Serendipity

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Yesterday, if you were living in a cave, was the Superbowl. What interests me so much is how the National Football League became the NFL. The reality is that television and the rise of the NFL came at the same time, and football, as Seth Godin talked about in his post yesterday, was made for tv. In fact it is pretty clear that if it wasn’t for television the NFL specifically and football in general probably would not be as great as it is today.

Serendipity, luck, perfect timing. These are such important factors to get any business off the ground. Twitter was launched, in essence, at South by Southwest conference six years ago. It just so happened that SXSW was the perfect storm for Twitter: lots of people together who didn’t really know each other all looking for the hottest place to be. Twitter, with its indirect connection model, was perfect for that time and place.

Sometimes this timing doesn’t work out. It was the year before Twitter launched when we were on the verge of changing math education forever, except a fateful decision by Palm to stop making handhelds and abandon the education market killed the entire deal.

Yes, a company needs a good product. Yes, it needs to have all the pieces in place to take advantage of this timing. But the perfect storm of success needs to happen too. Rovio took years to have success and finally found it with Angry Birds on iPhone. Before the iPhone there was barely a casual gaming market. It’s rise made Rovio, as we know it today, possible.

Dropbox, too, owes its meteoric success to the small screen, or more exactly to multiple screens. Ten years ago most of us didn’t need Dropbox. We had a single computer and all of our files were there. In a world where we carry three or even four machines, though, keeping files on all of them, up-to-date, is critical. Dropbox launched at the perfect time.

This is why fortitude is so important. The ability to endure hardship, the pain that is believing in something even when the world is laughing, is critical. Serendipity happens. Being there at the right time with the right product is a huge part of success.

Middle Earth, The Map

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Really cool interactive map of Middle Earth.

My wife and I saw The Hobbit this past weekend. It wasn’t horrible; it wasn’t great. Many people had a problem with the video frame rates but that didn’t bother me at all. I thought it looked okay, although a little blurry at times and my wife could see pancake make-up on one of the actors.

By my count, we got through three scenes in the book in 2.5 hours. It was stretched too far for my tastes. A three-part movie for a 200 page children’s book? I thought two-parts would have been fine.

But again, I was mostly entertained until they get trapped with the goblins. The Goblin King reminded me too much of Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars episodes that must not be named. A bizarre, silly caricature. Goblins in the Lord of The Rings trilogy were fierce creators, albeit ones who died quickly and easily. In Moria, they didn’t have conversations with the Fellowship. They just tried to kill them. In The Hobbit, it was a slow, involved discussion scene, which kind of ruined the movie for me.

I’ll see the next two installments, probably even at the theater. But it won’t have the same meaning to me as Lord of the Rings and may, very well, go to the mental trash heap with those Star Wars episodes I mentioned before.

For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade

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Great article on the history of the arcade and its demise. I didn’t realize how far it had fallen. There is an arcade here in Portland — actually a chain of them — called Wunderland Games that has been around forever. And there is a thriving arcade on the coast in Seaside, which is a little tourist town. I did drive by the house I grew up in and noticed the one we used to go to when I was a kid was gone.

Honestly, I wasn’t much of a gamer. I never liked losing money — didn’t have much to begin with. Dumping coins into the slot never really appealed to me. Given that, history does appeal to me and I learned a lot from this The Verge feature article. Enjoy!

Fly To The Moon!

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I’m done being serious for the week so thought I’d share some additional posts. In this week’s What If?, Randall Munroe discusses the possibility of flying a Cessna airplane above various Solar System bodies. These articles are usually pretty funny as they tackle some of extremely off-the-wall questions. My favorite line, though, is near the bottom, in response to flying a plane on Titan:

If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titan versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths. But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Such an engineering response! I love it!

Lotus 1-2-3 Turns 30

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This past week Lotus 1-2-3 turned 30 years old. 1-2-3, if you are unaware, was the PC spreadsheet to Visicalc’s Apple version. Visicalc was the original electronic spreadsheet, invented in the late ’70s. Given that, it was Lotus 1-2-3 that made PCs a must-have for business people all those years ago. It was also the forerunner to Excel.

As a numbers lover, spreadsheets and their history is fascinating to me. It is amazing to me that the tools we use for calculation — spreadsheets and calculators — are both as old (or almost) as I am. Even though technology has changed drastically in that time, the same tools still persist.

A few links for those of you interested in the spreadsheet in general and Lotus 1-2-3 in particular:

Enjoy!