Lon Safko joins the greats (Darwin, Wyeth, Edison) as the newest inductee of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection with eighteen of his inventions. His Apple II computer is on display at Apple HQ as being the first Apple to truly save a human life in honor of his amazing invention that restored the will to live for a C3 quadriplegic.
I had the opportunity to interview Lon recently and ask him how he played the instrumental role in founding the now $5.3BN assistive speech technology industry. Lon shared his view of innovation and stories on the inception of this technology which began in 1984. Many of Lon’s inventions were the archetypes to what we now know of as the Dragon Naturally Speaking product, the original Newton (pda) O.S., “Tool Tips“, X-10 Powerhouse, and Microsoft’s Bob O.S.
From paper models to garden hoses to AI and now the Smithsonian, Lon has had an amazing career. He believes that anyone can train his/her mind to see opportunities and deficiencies in the world and learn innovation using what he calls “The Three C’s.” Listen to his amazing interview (35min – 41MB) on the latest episode of the Grid7 Venturecast series.
When traveling alone you will at some point find yourself in a crowded airport terminal or restaurant waiting with multiple pieces of luggage. Professional thieves choose this high-commotion areas to target unsuspecting individuals because there are a lot of distractions and they can quietly snatch a bag while you are preoccupied with something else. When I’m at the gate and I know I’ve got my boarding pass and I’m good to go, I turn on the iPod and snooze before the flight. And under normal circumstances if I were to leave my bags on the ground next to me, I would become a prime target for a thief to stroll by and lift them. As simple as it sounds, here is a technique that prevents this:
Using plastic bags as carry-ons is just never a good idea if you can avoid it. Not only are they flimsy but they eventually turn your fingers into sausage links if they’re loaded with heavy stuff and you have to carry them far.
When traveling in Mexico especially, I will split both my cash and credit cards in two places so that if my wallet is stolen I still have dinero somewhere else. If you travel with a money belt I recommend putting a credit card and a few bills there and leaving the rest in your wallet. Cash is king in an emergency situation but the credit card ensures you have access to larger money if you need it.
A friend of mine, Jeff Hausman once said to me upon returning from an extended vacation in Thailand, “Why is it that I feel so depressed by all this concrete and the pace of things here in the US– what are we doing”
The trip was in every way an epic adventure. We saw terrain and people that few others will ever see. When we finally arrived in Cabo we pulled up to this beach bar called “The Office” (still fresh out of our cube farms, the irony was laughable). We promptly grabbed a metal bucket of coronas, filled the bottom 1/3rd with sand and floated out into the ocean bobbing up and down on the swells that rolled in off the Pacific. It is a gem of a memory I keep tucked away and to this day draw upon it in moments of great stress.
Like all amazing journeys though, it had to come to an end. We were there for twelve days and on the final day (once we had convinced Brad that he could not in fact smuggle the stray puppy that he had found back to the States), we guided Jeff’s Bronco onto Interstate 1 and began the long drive back up the Baja to Phoenix. We each took something different from that trip but what was consistent for all of us was the grounding effect of extracting ourselves from the rat race, transplanting to a seaside town and putting life in slo-mo for awhile.
Anyways, that’s the gist of my theory. Of course I have no scientific basis to substantiate any of this but it’s a best guess based on past personal experience and could be fairly easily tested with control groups. It would be great to see some grad student pick this up and do it as a dissertation – I will gladly volunteer to be one of the subjects if needed ;-)
What I’m proposing here is nothing short of the worldwide Vehicular Thomas Crowne Affair.
I just got my plate from AZ DMV and happily installed it this morning. It can still be read by the keen eye but from one of those crappy photo radar pictures it will be a non-trivial task to make out the characters. There aren’t many grey Tahoes in AZ that have a plate seemingly with all zero’s so with any amount of research effort the examiner could probably figure it out. But much like 
We had the second meeting of the 
This rift in philosophies really is that basic. While old media folk will be perpetually looking for a bigger rock to heave into the pond in order to displace more water, how to optimize the trajectory of their throw to get a greater initial splash and how to aim it just right so it lands in the very center of the pond to yield the maximum potential coverage area, new media people will be thinking about ways to reach the wildlife with messages worthy of redistribution. Under the old media paradigm distribution was scarce and channels were controlled by a select few so the well-aimed boulder throw made perfect sense. Today distribution channels are limitless, it’s the attention that’s scarce and the transmissibility of the message is what’s important.
As far as the Social Media Club, it’s an energetic group if not a bit overly so. There is an air of irrational exuberance that smells similar to when the dotcom craze struck as people started regurgitating buzzwords. Suddenly people think that blogs and wikis will solve world hunger and that blogging (the verb) is a sacred art form somehow different from writing. It should be no surprise that awareness and attendance of this group has ignited so fast given the nature of the subject matter. Last night had significantly more substance than the first though I’m happy to say. Francine who helped pull folks together as only she can, wrote up 
