You’re unsure of yourself. You’re unsure of what others will think. You’re unsure of how your actions will be perceived or misconstrued.

But a start is a wonderful thing. It’s the beginning of something new. A new path. A new direction. Hell, it’s pretty damn exciting.

For me I’ve hesitated to start this blog. I never really feel like I have anything worthwhile to say. In fact I have a collection of drafts here from business ideas, to auto-biographical write ups about where I’m from and the crap I went through to get here. But I’ve never posted.

Maybe I’m too self-critical and worried about perception, but after nearly 6 years in the game I think it’s time to just start writing again.

PokeIt

Problem: Men want to pop a zit, or pop out a blackhead without using dirty fingers.

Solution: A device you could use on your face to remove a blackhead, or pierce an ingrown/infected pore after shaving. single use, sterilized. use once then toss.

Business model: Sell em in a 10 pack for $3.99

Oh God I’m Starving – 4HB Edition

Problem: People on 4HB diets are sick of eating mexican food day in and day out. We already eat egg whites and lentils, give us one attempt at eating something different.

Solution: A website that lists the 5 nearest restaurants that serve low-carb meals, mexican restaurants are enabled if nothing is found nearby. Pulls in yelp reviews, open table if needed. Analyzes menus of top restaurants and provides a %-indicator of chance a person on slow-car/low-carb diet could find something to eat.

Business model: none, I just want to know where I can eat.

Wi-Tape - *free100kidea

Problem: Measuring body composition changes with a normal measuring tape is a slow process, has no digital method for analyzing data without first being typed in/written down, and is a big pain in the ass.

Solution: A measuring tape that wirelessly records body measurements. would measure body parts in succession: right arm, left arm, chest inflated, deflated, thinnest part of waist, widest part of waist, over belly button, over hips, right thigh, left thigh. This information would be combined with a withings scale and graphed visually to show body composition trends — a picture of a human body/torso would show green/red body parts where measurements have increased/decreased. Users would be able to set whether growth or reduction was positive/negative — waist: shrink = positive/green, biceps = grow = positive. Work with a company like Orbi-tape. USB and Wifi enabled. Would also have a measurement averaging system (MAS) — the system would work by taking a series of measurements over 3 seconds, remove 10% highest and lowest deltas (tension on the measurement apparatus) and then provide the filtered number.

Business model: Get the device built for <40$, patent the MAS and process. Produce the units in China. After successive branding campaign, white label the technology or sell units for 79.99 1 mm increments, and sell a pro version with finer measurement increments of 0.1mm, stretch-resistant tape, and a built-in measurement averaging system. Make a deal with Withings corporation and license technology, synchronize with their apps.

Recancel – *free100kidea

Problem: People hate looking over their credit card bills. Hidden within a household’s credit card statements are at least two recurring payments that could be removed or reduced. Analyzing, calculating how much could be saved, and the process of canceling these subscriptions is a time consuming task.

Solution: A website that analyzes all your credit card bills and tell you what recurring charges you have, the frequency of the charge, the amount of the charge (or average), and provide a button you could click to cancel it if refunds are pro-rated — or schedule to cancel it 7 days before end of next billing cycle. Would be useful to track down wasted subscriptions for people who don’t pore over their credit card bills with a magnifying glass. Results are shown in $ you will save if you cancel right now, estimated time it will take to cancel via customer service: ex: “Save 300$ by end of year by spending 25 minutes via phone”.

Business model: Recancel makes a 4.99 fee by canceling on behalf of you. Credit card analysis is free for first credit card, 4.99 for next 3.

LazyWalker

Problem: Walking around a hilly city is good for your health. But sometimes you’re tired, carrying something heavy, or just plain lazy.

Solution: A website that, given a departure and destination will show you the route that requires the least amount of energy. Would have two options for results: by least energy required, best suggested route. Best suggested route would suggest the lowest energy routes, while still having the route make general progress in the direction of the destination.

Business model: Makes money via the Lazy Adnetwork, all those super lazy gadgets you see on tv and think no one would ever buy, these users just might.

@mhofstrand

Premise:

Grandmas love sending email forwards, inspirational photos, powerpoints (wtf?), religious stuff, stuff about supporting our troops. So why not give them a place to do this?

Introducing Grandma mail: The world’s most simple email system, with over 50,000 forwardable emails baked-in.

Features:

A simple large-button UI built for grandma’s who wear reading glasses.

Four simple functions:

A gigantic gallery of forwardable emails : cat pictures, dog pictures, religious forwards, uplifting quotes. You sign your grandma up for categories she likes and she’ll get a new email each day from each category.

WRITE and SEND – Would function like any normal email editor. Except everything is in large text. A super simple photo adder, with a search bar, and giant photos they click and it gets added.

OOPS button – Undoes whatever they just did, and explains what it undid in simple english.

SOS – Sends an alert to the Techie Grandchild, daughter-in-law whoever is the families go-to computer person. This sends an IM, and email with a link that lets you see the exact screen your Grandma is on. It’s like a screenshare of their email where you can guide your grandma and make whatever change/fix is needed.

It offers a safe environment: blocks out all types of email scams that prey on grandmas/grandpas like Nigerian princes, people in distress, anything that could even be considered fishy.

New features: Automatic Snopes true/false analysis.

After a 2 month trip to Hawaii I’m finally back in California. We brought our entire team out to Hawai to build out our MVP. I already miss the beach, sun, rush and sway of the waves. I often found myself reflecting on the day, delving into thoughts, untangling fears, and constructing/deconstructing ideas. The weekends were full of family time, food, and laughter — some of which will be sorely missed in Los Angeles.

On the trip I realized I have a brillant and driven co-founder. Our team is full of smart, funny, good, caring people. I love being around these people all day. Hopefully, the feeling is mutual!

In other news: I’m finally moving to San Francisco! After a 4 year love affair I think it’s time to commit. I’ve already fallen in love with the Mission. I’m on the hunt now for apartments… fingers crossed, we’ll be calling SF home by November.

I’ve also decided to disable a 2 year Lifestream experiment. No more automated posts cataloging my interaction on twitter. (I probably should destroy them )

What’s new?

• I left day to day CTO duties at ADAM back in November. I have transitioned back to Advisory as they delve deeper in to the Chamber of Commerce world.
• Cheezburger is all growed up. It’s like that scene in gremlins2 where one drop of water resulted in tens, and then thousands of variations. I wish them the best.
• I went on several trips: Tokyo, Honolulu, SF, and most recently Austin for SXSW2011. I met lots of amazing and inspiring folks at SXSW.
• I’ve also recently met: Friggin’ Al Gore (he knows ICanHas LOLZ), Angry Asian Man, Derek Dukes of Dipity.
• Many of my Hawaii projects are starting to garner support. Lei Fresh, a project I helped to coordinate with Melanie Kosaka and the Hawaii Farm Bureau was recently awarded a grant to do a full build out. This project will hopefully make a big impact on how people find locally grown and organic Hawaii products. Lots of great ventures were pitched to Hawaii Community Foundation.

What’s happenin?

Most excitedly, I’ve decided to found a new company! At the moment, the name and idea are under wraps (super sekrit). I’m excited to share experiments, and insight here and on our team site as we cover ground. We are honing in on a very emotional pain point and I know we will build something that I believe will make peoples lives better.

If anyone still reads this blog, throw yo hands up in in the comments. What would you like to read more about?

At ADAM, my mobile software company, I’ve had the fortune of overseeing develoment across several major mobile platforms. We started initially developing on the iPhone 3G, moved to the 3GS and soon to the iPhone 4G. We’ve released our applications on to the Android platforms Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, and soon Froyo. We have even developed a basic version for mobile web.

Early on in the development of MyChamberApp a mobile chamber directory, we identified that the Blackberry platform had the most affinity for our target audience. The Blackberry rules in the small business world, smaller towns, and middle-america/east coasters still choose them over the fancier and pricier iPhone. We are seeing a bigger shift to the Android platform (notably the Droid’s marketing did very well for exposing the brand).

Our designs had been proven up on the iPhone and Android. Getting on the Blackberry required first isolating the several new screen designs.

1 – There are a mind-boggling number of Blackberry devices. If you strip out all out-dated Blackberry devices from their offering, and which lack built-in GPS capabilities you are left with seventeen models. Now, you could say “hey, Eric, Android has a bunch of devices too.”

2 – Each phone is tightly coupled with the service provider. Verizon locks out GPS capabilities unless you pay. AT&T hides a built-in map tool and “suggests” you download their AT&T Navigator. T-mobile seems to be the most open on allowing GPS/LBS.

3 – Because there are a TON of Blackberry devices, you require either a single design that can expand and contract depending on the multitude of screen dimensions. At last count we have 4 distinct designs for (320×240, 480×320, 480×360, and 360×480). As more devices are released (Playbook even) each phone will require testing.

Ironically, the issues experienced here are very similar to the Android fragmentation problem.

I have been testing development builds of our Blackberry application for MyChamberApp. Working with and removing prior .COD/.ALX files can be a pain.

Problem – When you remove an application using Blackberry Desktop Manager it does not remove all files. This results in older versions living on the system thereby preventing you from loading newer development builds.

example:

Solution — On OSX you can find and remove your previous version .cod and .alx from the directory:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/BlackBerryDesktop/Device\ Applications/Local
rm -rf *

Deleting files from here will explicitly remove them from your Applications list.

You may now add the newer application by clicking

10/1 is very likely the most important day on the internet.

To celebrate here is my most favorite cat video:

Corn is Fiber

Sweetcron introduced a lot of people to the basic concepts of the lifestreaming concept. I prefer the term Lifestream over social feed aggregation. IIRC it was one of the first platforms released and highly anticipated. Shortly after its release Friendfeed started picking up steam and fickle folks move on. I like the idea of content ownership and backup and I hope to extend the things I learned to this site.

Ur Doin’ It Rong

Unfortnately, one major issue with Sweetcron was that it was developed to aggregate activity on the web and not a replace a blog. It had a simple text editor with Markdown and worked well for one-off posts. I had abandoned blogging for a short hiatus and thought I could get away with bits and nibbles of updates via twitter/plurk (yeah I used plurk).

Well I think blogging and speaking your mind has become an intrinsic and important part of the everyday web experience. 140 characters is simply not enough to speak your mind — regardless of how stupid, ignorant, or navel-gazing people may think (take this post for example) it is our right to blab on about anything we want though, we are not given the right to an audience.

Ah, Fork It

I’ve written 4 or 5 posts about inspiration, jokes, pretty common fare and I intended to post them. Unable to locate drafts through the UI, I loaded up the the source in textmate, added some hacks to do what I needed, took a step back and decided the hack would not be maintainable.

My old lifestream shall continue to chug along here: http://www.ericnakagawa/sweetcorm

As it happens I will be trying other lifestream wordpress plugins while porting my SC “boxy_but_good” theme here.

[Update] I’ve converted about 80% of the theme to wordpress. I think it’s time to work on some fun posts. wp_cron’s still a little funky but generally the site is working.