Idealizing. Coding. Loving it!

I love Cambridge and now I know why

I am so thankful to Paul Graham for writing this. Thank you! I cannot pluck myself away from this place and now he has clarified what I just recently started suspecting. I moved to the US from Brazil 17 years ago due to family challenges. I went straight to Framingham MA, like many other Brazilian immigrants. On my second week here, a group of newly formed friends took me to Boston. I felt in love. I swore I would move there in 2 years time. I was living there in 6 months. Unlike many Brazilians, I was in awe with the new culture, and couldn't get enough of it. I didn't want to immerse myself in the local Brazilian community. Soap operas, the national past time of a country up to that time pretty completely closed up to foreign influence (read: low level of choices) had always been boring to me. I wanted to learn English as fast as I could so I could read the newspapers and get in the know of what was going on in such an exciting place! After learning English, I went to college (something of a dream, it was not a prospect in my life back when I lived in Brazil), had a really hard time choosing one career (I wanted to do everything) and found my love in building software.

In two years time I had pretty much shed the longing for the familiar things I grew up with, so the struggle between that and the thirst to experience the new subsided. After a while, I started thinking I need a new "fix": a move to a new (cool) place could do me good. I could never find a place I could justify moving to, but the need for the "fix" kept nagging at me. Until... I worked onsite on and off in Mexico City for 6 months and, despite falling in love with that and other places in Mexico, it was branded in me that no place other than the US would ever feel like home to me.

I kept looking to other cities, however. I naturally like to continuously reassess my choices anyway. It was very recently that I finally figured it all out.

I grew up in complete starvation of intellectual stimulus. I needed it, and didn't get it. Since landing in the Boston area, I have been completely consumed with nurturing this deficiency. I feel like I am behind and must catch up (to what, I haven't found out yet). Although I lived in Cambridge for 7 years up to a few years ago, I feel the same for the entire Boston area: there is not a time when I step somewhere that I don't meet somebody mind bogglingly interesting.

This is so good to my soul. There is no place with the level of intellect found here. He is so right.

Early Adopters and the Mass Market Year 2008

[sorry, I'm still working on finishing this text]

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/05/21/NoteToWeb20CompaniesEarlyAdoptersAreNotTheMassMarket.aspx

This is a very interesting article. It talks about there being a clear separation between the needs and requirements of early adopters and the rest of potential users of technology. Particularly, it focuses on web 2.0 tools.

I don't agree with some arguments in it. First of all, there is an entire category of people missing from the group chart. I don't know what they should be called... but they are the people who would be sandwiched between the pragmatists and the conservatives. They are those people who don't have a "need" to be solved by technology, but they will adopt it anyway if they can be lead to trying it out. Usually, this happens when a critical mass of friends are using or talking about something that seems interesting. Ultimately, they will find discover that they have a "need" for it after all, and become to think how they ever lived without it and how no one else should remain in the misery of not ripping the benefits of said tool. Purely on guts feeling, I would say this group of people makes up 2/3 of the pragmatists slice shown in the pie that is displayed in the article. Argue this number as you may, but I'm positive that there are not that many pragmatists (as per the definition) out there relative to the total number of potential users.

This group of people could be as enthusiastic and log some serious assiduous usage as early adopters could when first trying out a new technology. So I want to call them Accidental Adopters.

Now that I have completed the definitions to my satisfactions, I want to go back to the arguments.

the next generation of successful tools will be ones that will guide people

Geeky friends found at POPSignal in Boston

My friends (and family) are amazing, colorful, people. They, however, don't have much geeky blood running through their veins. That is why if you invite me to a geeky event, I will most probably show up. If you offer free beer (thanks Reed at Microsoft!), make that a certainty. But when I showed at at POPSignal last week I, obviously, could not divulge my status of geek friendliness deficit and still seem cool, so instead I focused on telling people about my company's product, the Eluma Desktop.

Eluma, btw, is an upcoming startup that offers this tool to organize and your web "stuff". But not only at the rate of 1 item at a time, like pretty much everything out there. You can compose collections and share the entire thing at once, and once you update the collection, everyone subscribed to it gets the updates.

I met some really interesting people at POPSignal. I was blown away by the fact that people really did want to connect. Everyone wanted to talk about things in addition to their work, and some didn't even talk about their work at all. Everybody had interesting stories, advices, and an amazing attitude. And an unbelievable energy.

I hope Jay and Brian can do it again next year. No, wait, I hope they can do it again twice a year, at least!

You can see Rob Larsen's photos here, and somebody else's here.

And I also want to give a shout out to everyone I met there. If you gave me your business card, you already got a message from me. It was great to meet you! See you next time!