The value of creative sabbaticals

I'm a huge fan of the work sabbatical. Both Apple and Palm offered them when I worked there, and I got within months of exercising sabbaticals at both before I left for new opportunities. A fact in itself which might argue that sabbaticals have to be offered earlier in an employee's life cycle ;-)

Gina Trapini has a great article on creative sabbaticals, which I found from her Twitter feed. Embedded in that article is a TED video about creative sabbaticals which I found inspiring.

One day I'll take a sabbatical!

Redefining touch-enabled desktops?

R. Clayton Miller has come up with some interesting paradigms around desktop centric touch enablement.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Amazing use of Microsoft Surface

I love this demonstration of D&D on a Microsoft Surface.

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

The project was done at CMU. Why doesn't that surprise me?!

Ray Kurzweil interview

Thought provoking interview with Ray Kurzweil, one of the most interesting people in technology. Posted on a new Dell web site.

Chris Rock states the obvious about Roman Polanski

Hollywood's reaction to the Roman Polanski situation baffles me. Chris Rock's discussion on this summarizes my view precisely!

If it was your kid, would you want Roman Polanski enjoying his coffee in France after what he did to you?!

Branching my secret identity

I enjoy a fulfilling business life. I have a great role at Sun helping make Java a preeminent platform for innovation. I've enjoyed success before Sun, interacting with folks way smarter than I am while building insanely cool consumer products we are all very proud of.

Along this journey I realized, like many before me, that I had accumulated two assets I could use to help other entrepreneurs; resources and expertise. A few years ago I used those assets as a private investor to help a startup, Shelfari, take off. Interacting with Shelfari as it grew was a tremendous experience. I realized that the risk and role of advisor and angel investor was something I thoroughly enjoyed, building from my previous experience starting companies myself.

I continued this effort more formally by creating a small venture firm, Klein Venture Partners (KVP). We've made a few subsequent investments and advise a small cluster of consumer focused startups. The companies are carefully chosen to be insanely good, non-competitive with Sun, and aligned with KVP's areas of expertise. It's as much a labor of love as an investment. The real joy is working with startups from the day they are created, watching and advising the climb from zero to a million plus users.

I'm in the process of setting up KVP's web site, and tweet about KVP progress relatively frequently. For folks who know me personally or through my work with Java, the KVP tweets were confusing, especially without context. I realized it's best to further separate the two discrete threads of my business life. So I'm doubling down on my Twitter investment. For commentary on all things Java, technology, and me, I'll continue via the Twitter username sircoolio. I've created a new Twitter address, kleinvp, that focuses on venture capital, angel investing, startups, and Klein Venture Partner announcements and progress.

The path of every angel investor starts with a single investment. I've enjoyed the first steps along the path, and have no idea where it will eventually lead. I do know it makes me happy helping small startups grow, and I know the effort helps me be a better manager and contributor at Sun. So I'll keep both parts of my business life well fed and see where the road leads.

If you know of any great startups focused on media, entertainment, mobile, or consumer, let me know! If you don't have my contact information, reach out to me via LinkedIn.

Company values

I've been thinking about why companies, teams, and projects succeed and fail. Whether it is a large corporation or a new startup, it's about the idea, the team, and the execution. The corporate entity is wrapped around these core elements, and the wrapper must enable success. A friend sent me the Netflix corporate values , and I think they are an excellent example of how the company's values can drive success.

It's a long read, but a great one for any senior manager or aspiring entrepreneur.

Evolutionary changes affecting consumer product strategy?

I've been thinking about evolutionary technology, market, or customer changes that should impact consumer product strategy through 2011. I've got a list, but am interested in what other people think about the list. Additions, modifications, deletions?

• Generation Y enters the workplace
• Micro-payments become mainstream
• BIC (Brazil, India, China) starts driving world economic policy, displacing role and power of G-7
• Consolidation of (mobile) platforms to large, entrenched players
• Media content valued for its ability to be simultaneously deployed across multiple customer screens
• Common hardware platform, developed by Asian ODMs, powers mainstream PC, mobile, and TV CE offerings
• Services predominately offered from the cloud
• Revenue models move from one-time, uni-directional licenses to performance based, small time increment revenue shares
• Users create (explicitly and implicitly) more/most content
• Technology embedded and connected in commonplace (billions) elements to drive huge improvements in productivity and environmental efficiency
• Mobile supplants desktop as the primary access channel for the Internet worldwide, TV rapidly becoming secondary access channel

Is creation the key to happiness?

Question 1: Do you consume or create?

Question 1a: If you create, do you love what you create?

Question 2: Do you focus your attention on others that love what they create?

Sony Ericsson take on Android UE?

This is supposedly a prototype of a user experience Sony Ericsson is working on for a phone codenamed Rachael. You can see the points where they've jumped from the current Android UE, integrating social graph more deeply into the home screens. It looks very nice, but I wonder how well the stacking card metaphor works when you have hundreds of connections? There are definitely ways to solve that...