a reminder or a quick thought, but whenever it comes to writing anything meaningful or of substance, our tool of choice has become the keyboard.

What does this mean for education and for the children who are learning how to read and write today? Do they really need to learn how to hold a pen or how to write longhand? The importance of longhand has diminished to such an extent that I worry about its very existence in the near future. It is more important to know how to type today than it is to hold a pen. In fact, I bet that very soon when someone needs to scribble something, they won’t be reaching for pen and paper, but reaching for their phone or whatever device it is that is almost surgically attached to their hand. (BTW, in case you haven’t tried it yet, I would strongly recommend trying out ShapeWriter on the iPhone. Here is the iTunes store link for ShapeWriter Free and ShapeWriter Pro.)

Writing longhand is a skill that I compare to boiling a frog — with every passing day, with every blog post and with every tweet, we’re boiling the frog that is writing with an instrument that still vaguely resembles a quill.

I use the submarine analogy because it best describes what I mean. If you are on the surface and literally skimming topics, then you know very little and can easily be overthrown or thrown out of control by a wave or the wind. By contrast, if you are under the water, you have a little bit more control and are less susceptible to the wind and the waves, but you still lack the depth of knowledge. While I was at Stanford, I felt that I was able to stay at periscope depth, but still be able to make deep dives from time to time. It was a requirement of the role and the task at hand.

In my new role of helping startups, I find I spend a lot of time at periscope depth, but I haven’t been able to make as many deep dives as I would like to into various topics — sometimes topics that would be of benefit to the startups I’m working with and sometimes those for just my own edification.

A big part of the problem has been the glut of information created by social media (mostly useless information, but every so often there are a few gems). Keeping up with my feeds, trying to get a healthy dose of the twitter stream, and most of all managing the beast that is email takes up a large chunk of my week. The weekends have really become catch up days for things left over from the week. Fortunately, the information traffic on weekends decreases just enough to make it possible to write a blog post for instance!

Has the increase in social media activities such as Twitter, Facebook, blogging etc made all of us incapable of making deep dives? Most of the time the web is an “echo chamber,” as it has appropriately been described, for the self-absorbed. Innovation happens not only be being aware of the acitivity around you, but by being able to get a deep understanding of a particular topic. When are entrepreneurs working on building stuff, when most of the time they’re keeping busy just trying to keep up? These are just some of the questions I am pondering over, while I try to correct my own observation of being at periscope depth.

I hope to make some proactive changes to help correct this and carve out some time to still do the deep dives that I believe are essential for being fully informed and not just partially informed.

Zephyr was the first real “instant messaging and presence” system in my opinion. We used Zephyr long before there was ICQ, or AIM, or Yahoo Messenger (or Yahoo Pager as it was first known), or GoogleTalk, or Skype. But Zephyr was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Not only did it allow you to maintain a list of friends whose presence you could monitor (mk5a has logged in to orion.weh.cmu.edu for instance) but it also allowed all kinds of cool functionality that IM never really caught up with.

Let me try to describe the coolness of Zephyr from memory. If there are any MIT/CMU alums out there who remember it, I would welcome their input to correct me wherever my memory may be failing me.

Lets start with the UI. Zephyr offered both a command line interface as well as a rich UI built around it. The command line interface was brilliant for being able to send messages even when you were telnet’d in over a dialup (shudder!). The graphical UI was cool — It not only showed a list of all your “friends,” but also showed which machine they were on. Since the machine names at CMU were logical and geo-coded by the name of the cluster they were in, you had a pretty good idea of where the person was on campus. For example, weh.cmu.edu meant Wean Hall — the home of all things geeky.

When a user logged it, their name got added to the list of online users with a little + sign next to them. The + sign would fade away. When they logged out, it showed a little – sign next to their name and then removed the name from the list. You could of course also have popup notifications about when a user logged in.

The standard UI for Zephyr used message pop-ups which appeared on the top left corner of the screen. The messages would pup up in individual windows (like the “toasts” do in Windows). The user could determine if they wanted the messages to automatically close after a predetermined time interval or stay stacked until you clicked on each message. The entire message window was a giant button — so clicking or hovering over it was not a problem.

Now, I mentioned “friends” above. but like Twitter and FriendFeed today, Zephyr also allowed me to watch people who I may not know, i.e. the “follow” vs. “friend” functionality. This allowed the discovery of lots of smart (and sometime even cute ones!) people — or as they say for Twitter/Facebook now: “Facebook is for people you know, Twitter is for people you want to know better.”

Zephyr had all kinds of utilities including one called zlocate, which alowed you to find out where someone may be logged in. zmap allowed you to produce a ASCII map of a particular cluster – you could tell exactly in what corner of the room someone was sitting in by using zmap. The wall utility allowed you to blast a message out to everyone within a particular cluster (or with a wider distribution if you had the powers). It also had a ultra fun zbomb utility which allowed you to flood a user with so many zephrys that it would take them a while to close out all the windows!

But I haven’t even gotten to the coolest feature yet. The Zephyr instances. These were vitual channels that one could subscribe to to become part of an opt-in community on any topic. The best examples are the food instance and the help instance. If you subscribed to the food instance, anytime there was free food anywhere, it would be broadcast on the food instance. (At Stanford we have the Gates food maling list, but that’s not as instantaneous as the Zephyr food instance! And as a student, when it comes to free food, you want to get that message quickly, before all the food is gone!)

The Zephyr help instance is where the magic happened. If you had a question, any question all you had to do was “zwrite -i help What’s the syntax for a regular expression that finds email addresses?” or better yet “zwrite -i help What’s the phone number for Dominos” and within seconds someone out there on Andrew-land would respond. We had “wisdom of the crowds” before it was called wisdom of the crowds. Zephyr was your oracle. It knew it all. You could ask (almost) anything and get an answer. In fact if you don’t know it already, the answer to “What is the meaning of life?” is 42. I learnt that on Zephyr.

The wisdom and instant gratification of Zephyr instances surpassed anything I had ever seen. It truly worked like magic.

Today, over 16 years later (geesh, I’m getting old) we finally have Twitter. Twitter is getting closer to what we had with Zephyr. It’s still not there. but it has the makings of it. By connecting my Twitter account with my Facebook status, I’ve finally been able to recreate the “oracle” I want. For instance, I was having trouble with my wireless router. A quick post to Twitter about which new router should I buy, resulted in a series of responses on Facebook with recommendations for which router to buy. Within 10 or 20 minutes I knew what my choice would be (in case you’re wondering it’s the Linksys WRT54GL — note the L, not the newest models, but the L). Similarly when I was trying to get some data on the paid click rates for search engines, I as able to ask Twitter (though I only got responses on Facebook!)

David Pogue (@pogue), the well known tech columnist for the NY Times conducted a similar experiment recently. Twitter really has the potential to become the oracle that taps into the wisdom of the crowds. However, Twitter is not perfect. It needs LOTS of improvement. I have lots of ideas about it too (UI improvements, threading, search, media, channels, discovery, ranking, visualizations, etc.) but that’s a topic for a whole other post.

But so far, in the absence of being able to return to Andrew and Zephyr, I’ll end with…

“Twitter, can you be my Zephyr?” (I hope so!)

P.S. In case you’re wondering, I’m @manukumar on Twitter.

I’ve often wondered about the disconnect that exists between the individual and the nation when it comes to economic policies and measures. As an individual, it is in your own personal self-interest to live within your means. While I was growing up (in India), credit for individuals was more or less unheard of. What was more common was “saving” — if you wanted to buy something, you would have to save up enough to make that purchase. Now I’m not arguing that that is the best approach, but a balanced approach is what I am arguing for.

By contrast, at the macro-economic level, the problem you hear the economists talking about is that “Consumer spending” is down and that has a trickle down effect on the economy — well, it does. But, should boosting consumer spending really be the way to improve the economy? Isn’t that at odds with the common sense of what is good for the individual!

In fact given the current supply chain in the US, boosting consumer spending will not necessarily stimulate the US economy as much as it will stimulate the Chinese economy. The current crisis has shown that the global economies are so tightly intertwined that that may indeed be what is necessary at a global level. Apparently, China reinvests all the excess dollars it earns into the US economy by buying up US treasuries, bonds and stocks and that is what makes money readily available in the US. If China stops buying up US assets with their surplus dollars, the US would be in even bigger credit/cashflow trouble.

Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) wrote a great article titled: Watch out, world: Americans are saving again (hat tip to @timoreilly for the link). Having read this article and having recently watched I.O.U.S.A (highly recommended) I am pleased to see that Americans may be saving more again — it’s what they should have been doing in the first place. But that American’s saving again will have a adverse effect on the global economy just means that the micro and the macro are not working to reinforce each other, but against each other.

To summarize this post, in essence, I feel that there is a huge disconnect between “what is good for the individual” vs. “what is good for the United States” vs. “what is good for the global economy” and until these differences can be reconciled and the interests aligned, I fear that we will be pulling in the wrong directions.

BJ’s class and and the principles of designing technology with the intent to change human behavior (for good) is a topic that I think about often. As a hobbyist of observing human behavior, I am fascinated by ways in which people get manipulated — sometimes consciously and sometimes sub-consciously. This happens everyday with marketing and advertising and is one of the reasons I hate being “marketed to” or “sold to” since then I know I am being manipulated. However, when this works to manipulate us in a positive direction, it can be a very compelling approach.

Yesterday, while I was in San Francisco to attend The Crunchies, a friend and I happened to walk into a Chevy’s restaurant on Van Ness Ave (an impulse decision and definitely not a pre-meditated one!). My colleague and I both noticed that their menu’s had nutritional information (calories, fat, carbs, and sodium) for every item on the menu directly below it. We were both shocked to see how most of the items on the menu also happened to be 1500 calories or over. So in one meal, you’re getting close to the entire days worth of calories! (I also noticed the limited number of options for vegetarians, unusual for most California restaurants, but then Chevy’s is a chain).

Turns out that the City of San Francisco, in its usual leading edge wisdom has required chain restaurants to post nutrition information on their menu’s:

“The law requires nutrition information – including calories, fat, carbohydrates and sodium – to be posted on menus or, for restaurants that do not have menus, on prominently displayed posters. Restaurants with menu boards would be required to list the calories per item on the board; other nutrition information could be listed on the posters.”

(Source: S.F. supes require posting of nutrition info)

Likewise, the State of California has also enacted a similar law to go into effect statewide:

“SB 1420 requires restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to post calorie information on their menus and indoor menu boards by January 1, 2011. And beginning July 1, 2009, brochures containing either calorie content information or other nutritional information, such as grams of saturated fat, grams of carbohydrates and milligrams of sodium, will be at the point of sale and drive-thrus for consumers.”

(Source: Gov. Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Promoting Nutrition and Healthier Options)

This is a brilliant move by San Francisco and California. It really needs to be adopted all across the US. Portion sizes in the US are ridiculously large. I think that this change will have an impact on at least some fraction of the people — those who may be well-intentioned about controlling their diet, but just have a hard time doing it (like me). It is an example of increased visibility and awareness being used to encourage behavior change.

One of my favorite books on the topic of eating behavior is Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think — it is a fascinating book about how and why we are not good at controlling how much we eat. The experiments in the book are eye opening, but even though I can read and rationalize them, changing behavior is inherently hard to do. I’m glad to see these laws that are designed to encourage positive behavior change — not with a stick, but with awareness and information.

And you had to read this whole post just because I ordered a salad!

Here’s a pretty awesome deal: Work for Merrill Lynch for a few days until it’s acquired by Bank of America Corporation (NYSE: BAC) and receive a $25 million golden parachute.

Now, I realize that the BofA takeover of Merril Lynch was a firesale more than a government bailout, but the article did make me think more about the issue of could this happen in a bailout? Since a bailout doesn’t go through the bankruptcy process, companies cannot invalidate their sometimes ridiculous employment contracts to avoid situations like this. This is one of the reasons why I dislike the bailout process as opposed to a structured bankruptcy.

Most major conferences now have multiple parallel tracks. CHI has 9 parallel tracks running concurrently with 5 different courses. So all in all, you can chose to be in one of 14 different places. The opportunity cost of missing some talks is high but unfortunately, since one doesn’t know which ones are the ones worth listening to, it’s ultimately an educated guess (some would call it more like a crap shoot, but it’s not really all that bad).

By the time a paper is presented at a conference there is nothing a person in the audience can really say or do in order to change that in any way. Regardless of how critical the comments may be, the paper/poster has already been published and is hence been condemned to be around forever. Since the paper has already gone through a peer-review process, I am willing to trust the judgment (though some would question that, but bear with me for a minute) of the reviewers who accepted the paper to have verified the methodology and the details presented in the paper. Therefore, there is no reason for me to have to sit through a half hour (20 minutes presentation and 10 minute Q&A) on a paper. Instead all I really care about is what is the motivation/topic for the paper, what was built/tested/evaluated and what the results were. 5 minutes at the most. The 5 minute presentation is sufficient to present a summary of the work. Anyone who is interested in the work, can read the paper and/or then meet with the presenter during his/her designated “discussion time” (no paper presentations should be on at the same time).

Back to the question of whether or not to trust the reviewers’ judgments — once the paper has already been accepted there is very little accountability in a public forum for the quality of the paper or the presentation. Therefore, rather than spend the time to listen to all the details, I prefer getting the executive summary and then having the opportunity to interact with the presenter in a special public Q&A session.

To that effect, I would also like to see some kind of accountability on the quality of the paper or presentation after the conference. Under the current system, while members of the audience can ask insightful questions, that interaction is not captured other than in the memories of others who were present and happened to be listening. It would be interesting to have members of the community post their critiques or questions in a public forum — similar to comments on a blog entry. Along the same lines I would also be in favor of having the paper reviewers comments and the authors rebuttal available since the real value in research is not just what actually gets published, but in the back-and-forth that happens between the community.

So here is what I would propose:
1) No paper presentation to exceed 5 minutes, maybe even 3 minutes.
2) Single (or at least fewer) track paper presentations so that one can at least get a comprehensive overview of all the papers in the conference.
3) The paper, abstract, reviews and rebuttals posted on a website, which allows others to view them and comment on them.
4) A designated “discussion session” for the paper, which is more interactive. Those who wish to question the methods or results can read the paper and then come and participate in the discussion. Those who wish to just listen and absorb are welcome as well. A scribe should be present to capture the interaction of the discussion so that it too can be archived along with the paper.

These are of course thoughts in progress, but I’d be happy to discuss them with anyone who is interested.