A few days ago, I saw Thank You For Smoking, the first film I’d seen in a theater in a long time. The movie was: pretty good. Not great, but funny, and very well executed. It successfully satirizes without being either heavy-handed or too polite. Aaron Eckhart is great. Rob Lowe looks weird after his plastic surgery. Adam Brody is delightfully unctuous. My only issue with the film was Katie Holmes — she’s all wrong as the randy upstart reporter. Though, I can’t think of a movie where she’d be right. But that’s another matter.

Being a bit of a design geek, I loved the films opening titles. And you can enjoy them, too, without having to watch the film. Shadowplay Studio, who did the title work, has made the opening available on their site.

Technorati Tags: movie, credits, graphicdesign

Tong wars seem like an event from the distant past, but the recent slaying of a prominent San Francisco Chinatown businessman is exposing that Tong mentality still plays a role in contemporary life. I’ve been following this story in the Chronicle, and it’s fascinating how history evolves.

Over the last couple of months I have attended “career days” events at two schools: Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, and UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

It’s a little weird going to these events, because Adaptive Path is typically much smaller than the other folks who show up (whether other design companies like Frog, or web companies like Ebay and Yahoo and Google).

One of the things that continues to puzzle me is why most of these companies want to put prospective candidates in a little box. Here was the extent of our table at the event:

It’s too bad I didn’t photograph other tables, laden with job descriptions with their bullet-pointed lists of qualifications and responsibilities.

The students at these schools typically have a range of skills across experience design and product development. In fact, one of the main draws of programs like CMU and Berkeley’s iSchool is that it appeals to a multidisciplinary person. And these students are often frustrated during these events, because prospective employers want to put them in a box, and many tell the students that they have to choose what they want to focus on. So if you have skills in both design research and interaction design, you can only go with one or the other…

I know why these companies do it — operationally and financially it makes things easier for the people running the company. But, it also exposes the plug-and-play mentality of these companies, that they really do see people as interchangeable cogs in their machines.

One of the things that GK and I agreed on is the foolishness of compartmentalizing skills into job titles. It’s such a throwback to a older model of management, and it surprises me how otherwise leading edge companies continue to practice it.

And, really, it wouldn’t take much to alter such systems to accommodate for multidisciplinary folks. Experience design and product development are such synthetic disciplines, and people practicing it inevitably have varied backgrounds, approaches, skills, and interests. To not acknowledge that; hell, to not embrace that is the height of foolishness.

Almost a month ago, I moderated a panel at SXSW called “What’s Hot in Web Applications.” The panelists were BJ Fogg of YackPack, Seth Sternberg of Meebo, and Scott Dietzen of Zimbra. Given these panelists, I shifted the discussion from a generic “What’s Hot” to a more focused conversation on what it takes to build a product, and a company, these days. Though all from the Bay Area, the three participants had markedly different approaches and stories: BJ spent a year or two researching the problem and designing the solution before getting funding and bringing on other people; Seth and his group just kept launching products until one felt right — only then did they take funding; Zimbra started business with a sizable round of venture capital, necessitated by the scope of their effort.

The audio of our panel is now available online. It might be a little frustrating during the demoing (which requires seeing the apps work), but the demos were a brief part of the discussion, and the bulk of it really does touch on the issues of creating a product and starting a company. So if you’re in an entrepreneurial mood, I think you’ll appreciate what the panelists have to say.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, sxsw, web 2.0, webapplication

This site is getting so hammered by comment spammers that it’s pissing off my hosting service. Until I have the time to set it up so that comments are a bit more of a challenge, without being unreasonable, I’m going to turn comments off.

I get on a plane bright an early tomorrow and head to Washington, D.C for a couple days.

If you are in the area and interested in joining up, there are open dinner plans tomorrow (Monday) night at Lauriol Plaza. 7pm-on. 1835 18th St., NW.

Stacy and I just completed what must have been the most frustrating road trip we’ve ever shared. At so many points along the way, we were thwarted from our desires:

– We couldn’t get banh mi at Au Petit Cafe because they are closed Wednesdays
– We didn’t visit the Vancouver Museum because the time periods of interest to us were ‘under renovation”
– We couldn’t relax at Joe Bar because they close at 10pm
– We couldn’t do much at Cape Disappointment because it shuts down at 5
– We couldn’t find the general store, nor other things of interest, in Mist, OR
– We couldn’t find Priya, considered the best Indian restaurant in Eugene, OR, and had to assume that they’d gone out of business
– Our visit to Crater Lake was miserable, because it’s fucking snowy and cold up there in April, and you can’t really see anything
– We couldn’t eat at our desired restaurant in Dunsmuir because it’s closed for the season
– We couldn’t get a hot doughnut at Krispy Kreme, even though it was between 5p-11p, which is supposed to be “hot light” time

We also got rained on through much of our drive.

Not that there weren’t delightful elements (introducing Stacy to the wonders of congee, visiting Vanessa and Elliot, great housemade cheese from the Pike Place Market, *good* pancakes at the Original Pancake House in Eugene), but this trip definitely had a black-cloud cast, figuratively and literally.