Tolkien and Workouts

I finished The Silmarillion last week and have moved on to The Hobbit. I really love the simple, fantastic Hobbit narrative. It was the hook that bought me into the rest of Tolkien‘s works (Thanks again, Lee and Sam!), which I have read and reread many times over. In many ways this is similar to how I entered the Harry Potter world–through the simple, fantastic narrative of The Philosopher’s Stone. Then I was hooked all the way through the much darker, much more epic tales of the rest of the series.

This evening I took a break from my normal routine (office => gym => back to work at home) and met some IMD Class of 2009 students to coach them in strength training. They seem eager to learn and to balance their intense workload with fitness so I will be glad to help them out–with as much time as I can spare! After all, the MBAT is coming up and they need to be training!
Today I also purchased a DLP projector. As I’m trying to stay light on furniture, my plan is not to have a TV and just to use the projector on my living room wall with my computer as a source. The first media I’ll watch will be the four Rambo movies–chronologically, of course–since I haven’t seen the most recent yet.

First Week In New Apartment

Sorry for my absence but last week kept me very busy! On top of many long hours at the office (due to our release of a new website look and feel), I also moved into my new apartment and have been dealing with all of the time sucks that come with that.

Friday night I met up with our new Marketing Director at Bavaria to discuss our product strategy. We ate sausage and drank Berlinoise (“glass of framboise + bottle of hefeweissbier == good!”)–I felt very Bavarian!
Saturday night was our IMD MBA Class of 2008 reunion dinner at the Moevenpick hotel. Many of us stayed in Switzerland so we had over 30 attendees–not bad for a class of 89!
On another note, I am loving Google Latitude. It’s like Twitter but coupled with locational information. It uses your phone’s GPS (or you can update it manually) to publish your location to your friends. Obviously privacy is a concern so you can hide your location from one, some, or all of your friends at any time. It uses some mobile phone data bandwidth but the possibilities of knowing when you are unexpectedly close to a friend of yours is more than worth it. On Monday, for example, I bumped into an IMD classmate as we got off the train in Geneva. Had we been using Latitude, we would have known that we were on the same train and enjoyed the ride together. Cool stuff!

Exciting times!

After a full weekend of Poken work, yesterday I moved into my new apartment! Well, sort of. I have a bed, a sheet, a blanket (Thanks, Lee and Sam!), a pillow, a shower curtain, and a water filter. Oh right, and lots of bags! I thought I would be able to leech wireless Internet access from a local cafe, but no such luck. Until my DSL is installed I suppose I’ll be spending late nights at the office.

Last night I tried out the Thai restaurant next door to my new apartment. I was disappointed to learn that they don’t serve Pad Thai. What kind of Thai restaurant doesn’t serve Pad Thai?? Oh well, at least it’s open late 7 days/week–very rare, here in Lausanne!

Our software team is killing itself with this new interface right now. The developers are getting sick, not seeing their families, and living on caffeine. We’re taking a much-needed break right now to play darts–at which I am terrible–then it’s back to work. But, for a few minutes at least, we’re having a good time. 🙂

P.S. We need a ping pong table!

A Country Kinda Week

I’ve moved through “G” and “H” in my music collection. This has brought with it a high concentration of country music: Garth Brooks, George Strait, Hank Williams, Sr., and Hank Williams, Jr. Although I’m not a HUGE fan of country, it reminds me of Texas and that is comforting. 

I’m onto Huey Lewis and the News now. Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in ’83,I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humour. In ’87, Huey released Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is “Hip to be Square”, a song so catchy, most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself.
The Poken team is working all weekend on a new user interface. We owe our users something prettier, cleaner, and more intuitive than what they are using now. It’s a major undertaking and we are behind schedule, but by God they shall have it!

Return to the IMD Bubble

Today I had lunch back at IMD. Despite the fact that I was a student there are recently as two months ago, it seems very, very far removed. On campus I now feel like one of the myriad visitors that shuffles through each day. Oh well, at least there are still many smiling faces I know. 🙂

I had lunch with three classmates–Ian, Mario, Joonwon–and Joonwon’s wife; it was a fun mini-reunion. It was fun to catch up with all of them and hear about how their new jobs are going–especially Ian’s as he now works directly for IMD! The food was, of course, delicious and plentiful–oh how I miss the IMD lunches. The best part may have been the ping pong, though. Apparently this year’s class doesn’t really play ping pong . . . wth?
In other exciting news, I took a break from my Silmarillion reading tonight to read up on Agile Development methodologies. Our team is already employing many of them–short iterations, frequent releases, ongoing communication, open layout, joint design sessions, etc–but I uncovered some other concepts that might be useful for us. I’ve always been vehemently against accepting a single development model as dogma. Every team, product, market, technology, and set of stakeholders has its own unique requirements and it is crucial to address them, not just blindly apply some model. However, in Poken’s case the rapid growth of the market, small size of the team, and constant evolution of product requirements all go nicely with a very agile process.

Chance Encounters at the Gym

During my first week at my gym here in Lausanne I ran into an IMD staff member. Tonight I bumped into not only one of my professors from last year but a member of the Class of 2009 as well. Two pleasant surprises to distract me from my cardio and The Silmarillion audio book! 🙂 I’m not sure if this is what IMD means when it advertises the power of its network, but I’ll take it!

facebook

As many of you know, I love facebook. I spend a lot of time on it, post my pictures there, re-post my blog there, etc. In fact, the other members of the Poken team are pretty big facebook fans too, as exhibited by this video that our Chief Architect posted of me doing one-armed push-ups (the day after working out my chest, OUCH!) today.

Yesterday, however, my relationship with facebook soured a little. We received notification from our lawyers that facebook was opposing our “Poken” trademark. Apparently they have trademarked the term “poke,” which seems awfully generic/untrademarkable to me. While I am honored that the facebook Goliath would even take notice of our organization, I’m disappointed that this is our first contact from them. In that we hope to bring them and their users a lot of value by being their extension into the real world, I hope they are open to engaging us instead of just opposing us.
As with all things, we shall see. In the meantime we will stay focused on building a better product to better serve our users (who are now hitting our site 40,000 times/month).

First Real Snow of 2009

Many of you may remember my blog entry last year about the surprise of snow falling one morning. That came on March 5th but this year I woke up to snow much earlier: this morning!

I spent Saturday in Basel at Startup Camp, a get-together for Switzerland’s entrepreneurs. The Poken team showed up en masse and we really had a great time. What’s more, fully 2/3 of the attendees bought Pokens and used them to connect with people, exchange contact details, etc. While we’ve known for a while that Poken can be very useful at a conference, this meeting was particularly suited for it because so many of the members use new social media such as twitter, blogging, social networks, etc. So the standard details included on a business card (name, email, phone, address) were less relevant than all of the new media identity information included on the Poken digital card. Cool! We were glad to facilitate people connecting.

GNR Rocks!

What a week it has been: 12-hour days, no recovery from jet lag (I arrived Monday AM on the red-eye from Houston.), a dev team that seems to be gelling/productive, lots of new orders coming in (We hit 30,000 website hits/month today.), trying to master the present while also planning out the future (a quickly moving target!), doing yoga in the conference room, sleeping in the conference room . . . Awesome!

I’m working on plans right now for our upcoming API that should really help us expand. In the background I’m playing the Guns N’ Roses discography–chronologically, of course! I can’t believe how strongly they entered the market! Appetite For Destruction is so chock full of awesomeness, it’s a wonder that 1987 was able to handle it. I should get to Chinese Democracy sometime this weekend–we’ll see how that stacks up!
My “life” outside of Poken was exceptional for two reasons today. 1. I suggessfully procured treatment for athlete’s foot at a pharmacy in French, and 2. I discovered that my gym has Wii Sports! Given that my life is already pretty much exclusively Poken + the gym, the Wii shouldn’t make too much of a difference in my daily routine.
This Saturday I will be in Basel for a Startup Camp event. I’ll have a chance to see the owner of my IMD Startup Project, Sobees, and some classmates. Speaking of IMD, today was the Class of 2009’s mini-Integrative Exercise, which I blogged about this time last year. It seems like MUCH longer than a year ago! My heart and support goes out to the IMD MBA Class of 2009!