Yearly Archives: 2013

The Last Roll of Kodachrome

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In my early 20s I walked into a pawn shop and bought my first camera. It was a Canon SLR with two lenses and a bag for a couple hundred bucks. I loaded it with film and started shooting. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but, on occasion, took a really nice shot.

After a few years of getting non-repeatable results I decided to up my game and took a class at the local community college. I had an incredible teacher. We ended up becoming friends and until he moved east we’d take pictures together. By that time I’d updated to a newer Canon SLR, learned to use a tripod, learned what f-stops were, learned the importance of 18% grey, and started shooting Velvia and Sensia slide film. The colors were incredible and my pictures kept getting better.

Then the digital revolution happened and the first DSLRs became reasonably priced. I bought one. I shot photos off and on after that, never really feeling the same way about it. Eventually I stopped using my SLR — it sits in a bag in the closet. Instead my daughter’s lives have been captured with point-and-shoot or an iPhone. Every once in a while I think of getting back into photography but frankly I never really liked digital photography and, even if I could get past the part of doing more work in front of the computer than behind the lens, I don’t have the time. I’m now in the process of reviewing all these old pictures, negatives and slides, ready to digitize the entire lot.

As you may know, slide film (maybe all film) is pretty much dead and gone. Fuji discontinued my favorite Velvia and Sensia film years ago. Kodak, whose demise is well documented, did the same with the historic Kodachrome film.

And that leads me to photographer Steve McCurry, who took what is probably the most iconic photo in National Geographic history. The last roll of Kodachrome went to him. Not only did he shoot the roll, he also recorded a half hour video on the process. After all, what do you take with the last 36 frames of the most iconic film in history? Watch the video here to find out:

Single User Utility In A Social System

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I always wondered about this: if your service is designed to be most valuable with multiple people then how do you get the first ones? The quintessential example is the telephone. Doesn’t do any good if only one person has a phone. The fax machine had the same problem. So did Twitter and Facebook.

Fred Wilson talked about this issue in relation to the bookmarking service delicious:

The first users of delicious were barely aware of and rarely used its social aspects. They just wanted to store their bookmarks in the cloud instead of in their browser. And they liked the tag based classification system. And they liked being able to use their links from any device. That was the single person utility delicious was built on.

But because bookmarks were public by default which resulted in most links being shared with others, a large social system developed. The delicious popular page was an important web destination in its day and most of those visitors never posted a link to delicious. They consumed others’ links.

As we’ve been working on new stuff here, we’ve wanted to make sure that it is social naturally. Sharing stuff, after all, is very human. But in order to get the first person to use it, it must also have utility for a single person. Or, as Fred puts it, social systems must have single user utility, too.

 

The Key To Entrepreneurship

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Seth Godin writes:

I don’t think the shortage of artists has much to do with the innate ability to create or initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it.

I believe very strongly that the future of the United States is tied to our levels of entrepreneurship. We can’t be a successful country with everyone working for the man. I’ve also come to believe that Seth’s comment above is the most limiting reason we don’t have more of it.

I might have told this story before, but my cousin got married and graduated from chiropractic school about the same time. He worked out a comprehensive plan to build his own practice. His wife, though, thought the safer route was to work for someone else for a little while, learn the trade and business, and then go out on their own. My cousin didn’t even think twice about that option.

When we spoke about it, I told her that she needed to understand something: in our family we didn’t know any better. Our grandfather ran his own business. Our uncle ran his own business. My father and his father both ran their own businesses. Even my cousin’s older brother ran his own business. And of course I did, too. From birth, it was ingrained in each of us that running your own business is part of life.

So yes, most of us aren’t in a financial position where we can just quit our jobs and go out on our own. But that’s not the first step anyway. Being convinced that you can quit your job and go out on your own comes first.

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I’ve had a few comments so thought I would expand. My mom’s parents had three kids. Same for my dad’s parents. Of those eight families (including my grandparents) only one never worked for themselves.

On Grammar

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I’ve been writing a lot on this blog the past year and based on the number of visitors, a lot of people enjoy my writing. I love writing and sharing my insights and knowledge with others. It’s no good locked solely in my head.

But the reality is writing every week day is taxing. It’s extremely hard to come up with topics every single day, write well and coherently and always spell and use correct grammar. Most of the time my process is pretty simple. I write my posts and re-read them at least once. Then  I read them again as soon as I get the post in my RSS feed. Each time I inevitably find something to fix.

As you probably can sense by now, I’m pretty anal retentive. I hated this when I was young but have found that it is a benefit for what I do now. One of my pet peeves is poor spelling and grammar. Hey, I’m not perfect. Nor is my ego tied up in it.

So I ask, if you see something I spelled incorrectly or used the wrong word or need to re-write something grammatically, please tell me. I won’t take offense.

Luck

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One of the commenters of my post on Apple’s Churning of the Gut said this:

We all agree that success is partly down to luck. Call it X percent. What you think of Apple’s future depends on what you think is the value of X. If you are young and inexperienced, you probably think it’s low, so Apple must have mainly succeeded on merit, which means it will continue doing well. As you get older and experience the world, your estimate of the role of luck rises, so Apple is riding a lucky streak which will inevitably end.

I’m convinced that luck is a huge component of success for a young company. Getting all the pieces right to get a company off the ground and to any high altitude is a combination of timing, the right relationships, the right marketing and the right customers. So much of that is luck.

But for mature companies, the Apple’s, IBM’s, Samsung’s of the world, I’m not convinced that luck is a significant factor. It seems that most mature companies die by their own mistakes, whether literally screwing up or not reacting to market changes.

Besides, if we want to talk cliches, any pro athlete will tell you that you make your own luck.