North Highland Partners

Peter Drucker said it best. Every business starts with a customer.

Earlier this year I helped a customer build a few apps. Apps to me are the next wave of widgets. I’m pretty excited about the prospects of the iPhone platform, Flash 10, and cloud computing. Apps are seemingly everywhere, on the phone, the TV, my car’s dashboard, blogs, Twitter.

The customer’s CFO emailed me. “Where do I write the check?” I quickly incorporated, naming the company after the street where we built our first house: North Highland Partners. Today I put a placeholder at our domain northhighlandpartners.com.

In the last tech wave, we’d build the Powerpoint, craft a Web 2.0 slik sight naim, look for investors, attend conferences, send out fliers, get a logo, design t-shirts. We’d buy traffic, hook up AdWords and more. We hoped to be the next Four Square, Twitter, or Facebook.

In this economy Drucker rules. Start with what you do best, get a customer to pay for real value. Deliver quality. Cash the check. Repeat. Referrals will build when you deliver. Thirty days in, we crossed six figures in qualified opportunities. Last week we crossed seven. I was stunned.

The App wave is growing. Fast. Now, back to coding. We’ve got this really cool iPhone app for a movie that… well.. can’t say yet. Its under NDA.

Recovery.gov Heat Map

Over the summer I worked on several Flash Apps to help track and visualize $800B in recovery spending by the US Government. My favorite is the app on the home page. This little guy has over 50 sprites, each for a state, hooked up to an XML feed… right from the data vaults of the US Government. We apply a bit of statistics to determine the mean, standard deviation, and T values for each state, put them into 5 buckets, choose an appropriate color, and voila. Working with TMP Government, Axispoint, and others was a pleasure. The team crammed months of work into weeks, toiling on weekends and nights. It felt just like a startup but within the aura of the US Government.

The site went live today at Recovery.gov.

Mike Onghai wrote a version of Mario Brothers in Flash, and now its the top widget on WidgetBox with nearly 1 million installations. Impressive. I stumbled across it today while looking for Wordpress plugins. Thanks, Mike, for brightening my morning!

PS. Click on “1 player game” to start. Use the arrow keys to move around.

Back in the early 90’s, IBM used the Sporting Events team to try all kinds of new fangled ideas. I was lucky to be part of that team, working from within IBM Research with a ragtag group of engineers and product designers who were fascinated with the Web and its potential.

IBM’s at it again. This time, in Wimbledon, the guys at Hursley have created a mobile version of augmented reality. Not surprising that they chose the Google phone over the iPhone — many of the leading executives at IBM in those days now work at Google. I like what I see. Nice job, guys! Its good to see they’re still pushing the edge, even in this economic climate.

AR is the way out of the Virtual Reality quagmire. Helments, gloves, wires coming out of your shirts… that won’t hit mainstream. Have a dash of AR with your flash webcam? How about annotations on your camera as you pan around a GPS location? Perfect.

Jesse Freeman, a good friend of mine, is speaking on AR at the upcoming Adobe Max conference. Now, all I have to do is find an enterprising customer who wants to do AR work… that’d be fun.

The other day I was fascinated by the volume of pictures uploaded to twitpic.  They appear to be on a similar trajectory to Photobucket back in the early days of MySpace.  I bet twitpic rides Twitter to quite a handsome sale!  I also came across song.ly, a relatively new service for tweeting music.  For fun, I mashed the two feeds up.  The result is a surreal experience, watching people tweet pictures while listening to the music from others, set against a backdrop of music visualization.