Mike Maney

Category: Uncategorized

  • Bad ideas are the good ideas

  • It’s all living

  • Nobody is dumber because we got smarter

    There’s something profoundly important happening in the world of education. I’m sensing an increasingly stronger undercurrent of individuals and companies working to infuse computing into mainstream curriculums. Some, like the Code Red Education, are trying to work with the system; others are bypassing it altogether.

    Listen to the NPR story about Code Red Education
    [thb_audio src=”http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kwmu/audio/2013/12/codered.mp3″%5D

    Both approaches are necessary to ensure that the advances society has made in technology continue…to ensure that future generations are encouraged to explore the boundaries of possibility.

    ‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next. — Sam Seaborn via the great Aaron Sorkin

    [thb_video url=”http://youtu.be/6XvmhE1J9PY”%5D

  • Me on the direction of MoMoMa

  • A Future of wires, rotors and data

    While everyone was busy installing derivative messaging apps on their phones, some companies were busy messing around with wires and rotor blades. And by messing around, I mean doing some really interesting things.

    Amazon recently teased its drone delivery strategy and, as reported by VentureBeat, Google has been quietly acquiring its own robotic army.

    What I want to see is a live TV news shot of the first Amazon octocopter drone taking off on the first ever delivery. It passes over a Google car … which transforms into a bipedal robot and knocks the drone out of the sky. Your move, Bezos! – Ray Pawulich via Facebook

    Google and Amazon are just two of the big names in this next wave of technological innovation. Others, such as OpenROV, OnTheGo and Orbotix are also building pieces of this combined computing and manufacturing future that began with the dawn of the industrial age.

  • Mentally Unplug

  • Rockets and the Mystery of Science

    Sure, one could say ManeyDigital is located way out in the sticks. But one would be wrong.

    Especially when there’s an experimental rocket engine startup right in our backyard (the same backyard, mind you, that is home to the centrifuge every Apollo astronaut trained in…and my oldest daughter summer camped at).

    Since man landed on the moon nearly half a century ago, minimal advances in space-propulsion technology have limited the development of modern space applications. That is about to change. The Cannae Drive is a revolutionary space drive that breaks the stalemate between current technology and our imaginations.

    Oh yeah. The rocket engine (experimental thruster) company’s head of media? Some local guy named Joel Hodgson, MST3K (must be some newfangled doctorate title).

  • MapMy(Beer)Run

    So here’s the deal: Last year, Matt Helmke and I undertook an epic multi-state beer run from Philadelphia to Portland to attend Monktoberfest. Along the way, we made like Zane Lamprey and Pleepleus by stopping at a number of craft breweries. At each stop, we interviewed the head brewer and put a case or two of their tasty beer into the back of my Tahoe. We arrived in Portland with close to 13 cases of Dogfish Head, River Horse, Old Burnside and Harpoon to share with attendees (on top of all of the ridiculously crazy good beer provided by Steve and the Redmonk crew).

    This year, we’re making the same Philadelphia-to-Portland run…with a twist.

    Come to find out, there’s a site that let’s you plug in your origin and destination and it spits out a map showing the breweries along your route. Which got me thinking: Why not let the Monktoberfest participants decide which breweries to visit on our annual pilgrimage?

    So, take a look at the map. Study it. Then tweet out your top five choices (copying me @the_spinmd). Voting closes at the end of happy hour (ET) on Friday, 9/13. I’ll then tally the responses, gas up the truck and make like The Bandit.

  • Because on Fridays We Inspire

    For the past year or so, I’ve used Fridays as an opportunity to post inspirational, feel good stories to Facebook. It was my way of offsetting some of the more negative posts that a lot of us tend to inundate our feeds with throughout the week. I am as, if not more, guilty in this…though I like to think of mine as discussion starters :)The title of the posts grew out of a line from the movie “Dave.” For those of you not familiar, it’s a flick about an actor (Kevin Kline…who I met on the set of Saturday Night Live years ago…tall man) who impersonates a corrupt president who had a stroke. Dave (Kline’s character) has a day job as a temp agency owner who believes that anyone who wants to work should be able to work.

     

    Dave: If you’ve ever seen the look on somebody’s face the day they finally get a job, I’ve had some experience with this, they look like they could fly. And its not about the paycheck, it’s about respect, it’s about looking in the mirror and knowing that you’ve done something valuable with your day. And if one person could start to feel this way, and then another person, and then another person, soon all these other problems may not seem so impossible. You don’t really know how much you can do until you, stand up and decide to try.

    For some reason, that quote got stuck in my head (along with a ton of other useless information that serves no apparent purpose). But this one did end up serving a purpose. It makes me want to be a better person. It makes me want to highlight people who go above and beyond what is expected of them in today’s society. And I hope it makes others want to do the same thing.That’s what inspired “Because On Fridays We Inspire.” Until now, it’s been a single, weekly post by one person. But I think it could be bigger.

     

    We can find meaning and reward by serving some higher purpose than ourselves, a shining purpose, the illumination of a Thousand Points of Light…We all have something to give. – President George H. W. Bush, 1989 Inaugural Address

    So, here’s what I’d like to do — and it involves each of you: Every Friday, use your first Facebook status update to highlight a story of inspiration you’ve heard or read about. Headline it like I do with an all-caps BECAUSE ON FRIDAYS WE INSPIRE. Encourage your Facebook friends to do the same (or, at the very least, share your first Friday post).President Bush pushed for a thousand points of light. I think we can highlight millions of them.

    (Image via Creative Commons. photosteve 101)

  • APIdays San Francisco

    Last night, I moderated a panel on the current state and future of the API market at APIdays San Francisco. It was the first time APIdays had come to the States, originating in Paris where the biggest event in its series of multi-city conferences is hosted. There’s a great round-up of photos and tweets here.

    Our panel included TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter, Alex Williams; former ProgrammableWeb blogger and current head of SendGrid’s developer communications, Adam Duvander; and two top venture capitalists in this space: True Ventures’ Adam D’Augelli and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil.

    It was a lively discussion with great debate among the panelists. One topic I’m seeing a lot of the API discussion coming back to is infrastructure. I saw it at Gluecon in May, too. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while and one of the reasons I created maney:digital (well, that and the fact that the girls really love a guy with his own influencer consultancy). The sexy part of tech right now is the unsexy stuff. The tech world is no longer dominated by glossy apps. People and startups (the smart ones) know there’s real work to be done in shoring up the stuff that makes all the other stuff work. It’s not dissimilar to the rebuilding the American transportation infrastructure is going through (or should be going through). And among all of the digital ditch digging is an emergent class of startups banking not on the fixing, but on innovating among and on top of that new API-centric plumbing.

    Sex may sell, but unsexy makes the sale possible.

    (Image shot by @SOASoftwareInc)