1X57 – Page 191

1X57 is a Washington DC Tech Titan!

Hot off the presses!

Fresh from the minds of the Washingtonian team and editor Garret Graff!

The 2011 Washington DC Tech Titans:

Quote:

Our tech scene (DC) is the hottest it’s been since the dot-com glory days of the 1990s, with big investment by government in IT, surging green-energy programs, growing biotech research, and start-ups such as LivingSocial. Here are the people who are making this region grow.

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And, our very own Titans!

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From the magazine:

Amy Senger and Steven Mandzik
Founders of the consulting firm 1X57, they’ve become influential in Gov 2.0 circles—and have helped usher the CIA into the age of social media.

Very Wise: A Political Statement, of Sorts

I found this from one of my favorite leaders and her blog the Recovering Fed:

“…I have over the years developed a very small brand as a senior government executive who really believes in social media and the need to reconceptualize the concept of work. And let me tell you…I really believe in the transformative power of what these technologies achieve, which is effective connectivity between people, effective enough to let people self-organize to do important things together…”

“My essential political/philosophical conviction is belief/faith/trust that human society still has a lot of upside potential–so in that respect I call myself progressive. I tire very quickly of individuals who have a kneejerk reaction against any new idea. My bias definitely is to be much more tolerant of individuals who are enthusiastic about the new.”

Sage words that I def agree with.

The Copreneur Competitive Advantage

Recently, with great honor, 1X57 was named to Washingtonian’s 2011 Tech Titans list as an Entrepreneurial Couple. It got me thinking about the growing “copreneur” phenomenon as more women embrace the role of entrepreneur and more people start their own businesses following what Richard Florida describes as the rise of the “creative class.” Entrepreneurial coupling is certainly not new. There have been very successful businesses started by couples – like Cisco’s Len Bosnak and Sandy Lerner, or Rina and Will Stein of Philip Stein. But there seems to be a stigma about mixing business with pleasure or putting all your proverbial eggs in one basket (Wall Street Journal did a good write-up of the perils of running a business with your significant other).

It’s always puzzling when people discover Steve and I are not only business partners but also “romantic partners” (or vice versa). I encounter a mixture of surprise, skepticism, and an element of “Are you crazy?” followed by a “How’s that working out for you?” People seem genuinely shocked when I respond with how much I love it. But I do. And to be honest, I’m always a little taken aback by the dubious responses I receive from strangers.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. It can take its toll on you – physically, emotionally, psychologically (I love The 11 Harsh Realities Of Being An Entrepreneur). Getting a business up and running takes a lot of time and energy. If it fails, if you don’t succeed, you have no one else to blame but yourself. And when you do succeed, you’re the one steering the ship – success only brings bigger waves, stronger winds and less chartered waters.

I would hate to go at it alone. I love that the person I trust and respect and admire the most in the world is the person I get to work with every day – that no matter what challenges we face, we’ve got each others back, for better or for worse. Yes, we have our ugly moments, times when it literally feels like laser death-beams are shooting out of my eyes or Steve is conjuring the power of the robot overlords to have lightning bolts strike me down from the sky whenever we have a disagreement. But we work through it. And to be honest, I’ve always been an advocate of “fishing off the company pier.” As a workaholic, loving what I do, it just makes sense. There are only so many hours in the day. The separation of business life from personal life seems like a very inefficient approach to time management.

I think of other entrepreneurial couples I know in DC, like Leslie Bradshaw and Jesse Thomas of Jess3 or Jen Consalvo and Frank Gruber of TechCocktail, who like Steve and I, genuinely seem to be having fun growing their business, embarking on their entrepreneurial adventures together. I can’t imagine Jess3 without Leslie’s business acumen and sheer ‘fire in the belly,’ or TechCocktail without Jen’s savoir faire and diplomacy. Then I think of friends who are going at it alone and how they genuinely seem to crave companionship and suffer from not having it. I think of the final line in Clay Christensen’s award-winning HBR article: How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”

Love, companionship, family, intimacy – these are the things that make life worth living, at least for me. All the fame and fortune in the world seems utterly worthless if I don’t have someone to share it with.

Steve and I are best friends first, business and sexual partners second. If anything, this anchors and strengthens the latter because at the core is trust, commitment and communication, qualities essential to any business relationship. And we complement each other. There are things that come naturally to Steve that I struggle with and things that I do really well that he doesn’t. Some of the best and most successful companies in recent history involve “Founder Pairs” – Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. So I see our copreneurship not as a liability but a competitive advantage.

I’m curious what others think or have experienced. What are the keys to successful copreneurship? What makes it fail? What are the biggest risks? Is copreneurship more a competitive advantage or a liability?

Leading into the Future: Why the U.S. will look to Japan, not China

On Wednesday night, ~75 futurists gathered for an engaging meet-up at Public Bar in Washington, DC. Patrick Tucker (@TheYear2030), senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine, spoke briefly, as I had invited him to share a little about his experiences while on assignment in Japan during the past six months.

In an email response to Shashi Bellamkonda (who snapped some fun photos of the evening) on why he ventured to Japan, Patrick wrote:

…in searching for a picture of what the United States will look like in 2050, don’t look to China. The story of the emerging superpower is one we’ve already lived. China will industrialize, build factories, grow its middle class, and assert its interests on the international stage. For all the menace that Washington projects onto the government in Beijing, too often we forget that China ’s ascent is the story of America’s rise a century ago. A more accurate picture of our later 21st Century might be found in Japan, a nation grappling with enormous national debt, insufficient natural resources, waning geopolitical influence, and the oldest population in the Industrialized world; 22% of the country is older than 65.

Japan is still the future. But the future is not what it was.

Japan’s aging and shrinking population is a lethal combination for economic growth according to many outside observers. Older populations draw down savings rather than reinvest, and they strain public services and government budgets, a particular worry in Japan where the debt to GDP ratio is above 200%.

Japan, however, is also a world leader in green product design, hardware design, and personal robotics. In the coming decade, Japan will leverage its technology and design strengths in an attempt overcome its economic and demographic challenges. Japan’s success or failure in this effort will be instructive for other developed economies with aging populations.

As someone who follows technology and innovation closely, Japan is exceptionally interesting – for its cultural tradition, discipline and honor, for its love of nature in its reverence for trees and seasons, and for its exuberant development of robots. Now, in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that disabled the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, I’m even more interested in how this country will lead the way in energy innovation (for example, read how one Japanese company is pursuing a plan to harvest solar energy from the moon). And more importantly, how the United States will partner in these endeavors.

You might be a futurist if…

You find the now so yawn…what’ll be hot in a few months from now meh…transporters and nanobots and the singularity can’t get here soon enough.

In all seriousness (not that I was joking in the previous paragraph), I think futurists, and futurism, scare a lot of people. And it’s not because futurism challenges deeply held precepts of traditionalists.

No, I think it’s because people can barely handle their current reality, let alone the idea of ones in the future. Of course you’re going to think Ray Kurzweil is a kook if you cling onto the past or even worse, can’t come to terms with it.

Futurists are not people who live in fear, who aren’t so mired in reality they can’t envision what the future looks like. Futurists are dreamers and even more, they are believers in their own dreams. They are inventors and they are creators and they are problem-solvers.

Wikipedia defines futurists as “scientists and social scientists whose speciality is to attempt to systematically predict the future, whether that of human society in particular or of life on earth in general.”

But I don’t believe futurists are so much predictors of the future as they are drivers of it. Thomas Edison was just as much of a futurist as Martin Luther King. They had an inherent, insatiable need to create change based on an undying discontent with their current surroundings and circumstances. To quote Edison, “Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”

So does future make the man or does man make the future? I think futurists make the future. One is able to predict the future by creating it. So the real question is, what kind of future do you want to create?

PS – Tomorrow (Wed, Apr 20) I predict a large group of people will gather at Public Bar in DC to talk about futurism, the future and Japan: dcfuturists.eventbrite.com

Learning To Use Adobe Photoshop

I’m super excited to start playing with Photoshop but the darn thing is scary. It comes with 14 separate applications!

I barely know how to use one of these:

Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Builder, Catalyst, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Contribute, Bridge, Device, Extensions, Acrobat, Player, Encoder.

At least they are having fun with single word titles. What about names like Killer, Motherload, Gargamel?

Right now I feel a little lost in all of them. I can barely figure out how to do anything. It feels like I have more skills in Microsoft Paint.

The good news is I am optimistic about my skills. I’ve started learning the names of all 14 apps, which only took me a day. I even created the above graphic as a reward (took two hours).

After that I thought it would be fun to create something simple with basic colors..

Step by step, day by day I will keep getting better. I do love creating things and when I can figure out how to do something it is actually a lot of fun!

What I Learned From A Fashion Show…For The Dogs

Ok, I’ll admit it. Of all the charitable causes I could give money to, supporting a philanthropy that involves dogs walking a catwalk first seemed a little silly. There’s poverty and homelessness, domestic violence, educational gaps, hunger problems, all under our noses just here in Washington, DC alone. I haven’t even mentioned hard-hitting catastrophes like the ones that have devastated Japan, Haiti or New Orleans.

But then I had a conversation with @robotchampion that changed my mind. He rescued a dog from a shelter that most likely had been abused or at the very least, neglected. People who meet Jesse fall in love instantly. She’s one of the sweetest, most loving, well-mannered and fiercely dedicated and protective dogs I’ve met. Jesse has been one of Steve’s most trusted and loyal companions for most of his adult life – driving cross-country four times with him, protecting him from stray dogs and of-questionable-intent humans when walking alone in the city at night, guarding the homestead when he’s been away. Not growing up in a “dog house” I was fairly uneducated on canine matters; what I learned from Steve and what I went on to discover further on my own, is that humans and canines evolved over time together. Our four-legged friends are actually descendants of wolves and this transformation from wild animal to domesticated partner proved revolutionary to man. Dogs became our hunting partners, protectors of our settlements and livestocks, and our own personal mobile alert systems.

It seems we owe a lot to man’s best friend. Which is why I wanted to support the Washington Human Society in their annual benefit, the Fashion for Paws Runway Show. On it’s fifth year, this event proved to be, in a word, spectacular. And a lesson to any non-profit and business. If you build something incredible and novel, they will come. Last night, ~1,700 Washingtonians turned out (and donated ~$500,000) for a truly exquisite experience held at the National Building Museum. The catwalk, lit up like a Lewis Carroll wonderland, was MC’d by Entertainment Tonight’s Lawrence Zarian and the always elegant Pamela Sorensen. With sixty local DC models rocking the runway, the true stars were the dogs. It was miraculous how composed each little (and non-so-little) woofer stayed while marching out into a stadium-like setting with techno-beats blaring in surround-sound and photogs flashing away.

Fashion for Paws is an exemplar, a true purple cow. In a world of competing resources, it’s not enough to simply be a good cause or a good product. You must be remarkable – you must give people something remarkable. Fashion for Paws does just that. In a city where the most fashionable color is beige or black, and dogs are viewed as household companions and not Paris Hilton-style portable accessories, F4P blends the sophistication, style and glamour of New York and LA in one star-studded, stand out event – and all for a great cause. So thank you to the Fashion for Paws organizers, drivers, and supporters for a remarkable experience. It was a pleasure to see the runway go to the dogs.

Press Release: Call For Start-Ups, Entrepreneurs, & Inventors

Are you an entrepreneur, inventor, or working for a start-up?

If so, here is an opportunity for you to get in front of 1,000 influential futurists and an online community of over 35,000.

We are pleased to announce the Futurists: BetaLaunch in partnership with the World Future Society, a 45-year old non-profit organization dedicated to advancing ideas of the future.

This launch platform will take place in July at the World Future Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The audience will be an enthusiastic and sophisticated group of customers, investors, forecasters, political figures, early adopters, engineers, and more!

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To participate visit our website: Futurists: BetaLaunch website

Submit your innovation/invention, due by April 15!

We are looking for a wide range of entrepreneurs, inventors, start-ups, artists, educators, manufacturers, etc.

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Official press release from the World Future Society

World Future Society – Futurists: BetaLaunch

Bethesda, Maryland

The nonprofit World Future Society has issued a call for inventions and innovations to showcase at the first annual Futurists: BetaLaunch, this summer in Vancouver. The Futurists: Beta Launch or F:BL will serve as a sort of technology petting zoo where engineers, designers or others can present their inventions to the 1,000 futurists expected to gather for WorldFuture 2011, the Society’s annual conference.

“Recently, the global community of the World Future Society was polled about what futurist ideas they would most like to examine. The results confirmed what we suspected; futurists love ideas, innovation and look to us [The World Future Society] to help them keep on top of coming technological breakthroughs,” says Jennifer Boykin, World Future Society director of development.

WorldFuture 2011

Founded in 1966 as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization in Washington, D.C., the World Future Society has members in more than 80 countries around the world. Individuals and groups from all nations are eligible to join the Society and participate in its programs and activities.

The Society holds a two-day, international conference once a year where participants discuss foresight techniques and global trends that are influencing the future. Previous conference attendees have included future U.S. President Gerald Ford (1974), Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1975), behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner (1984), age-wave expert Ken Dychtwald (2005), U.S. comptroller general David M. Walker (2006) and inventor Ray Kurzweil (2010). Others in attendance typically include business leaders, government officials, scientists, corporate planners, and forecasters from across the globe.

“Because of their passion, conference attendees are key purchasers and influencers for markets serving innovation, inventions, learning, and new technologies of all kinds,” according to Boykin. She hopes that F: BL will allow inventors “to connect in a very personal way with an audience of people who can help you launch your idea.”

Where and When is the Event?

The Futurists: BetaLaunch showcase will be held in conjunction with WorldFuture 2011, the Annual Conference of the World Future Society at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre hotel in Vancouver, Canada on July 8-10, 2011. You can learn more about the conference by visiting www.wfs.org.

F:BL will be physically located in the conference exhibits area. The call for inventions will close on April 15, 2011. The World Future Society will notify all entrants of selection decisions by May 1, 2011.

All inventors selected for the conference will receive a complimentary registration to the conference ($750 value.) Travel costs are the responsibility of each inventor. Learn more about Futurists: BetaLaunch at http://wfsbetalaunch.com/ or contact Jennifer Boykin at jboykin@wfs.org or call 301-656-8274.