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Steve’s demise was bound to happen, but knowing what he had done in the past I figured he could dodge another bullet. Starting a company, getting kicked out and then coming back and kicking ass. In between all that drama he started a couple more companies and in the process became the largest shareholder in Disney.

While most of us fail to leave a mark on anything this guy left his mark on many markets – personal computing (Macintosh), animation (Pixar), music (iPod & iTunes), phones (iPhone) and mobile computing (iPad). I mean what the f!@#$…brilliant.

I remember when I saw my first Apple Computer and first NeXT computer, I was blown away by the interface. At that time, I was hacking away on an IBM PC with a 1200 baud Hayes modem while screwing around with MS-DOS commands.  The Macintosh user interface just seemed so natural to use…simplicity.

P.S. The title of this post was going to be just a placeholder till I finished the post. However, the draft title says it all.

That feeling you get when you come back from vacation is reality smacking you in the face. There are two parts to it, the first part is you are no longer on vacation experiencing new things and new places. The second part is more sinister, it’s when you start plugging back into the grid – email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, voicemail, to-do’s, etc…

Some people just declare email bankruptcy once they come back from vacation and figure if something was that important the person will email again. There are many startups and even Google is trying to prioritize your email for you and present what is believes are the most important emails to respond to. Luckily, I’ve been able to tame email using a ton of filters so I don’t have to go down the path of declaring email bankruptcy.

However, what smacks me in the face when I get back from vacation is my RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow you to track the content of various websites into a single location so you don’t have to visit 10-15 websites on a daily basis. I use Google Reader to aggregate the information that easily tops over 400 new pieces of content on a daily basis. If I take a 3-4 day vacation my RSS feeds would easily top 1600 articles, there is no way I’m going to scan 1600 titles in Google Reader…hence RSS bankruptcy.

When I got back from my most recent vacation I decided I needed to really tame my RSS feeds. For me, I like reading articles but I’ve come to realize many of the articles that I read are just worthless and a waste of time. I believe I read these type of articles for two reasons: it diverts me from work that I should be doing and second I gain knowledge about a particular subject. The problem is if you waste 15 minutes reading garbage you won’t get time to read another article that might actually be useful. Coincidentally, my friend Sahil sent me a link saying that “keeping up with RSS is poisonous.” I would completely agree with the article.

So what did I do? I nuked about 75% of the RSS feeds I had and started following those particular websites on Twitter. Secondly, I started following several new people that seem to send out useful articles via Twitter. The idea is I might miss a particular tweet from
Engadget when it first comes out, but if the article is really useful it will get re-tweeted many times and then I can read it. You kinda have to have faith in the people you follow and truly believe in the wisdom of crowds. Twitter has now become my curated personal news aggregator.

So what were the big news stories when I was on vacation for 3 weeks? Two seem to stick out 1. Google buying Motorola Mobility and 2. The VC funding misadventures of Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. The second story was heavily re-tweeted and even Sahil sent me a link to the story. Using my old method I would have seen story #1 pop-up in my RSS feed but story #2 would have been buried…and story #2 is actually a GREAT read if you are looking for VC funding.

I’m sure while on vacation, I missed out on thousands of stories. Let me guess there were several Top 10 articles on how to grow traffic, effectively use Facebook for your company, maximize your Google ad spend, etc…all noise to be honest. It’s the fear of missing out that drives people to track everything and read everything. The article I’m really looking for is how to score a 2012 Lamborghini Aventador since it has a 3 year waiting list.

Lexus LFA dashboard

During the late 90′s all the rage on the internet was with portals. The concept was simple, you select the type of information you wanted  - news sources you like, stock quotes for your holdings or local weather information. Then the portal would magically aggregate all the information in a single location.

If portal 1.0 was about external information (news, weather, etc..) then portal 2.0 is about your information. Portal 2.0 or what I’m calling The Personal Dashboard is the next step, where you can quickly glance at various parts of your life in a single location. Parts of your life would include friends (Facebook), work colleagues (LinkedIn), personal finance (Mint.com), health, cars, fashion, etc…

Social Dashboard
Since many websites are opening up their data stream via an easy to use API (application programming interface) the ability to create a centralized dashboard is not that far fetched. For the social piece of your dashboard you would have a mix of Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter in your social news feed similar to how the individual streams look now, but it would be an aggregated summary. For the full blown feed you would have to go to the respective sites to get your daily dose of empty calories better known as social networking.

Personal Finance Dashboard
Yes, Mint.com does a lot of the financial data aggregation but two things: first it’s on their site, I want to see that data stream appear on my dashboard. More importantly I would like to weave Mint.com with all my other financial data streams. Suppose I have Google Wallet, I would want that to appear as well.  For me personal finance is broken down into 2 categories: short term (expense tracking) and long term (portfolio management). Since all my financial feeds are in one location, I would want to get real advice and/or offers based on how I spend on my short term or daily expenses.  If I constantly spend on cafe lattes at The Coffee Bean (which I do everyday in Nariman Point), it would be nice if they kick out an offer for 50% off on a new product they are introducing. Or if I suddenly stop visiting for 2 weeks, they kick out an offer for 20% off on my next visit. This would be completely automated without having to signup for some dumb-ass daily deal site (Hi Groupon!).

On the portfolio management side, it would only present offers in two cases: the product saves me money or makes me money. If there is a better performing CD/FD it would alert me to it. If I can save on brokerage, then it would notify me…but only if I really trade a lot and it would specifically show me a cost comparison based on my accounts details. Consumers would love this, but of course established companies would hate this level of transparency. However, there are new players such as BankSimple.com who might be able to make a difference.

Health Dashboard
Personally, the area of health is what got me started to think about the Personal Dashboard concept. There is a growing trend around the idea of the quantified self –  capturing details such as heart rate, blood pressure and many more data points to learn about your health in real time.  Gary Wolf gave a TED talk about the topic. When you talk about big markets, the health care industry is one of the biggest at 16% of the US GDP and a large chunk going to hospital care. There has to be a better way for people to track their own health and make adjustments in real-time to improve their health. There are several devices available today that offer a glimpse into the future.

Fitbit is the size of a money clip and tracks physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep patterns. At a $100 a pop, this should be mandatory for anyone with a BMI over 30. Another gadget is Basis which is like the Fitbit but also tracks your heart rate. Of course, Apple is also planning to gate crash this party with their products based recent patent filings.

Gadgets are one piece, the other is data aggregation and several companies such as Microsoft HealthVault and RunKeeper have started to support the above gadgets on their platform. Once again these are islands of data and should be part of an overall personal dashboard. These services should interact with each other and kick out real-time advice based on my physical condition or let me know if my sleep cycle for the one week period is normal for my age group, etc… Or I should be able to export my data to a PDF to show my doctor that I have indeed been sleeping 7 hours a day and working out every other day. By tracking certain metrics it lends itself for people to correct their behavior if they are serious about it.

Summary
I’ve touched on 3 areas but there can be many more depending on the lifestyle of the individual. Such as a car dashboard that tracks the vitals of the cars you own – mileage, fuel tank, tire pressure, etc…then it could send a reminder for when the next servicing is due. (Yes the irony, a dashboard of a dashboard!)

The Personal Dashboard might seem like an idealistic view of how our lives should be simplified, but I firmly believe it’s where things are moving to. Currently, all this data is housed in disconnected data stacks but eventually there will be a meta aggregator of all these bits of data we are creating on a minute by minute basis.

The above article was syndicated on VCCircle.com.

When I first heard about Aadhaar I figured it was just another Government of India project that would go nowhere. (For a quick refresher on Aadhaar I put together a quick 10 slide summary.) As the program is starting to gain traction, many people are starting to challenge the claims and veracity of the projects purpose.

One of them is Sucheta Dalal, who is a highly acclaimed journalist who broke the story on India’s largest insider trading scandal in 1992 involving Harshad Mehta (he was the first person in India to buy a Lexus LS400). I’ve actually had a chance to meet Sucheta and she is a straight shooter. I’ve commented in the past that I feel Aadhaar will help to ease corruption. On Twitter, Sucheta had a more direct question for me:

@mrjain  please enlighten me how a number allotted to you will curb corruption? I am all ears

One of the misconceptions about Aadhaar is that it will solve every problem that affects India, it won’t. The other misconception is that it will be 100% fool proof and rock solid from day one, it won’t.  Aadhaar is a technology startup that happens to be ventured backed by the Government of India. As with any startup or government program there will be teething and integration issues that will have to be dealt with in real-time.

My answer to Sucheta’s tweet is “yes, but probably not for Sucheta and me.” It would benefit people that suffer from the “poverty tax”, which is a large percentage of the Indian population. If you receive a pension, you might have to pay a “fee” to the clerk to speed up the transaction. Same issue with food, subsided kerosene, government jobs, etc…if you want something you have to pay a fee.  That fee hurts more if you earn less and hence it’s called the poverty tax or you can call it what it really is…corruption. With an Aadhaar number the government would directly deposit the money into your bank account. No middle man to slow down the transaction or take money from you to speed up the process of getting YOUR money.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt are the 3 things that critics raise when talking about Aadhaar. Fear of what the Indian government will do with the data. Uncertainty about how much money is being spent on the project. And lastly, doubt of whether the program can achieve anything impactful.

The other complaint I’ve heard from several people is they feel it’s just a large technology project to benefit system integrators like Infosys, Wipro and TCS. In particular, a friend of mine questioned why Aadhaar was so keen on using iris and fingerprint scanners to authenticate people. Was it because that would force new hardware sales for iris and fingerprint scanner vendors. Why not use voice verification via cell phones that are so readily available? Granted, there might be issues with voice pattern recognition but why not open it up to a college competition for the top technology schools (read IIT’s) to try and solve the problem.

Personally, I think that’s where the Aadhaar team has done a rather poor job of openly communicating and should really improve in that department. I still firmly believe Aadhaar is a step in the right direction and will eventually benefit a large percentage of the Indian population.

Ever have one of those “oh sh^%!” moments when your data gets deleted or your hard disk spins out of control and takes all your data with it? We have all been there and it’s a painful moment. Sadly, it doesn’t have to be since it’s completely avoidable if we were just more proactive. I had my first oh shit! moment back in 2003 when my iMac went all wonky and I thought I had lost all my data. Luckily I was able to hook it up to another Mac and transfer the data safely to an external hard disk (thank God for target disk mode on Mac’s). That’s when I realized the benefits of running regular backups.

For me there are 3 “oh shit!” moments you are trying to protect against:

1. Oh shit! I deleted a file (file diversity)
2. Oh shit! my computer hard disk crashed (hardware diversity)
3. Oh shit! everything got stolen (location diversity)

The first event is very simple to implement on a Mac, you just have to fire up Time Machine and attach an external hard disk. Then it will periodically backup all your files and keep track of the files you change and allow you to recover to a previous file for whatever reason.  Apple makes it even easier with a Time Capsule (a wireless router + hard disk) which continuously backs up your computer over a wi-fi connection to the Time Capsule…pure genius.

Many people forget about event number two because they feel it’s covered by event number one, which is not totally true. If your hard disk crashes you might have all your data on an external hard disk, but you still have to waste hours re-install your operating system, reload your applications and copy your data. That’s a major pain if it happens on a Monday morning and you have a big presentation later in the day. To cover event number two I use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), it allows me to make a bootable backup of my computer to an external hard disk. Which means if anything happens to my main hard disk, I can just plug in the external hard disk and boot-up as if nothing happened. It’s become a Sunday ritual to use CCC and make a bootable image to an external hard disk. Oh, and the best part is that CCC is completely free.

Event number three is where I still struggle to have a completely fool proof system. Before the dawn of cloud computing people used to have a multi off-site strategy, they would store copies of their data at their house, office and bank locker. If an earthquake were to hit then most likely all your local data storage locations would have been affected and thus making the strategy useless. But now you can easily backup your data to a cloud service like Dropbox, CrashPlan or Jungle Disk. I use Dropbox for my critical data and it’s great. But, I haven’t gone down the path of backing up all my data which is around 400GB and growing by 1GB a week. To transfer that over a 1MB line would be impractical and not to mention very expensive. In the meantime, I’m still searching for a complete full proof way to insure against event number three.

Well there you have it, a quick summary of how to avoid those three “oh shit!” moments. Since external hard disks are so cheap these days, I would say get two external units and starting backing up right now to avoid events one and two from happening to you. Granted all the information was Apple specific but I’m pretty sure the same can be implemented on the Windoze platform.