A common definition that is given for running that I hear referred to or that is inferred in conversation includes the most basic concepts, a rapid movement on foot, with long strides and both feet momentarily off the ground. When I view running, this is certainly not the definition or feeling that I get. Yes both feet are momentarily off the ground, yes sometimes it is fast, yes it is always by foot, but sometimes running is relatively slow. Sometimes running does not have long strides. The problem with the definition is that it could include scissor kicks while jumping in the air, it could include skipping, or it could include hopping like a kangaroo. What are missing are the specifics about how the legs are moving in relation to the rest of the body and how the rest of the body supports the run. If the definition doesn’t match what I see as running, there must be more to it than this simple definition that is commonly used. There must be more information about where we came up with the concept, how our bodies are built to support the concept, and how we have grown into runners. What exactly is running anyway?

Running is a mix of art and a physical endurance, there are many aspects of running such as how your legs and feet move while you are running, what things you wear when you run, how you feel when you run, how you stretch, and how you prepare your mind and body for a run. All of these are equally important attributes of what we consider running. For some the accumulation of all these things results in the concept of running being negative while for others putting all these things together results in an activity that evokes pure bliss and enjoyment of life. Why are there so many differences of opinion and different interpretations of running? After all isn’t it just a faster form of walking? To understand what running is and what is meant by the words “to run”, we need to understand how it is that we move in the first place and how our bodies are designed in relation to running.

Running was something that we humans grew into; our ancestors had big toes that stuck out for grabbing objects with their feet. They had knees that stuck out to the side so they could squat better. Their shoulder muscles were designed to help them hang on to branches and climb trees. If we look at the qualities that are important for running, humans have evolved beyond our ancestors, putting our big toes in line with the rest of our toes and underneath our knees. The knees themselves have been moved underneath the hip so that when running occurs, the muscles and bones don’t need to be stressed as much. This is only part of the story. Our hips, being smaller to get our legs actually in front of us, are also doing something that not even our four legged friends have, it is getting our whole body on top of the legs so that the legs only have to move the mass on top of them instead of trying to balance and move all the weight next to them. This is in line with our spine supporting an upright posture and the back of our skulls providing more balance than most other animals.

The interesting part is the side effects of these changes in the bone structure. With our bodies designed to be erect while running, our ability to suck in air while we run is also better. Our lungs can work to their fullest. The most interesting side effect of our skeletal changes to me is the Achilles tendon; this is the most interesting because of its usefulness in running. In studies of gait analysis, it has been found that when running this tendon acts like a big rubber band, storing energy and releasing it into the stride with every step. This makes a number of things better for running, the most important being that it reduces the amount of energy required to run. The tendons themselves are not a prevalent feature in African great apes, nor are African great apes good runners. This suggests that during the evolutionary process, in addition to the muscular and skeletal changes discussed earlier, changes to the Achilles tendon also contributes significantly to what we view as running. If we were to imagine what it would be like to not have these changes, the tendons, the muscles, and the skeletal structure, we would come up with a different concept of running. Our gait would be different, our body posture would be different, and the amount of exhaustion that we experienced would be different. Essentially all of the components we include in our concept of running would be different.

Beyond the skeleton changes and the changes to the muscles and tendons as a result of the skeletal changes, there are some interesting aspects of the feet specifically that make what we know as running possible. With so much obvious advancement of the human body, why is it that there remain so many different opinions of what running is and means? Our bodies have evolved into running machines. There is a wealth of modern evidence to support this, look at all of the different types of running and the different distances that we humans go. We have ultra-long distance endurance runners, running the distance of multiple marathons in a single go. We have people who never run or try to run further than a few miles. We have people that hate running entirely and can’t stand the thought of walking very far, let alone running.

We are clearly built in a way that enables us to run. There are many of us who take advantage of this evolutionary difference that we have. There are also many of us who choose not to take advantage of it or get injured or in pain when they try to. Why is it so difficult to understand what running is and if we humans are designed for it or not? Perhaps the more recent, in the last forty years or so, evolution of running as a sport and hobby that requires special cloths, equipment, and styles has some insights into our concept of what running is.

The running industry has developed rapidly in the last forty years to accommodate a perceived need to supplement our natural abilities to run. Companies like Nike, New Balance, Polar, Suunto, Brooks, Asics, etc. have all cropped up to sell runners special shoes, heart rate monitors, pedometers, wicking clothing, specialized socks, and watches. Not to be outmatched – the services in the industry are growing just as rapidly as the products have. Running styles like the POSE Method, the Chi Method, and the Newton Running Method have all been created to ‘teach’ everyone to run correctly. With so many supplements to just the motion of running, the definition of running has an opportunity to be even more unique for each individual. For example, keeping your heart rate at a particular level (now that we can measure it in real time on a run), keeping your pace at a particular intensity (now that we can measure pace in real time on a run), or if there are a particular number of steps per minute (as defined by the running style of choice). The running industry, after evolving in such a short time, has added a lot to our individual definitions of running. Despite all of these variances in definition and supplemental tools we use for running, running comes down to feet hitting the ground and moving the body forward. Understanding this motion and how it has evolved must be more important to the essential definition of running. .

According to research by a group of researchers at Harvard, a natural running gait consists of one that includes a forefoot or mid foot landing. This landing style is one that naturally absorbs the impact resulting in a body that does not have to deal with the impact. Examining the modern running shoes themselves, it is easy to see a large cushioned heel which promotes an aft foot landing. This aft foot landing allows the shoe to do several things, including align the foot throughout the stroke, reduce or remove pronation, and provide a level of comfort on the ground. These changes to the landing are counter-intuitive to how the foot itself is designed. The most basic method for testing this is to take your own shoes off and try jogging around. Even in the dirt and grass, this is not a comfortable feeling. Taking it a step further and looking at what happens when the foot strikes is revealing. On an aft foot strike, the ankle is pointing the entire foot upwards and all of the weight of your body is pressed onto the heel. There is no load of your body distributed to the arch of your foot or any other component of your foot. As the rest of your foot begins to land the arch begins to share in the load of the landing and the ankle changes how it is flexing to allow the leg to move forward of the ankle. This combination of loading the arch and changing the flex in the ankle is called pronation. Finally the ankle changes it’s flex again for liftoff and the calf muscles and Achilles tendon shorten, the arch recoils, and the toes flex. This final movement causes the upward and forward motion of the body. Compare that movement to the fore and mid foot strikes (with our without shoes on), the initial landing is somewhere on the outside of the foot, generally centered on the ball of the foot (however, this varies by person and variances in exact landing are made by individuals for comfort). When the foot lands, the ankle is pointing the foot generally towards the ground and the toes are slightly elevated. The ankle begins to flex the heel towards the ground letting the calf and Achilles tendon absorb the load and energy of the movement. Throughout this process of landing, the arch is participating in the load absorption. As the heel lands, the arch fully flattens and pronation occurs. This is roughly the same point in time that pronation occurred during a heel landing; however, this time the pronation is reversed and occurs from forefoot to aft foot. The final movement is also the same; however, there is a difference here as well, at the beginning of the landing, the Achilles tendon absorbed all that energy during the stretch of the heel towards the ground. During the liftoff that energy is released as the tendon shortens just like a rubber band.

With information like this available it is easy to see why running styles and training have evolved in recent years to ensure the art of running is not lost. The one thing that all of the running styles seem to have in common is a focus on body positioning and foot landings. The art component of running certainly rests here on how fluid the landings are, how enjoyable the foot stroke is, and ultimately how the pain is accommodated for. In the example of running with high tech running shoes developed in the last forty years the solution to handling the pain of running is to add cushioning and foot controls within the shoe. In the example of running without the use of high tech shoes that has been developed and refined in our body during the last hundreds of years the solution to handling the pain of running is to slightly adjust individual foot landings and take a break from running when it gets to be too much.

What is interesting about the definition of running as we know it today is that it is a result of two different types of evolution; the evolution of the body and the evolution of the running industry. The evolution of running, at least the portion of running that seem to result in our body being able to run, stems from our ancestors having a need to run long distances during hunts. Over time, this requirement to run long distances to provide food for the family and tribe acted as a cultural motivator for the body to evolve into a more efficient running machine. The running industry, being that it only cropped up in the last forty years or so has not had as much time to evolve, nor enough time to determine how useful the evolution is to our ability to run. What is known about running is that it is unique to every person. There are some generalizations about the form of running, but just like all art is unique to all individuals the movement of running is as well. For this reason, it is important to examine how our bodies are designed to move and what feels comfortable for us when we are running and then look at the running industry to see if there is anything useful there to enhance our natural abilities. There certainly may be, after all humans weren’t meant to fly, but the flight industry has done wonders for our ability to get up into the air and explore, calculators have done wonders for our ability to compute numbers, and plastics have done wonders for our abilities to advance society.

With all of these indicators that our bodies have evolved to run and our desire to enhance that ability, as evidenced by our continued expansion of a running industry, the question of the benefits is left open. Are there any measurable benefits that are a result of running? There are a few things that are not generally argued. Running is something that nearly anyone can do, running is good for the body (lowers HDL, promotes bone strength, and results in a healthier lifestyle at older ages), and the way a body moves and the tools one uses to cause the body to move can vary drastically when one considers what occurs when one runs. Another less explored area of running benefits is the level of life satisfaction and satisfaction of family life. One would think that running; especially committed runners who run a lot would have a lower quality of family life due to their being out running all the time. That doesn’t seem to be the case; however. It seems that runners who are committed to running are runners that have a higher quality of life. This is in line with what has been stated throughout this paper, running is an art that evolved in our bodies over thousands of years.
Running can’t be placed into a neat definition because it is so unique for everyone yet collaboratively based on the same principles. I would say that the definition of running includes your personal implementation of an ancient act that has evolved over thousands of years, it includes how all of the bones, muscles, and tendons work together to cause your body to endure the movement or not, the personal feeling and emotion that is wrapped up in the run, and today may be enhanced and measured by a number of tools in the industry. Obviously this is much different than the common definition of long strides and both feet momentarily off the ground, but running is more than just long strides with both feet momentarily off the ground.

Thanks for reading!

I recently spoke with Laura Rich from Fast Company about the local startup environment. She is doing a piece on startup ecosystems and has spoken with Fred Wilson, Jeff Bussgang, Brad Feld, Andy Sack, and is making her way around the country to find the things that are special in the growth of startup ecosystems.

We talked about the changing startup environment in Seattle that has grown over the last decade. It was interesting to reflect on the role of Microsoft which has had a major presence in the area as well as our major university in town (UW) and how these have played different roles over time.

Some thoughts that I left with her was that our community is growing and over the last two or three years has really morphed into more of a “startup” place. I use quotes, because in the last decade there have been a huge number of startups that grew up around Microsoft but were only in existence because of the Redmond empire. Most of these kept close to Microsoft and disappeared after a few years of offering a feature the Microsoft missed in one of their offerings.

In Fred’s talk, he attributes the changes in NYC to the people (immigrants, investment focused, creative), the visibility (yes it is New York), and the history of entrepreneurship (again, it is New York). Here in Seattle, I think some of those themes hold true as well. The people coming out of Microsoft, the UW, and Amazon are being accepted with open arms by both the local startups and the investment community just as much as the people coming here for the quality of life and the people who have been here for years doing startups. These are immigrants, business types, and creative types, as well as people who have been trained for years to build profitable products at places like Microsoft. This is different than in the past where transitioning from Microsoft or the UW into a bootstrapped startup was not looked on highly by peers or investors, there was a social norm that restricted the transition of these people. Today, the stigmatism of Microsoft employees being evil is not as great as it used to be. Additionally the number of large tech firms where a young student can be trained in the art and science of profitable software making has grown with firms like Google, Amazon, HTC, T-Mobile, Adobe, RealNetworks, F5, etc all having a large piece of their respective markets and all having a presence here. All of these places are providing a place to learn the tech business, get good with a specific technology, and go build something new.

A major amplifier of this is that now the community is accepting of these people and is happy to talk with and about them. Seattle Tech Startups has been around for a while with it’s unique alcoholics anonymous approach to helping each other is unique to the Seattle ecosystem. Seattle’s friendly atmosphere has extended itself into the tech scene with entrepreneurs always willing to help a fellow entrepreneur because we all know how hard it can be to do. Add to the online support, a number of regular in person networking events like Seattle Lunch 2.0, nPost Events, Open Coffee, GreenDrinks, Hops&Chops, and StartupDrinks the opportunity to meet people to partner with is much better than it was in the past. Add to that the larger events like Seattle 2.0 Awards, Seattle 2.0 StartupDay, StartupWeekend, MindCamp, and all the other various “camps” the accessibility of like-minded people and the accessibility of the best in the industry is much better as is the opportunity to work with those people on a side project.

All of these goings on are now being reported on and talked about by a growing group of local reporters that really like to talk about local tech stuff. The emergence of Techflash, Pomp & Surkanstance, and Seattle 2.0 have given Seattle a much broader platform where we can watch each other and let the world have a peak at us as well.

Of course Fred, Jeff, Andy, and most of the other investment types will talk about how all these things lead to more investments in a particular area. Yes, there are plenty of companies being funded by VCs and Angels, yes this is a good measure of how many companies are growing quickly. However, I disagree that these are the things that really make an ecosystem work. They are contributors but not the only contributor in making a startup ecosystem successful. The community and ability to find smart people to work with is of far greater importance in my opinion. Finding the right person to start a company with or choosing the right third employee are huge tasks for startups and in a sea of talent, finding the right talent can be hard. This is where the community and accessibility show their value and prove to be far more important than how much money you can raise.

Keep in mind….

If you have a crappy team and a lot of money, you can build a lot of crappy products for a long time. If you have a rockstar team and a little bit of money, you can build a small rockstar product in a short amount of time.

NWEN EU – Plugging-in

It was a lot of fun and interesting to learn from the attendees and co-panelists (Nathan Kaiser, Danielle Morrill, and Dave Schappell) what problems they had with networking and how hidden the local community appears when you are an outsider looking in.

The five points that I found most applicable were:

1. Do more favors for people in the community than you get from the community. The quality of favors you get in return will be worth it.
2. Ask for advice, not for assistance.
3. There are always going to be too many places to network and too many events to go to. Network where it is most convenient for you as you.
4. It’s ok to mix personal and business networking, it’s more fun when you are doing business with people you enjoy.
5. Use tools and system to manage who you are networking with, when you are networking, and why. Things like LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, salesforce are all great to help manage all of the connections and conversations. They are all useless if you are not using them to network with the people who will add value to what you are doing.

(6) – bring some breath mints or gum or something – bad breath sucks :)

A few of the follow-up conversations I had were also interesting…

I spoke with an attendee about the power of LinkedIN and how to go about using it to plan a conversation with someone either online or in-person. We used a scenario of a connecting with a Sr. Researcher at a company of interest. For my brief demonstration, I’ll say that I have a startup where I am trying to build a new touch based device that includes components of augmented reality for a medical purpose. For this I would start with a good LinkedIN search such as:

From here, I would expect to get a few folks in the Microsoft Research team locally and perhaps get some success…

With 9 results, I may not have much luck, but there isn’t too far to go to find out if I have a shot at finding the person that I’m looking for or not. To start, I’ll drill into each of these, keeping in mind that 2nd leve connections are easier to get to than 3rd level connections. So I’ll drill into Patrick Baudisch and see what I can find.

It doesn’t appear Patrick keeps his LinkedIN profile up to date which may be the case for researcher types. Business types are usually different and have a lot of information about what they do on their profile. The important thing though, is that Patrick does point us to his personal website. So let’s have a look…

ok, straight off of his website, this guy has done some projects with multi-touch at a nano level and blindsight (by the looks of the picture and name, I get the sense that he has figured out what is behind an object even though we can’t see it (kind of augmented reality). Hmm, sounds like a guy that may be up my alley, definitely worth following up with. Flipping back over to his profile, it’s time to see how easy I can make the introduction and if this guy would be interested in talking to me.

Looking back at the profile, I see that we are both connected to Scott Bright. I happen to be connected to Scott because of MindCamp (hence the need to attend a few good events, do some favors, so that you have the right connections to leverage when you need them).

In this case, I would ask Scott for some advice on how to meet people in the space that I’m looking for. If he doesn’t offer Patrick as a connection, I would ask directly about an introduction in-person or online.

According to the calculations of our friend Jake over at EconomPic, the current average of working hours in the US is the lowest it has ever been! (well the lowest it has ever been since we’ve been keeping track anyway.)

That’s actually kind of amazing if you think about it this means that if you take the US as a group and looked at how many hours we are working, we are working the least amount of hours then we did at any other period in tracked history. Look at Oct. 99 – we were working the most and of course we all know about the internet bubble that was happening at that time. With so much less work

Interestingly a lot of people argue with me about the rate of job loss decreasing is a result of people getting new jobs and not a result of people dropping out of the job hunt or settling for lower quality work. This certainly has some truth to it, my friend Mish has some interesting numbers that he pulled out of the BLS data on this…

Highlights

• 190,000 jobs were lost in total vs. 263,000 jobs last month.
• 62,000 construction jobs were lost vs. 64,000 last month.
• 61,000 manufacturing jobs were lost vs. 51,000 last month.
• 61,000 service providing jobs were lost vs. 147,000 last month.
• 40,000 retail trade jobs were lost vs. 39,000 last month.
• 18,000 professional and business services jobs were added vs. 8,000 lost last month.
• 45,000 education and health services jobs were added vs. 3,000 added last month.
• 37,000 leisure and hospitality jobs were lost vs. 9,000 last month.
• 00,000 government jobs were lost vs. 53,000 last month.

A total of 129,000 goods producing jobs were lost (higher paying jobs). Retail and professional services contributed to to the plus side.

So yes – there was some job growth… we added a lot more retail jobs, professional services jobs, education jobs, and healthcare jobs… In other words – the people who lost their jobs making products are now reporting that they are in a category that does not make products and usually requires less working hours, lower pay, etc. A great example of this is a friend of mine who lost their financial industry job some time ago and began a private professional service job out of their house. They are doing good with it, they have customers and are making money - yet the overall income they are taking in is drastically less and the contribution to the economy as a result is drastically less (their consumption is down, despite having a graduate degree they are not contributing to a company that is producing or investing anything, etc). Based on the overall data, this anecdote is likely true amongst a large number of the people making a similar change.

Mish summarizes this very well with this quote (he has the data to back it up on his site)

The chart shows there are 9.28 million people are working part time but want a full time job. A year ago the number was 6.8 million.

Yes, that is a huge difference - yes that is A LOT OF PEOPLE! Given all this information it is not amazing that the government is adding extensions to the unemployment insurance program. What does that mean for you and I – five simple thoughts?

• If your a trader, trading will be choppy intra-day so follow trends.
• If you are unemployed – try starting your own business (now’s the time to experiment while you have free time)
• If you are employed – you should re-evaluate where and how you are saving your money, what your plan is for staying afloat when/if you are laid off.
• If you are an entrepreneur – get scrappy – regardless of the funding you have, being scrappy and focused is important (did you read Andy Sack’s lessons on Seattle 2.0 today?).
• Talk to your kids about what his going on.

While I do have a lot of my own thoughts, I would be more interested in your thoughts about how to build a network and how to get plugged into a network where you previously have not been active. There are a lot of theories and methods for this sort of thing and of course every network is unique, I’d be interested in hearing your feedback on a couple of basic questions…

• How do you go about networking?
• In-Person, Virtual, or a mix?
• Do you network at events, or one-on-one?
• How do you decide which events to attend?
• How do you ensure you have a solid reliable network?

I’ll share my thoughts post presentation (if you are interested in attending in person let me know)!!

We are starting to see the tails of housing not making the comeback we all were anticipating and consumer confidence eroding (now at the lowest point it’s been in 26yrs). This consumer confidence problem is a big deal, especially when combined with continued declines or stagnation in the job market. The consumer confidence is an attempt to measure what consumers think about the future outlook of their livelihoods. This means that if the general populous thinks the future is dim, they will react accordingly. In other words letting money out of their site will be a difficult thing to do.

Some argue, that keeping the money in savings is ok, considering banks have more in their coughers to lend out to big and small businesses alike. The problem with that theory (in relation to the current situation) is that consumer confidence in banks is eroding and banks are continuing to add more barriers to credit. The financial sector in general is struggling to make ends meet and the list of bank failures growing monthly. Banks need to find ways to make ends meet, the obvious source is the consumer. This is an odd problem all on it’s own though – Banks are taking more of the consumer funds to cover the taxes they borrowed in the first place – yes, we gave banks money through the government, so to pay us back, they are taking more of our money through assessing larger fees for using their services. This results in a lot of money poured down the drain on overhead (on both the government and financial organization sides), it also results in a deadweight loss as consumers choose to not partake in the new banking environment and keep their money out of the system.

So what does all this point to? Additional declines in the economy? A jobless recovery? The recession being over?

Well, I don’t think anyone can safely predict where things are going. There will always be controversy in the actions taken so far and what the correct actions should have been or are to fix the remaining problems. All I can say is that whether you’ve lost your job or 40% of your bank savings or not – Be cautious that the worst is not over and make the right decisions along the way. My favorite picture is of the 1932 timeframe of the stock market, after what looked like the worse decline ever…

There was a great recovery – see it there? Right at the end of 1929 – just before the rest of the fall halfway through 1930?

Worse can happen – plan accordingly

UPDATE – A few more posts related to the topic today – Mish has a great review of David Waggoner’s technical chart of the current correction. Economicpicdata has a great graphic of current the thoughts of the public.

While I was thinking about this I started to examine all this new safety net spending we are putting together and found a nice way to look at where we are at today (before the new spending). I found this federal spending calculator over at Know All Design and a calculator on the CEPR site to convert billions into per/capita spending per/year.

Unfortunately all of the traditional schools of thought overlook the importance of education and as such there are not pools of advocates inside of the think tanks and economic institutions where these policies are made. What I found though seems to lend itself to supporting the need for better thinking in this area, Educationalism?….

We spend 61.3B inside the Department of Agriculture on a group of spending called Food and Nutrition Service. This group of spending includes things like the Food Stamp Program, Child Nutrition Programs, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program (WIC), etc. At first glance, this seems fair – there are people in the US that need assistance getting food of any sort and kids who should be able to eat healthy. The problem is that if we think about why these families are in a situation where they need this assistance, we find a lack of knowledge to be a major source of the problem. People don’t know how to get and keep jobs, they were never trained on how to become motivated, how to stay away from crime and drugs, etc, etc. Clearly if a lack of knowledge is the problem, there should be at least double the amount spent on feeding people spent on educating them to feed themselves. Looking at the entire Department of Education, there is 63.5B outlaid for education. This is only two billion more than we are paying to give free food to those in need. Perhaps the assumption that we as a nation actually pass knowledge on and attempt to raise the level is a misconception.

Examining this issue a little further and thinking about what else the uneducated, unmotivated class of people need, a look at  the Department of Health and Human Services (where the Food and Nutrition Service spending should occur vs. the Department of Agriculture), there is 919B spent on Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid is for pregnant women and children who can’t afford services, in other words if you were not trained at a young age to make a sum of money that could support your medical needs – this service does that for you. I will admit, the Medicaid portion is much less than the group overall, there are only 215B in grants to states for Medicaid. That is still 314% more in medical services for people who could be taught to be smart/motivated enough to pay for the services themselves than we are paying to actually train these people.

Unemployment? Well you guessed it, nearly as much as the Department of Education. 40B to give unemployed people money, yet only 20B more than that to train everyone (employed and unemployed).

Obviously there are some flaws here, all of the traditional safety net items combined (food, health, and basic needs) total 316B. Meanwhile the only spending to ensure the safety net is not needed is 63.5B. Examining this from a per/capita per/yr perspective, we are paying $202.04/yr on Education and $1,005.41 on the Safety Net. This is drastically less then what we spend on defense per/capita per/yr ($2,119.00), but is a major cause for concern. The more money we put into the safety net, the easier it is to obtain those easy to use funds, and the higher the escape velocity becomes for people who have felt the net. This is in steep contrast to the capabilities being built to reach that escape velocity.

It appears we are working to make this problem worse by expanding the safety net and at the same time shrink the education budget. This is the reverse of what is truly needed. This is like taking the gas out of your engine to trade it for booze and telling everyone that walks by, you are trying to stop being an alcoholic but you just can’t drive away from the liquor store and you don’t know why.

For those of you who didn’t attend the event (in-person or live) – you should not make the same mistake next year! Marcelo and team put together a welcoming environment where the focus was on the event, the speakers, and the community. Definitely kudos to him and the team – pulling off this kind of an event is difficult and the team’s ability to execute well definitely shines through! John has a great write-up on the results.

The family and I had a great time. Quentin was embarrassed that people knew who he was. Gabriel was his usual self and was handing out Seattle Lunch 2.0 stickers to everyone. Robin was of course her usual proud supportive self. There were quite a few people there I didn’t know, so it was great to meet new people and chat about their startups. The boys were hilarious, after meeting Jonathan Sposato in the restroom, they were proud that they met the guy who kept winning awards. They kept saying, “oh – we met that guy!”

Luckily, their Dad finally won an award so he could compete with all these cool CEOs who were winning awards and giving talks to the audience. The boys wanted to brag to everyone so it was a great chance to teach some humility and let them know how important awards from the community are. It was also good because the kids got the explanation about how there are so many other great seattle tech groups and events that just being a part of the category is a great thing (all the event organizers deserve an award).

If you haven’t attended a Lunch or Happy Hour – get registered for an upcoming event before the seats are filled!! If you’re unsure of what to expect, check out The Experience of Attending or Hosting a Seattle Lunch 2.0.

There will be a Seattle Lunch 2.0 @ Pelago on May 15^th.

There will also be a Seattle Lunch 2.0 Happy Hour @ Sortuv on May 29^th.

If you can’t attend either of those, Seattle 2.0 Live will be streaming the events (so you can at least attend remotely). There are plenty more in the works – contact me if you want to host/sponsor. If you don’t have the resources to host/sponsor and still want to contribute – make a donation – I am currently sending Seattle Lunch 2.0 stickers to all those that donate.

For those of you who voted for Seattle Lunch 2.0 – Thank you (I literally could not have done it without you)! It truly takes a community and if Seattle Lunch 2.0 wins an award like this, it means that all of you in the community contributed to the events enough to make it happen!

First,  I want to say thanks to Marcelo and the team for putting on the Seattle 2.0 Awards, Seattle definitely needs this kind of event!

Second, I want to thank the community for nominating Seattle Lunch 2.0in the Best Social Event for Startups category. It’s a real honor to be a nominee in this category and I’m glad to share the nomination spot with so many other great events and organizers.

Third, I want to let all of my readers, twitter followers, facebook friends, etc that the family and I will be attending the awards ceremony tonight. I will be tweeting a lot throughout the day regarding the event and especially during the event (this means twitter and facebook status updates). I will be using the hashtag #seattleawardsfor those of you that want to filter out those due to the amount of traffic to your facebook status (fine – I should have less seattleawards updates tomorrow). Although I would assume you all have either a vested interest in the health and vitality of the young Seattle companies being celebrated tonight as our economy truly does depend in large part to the innovative companies, investors, thinkers, service providers, and event holders that make up this community or you are seriously curious to learn if Seattle Lunch 2.0 wins…

Fourth, It is Quentin’s birthday today (11yrs old ), and we are going to spend his birthday as a family cheering on the Seattle Startup community. If you are a founder, CEO, investor, or entrepreneur - please stop by and encourage both of my young sons (Quentin – 11 and Gabriel – 7). They both look up to people who start stuff and well, I know a lot of you don’t think of yourselves as role models. It will be a great way to get an ego booster and help encourage my sons to pursue their dreams.

Fifth, Did I mention how important this kind of event is for Seattle and the economy as a whole? It is kind of our duty to pass along the details of this event to anyone and everyone we know. The goal is to ensure the live streaming attendance is higher than the in-person attendance and the press coverage at a national level is just as high as it is at local level.

On another note – if you didn’t vote for Seattle Lunch 2.0, it is too late to vote but it’s not too late to donate to the running of these events or to attend the Lunch @ Pelago or the Happy Hour @ Sortuv.

Organizations around here do seem to be reducing their costs. My friend Nathan has some great advice on reducing costs of running your business and the importance of cash flow. Other organizations out there (companies, nonprofits, government agencies) are all showing an interest in preserving cash too. Besides the great ideas for reducing operating costs that Nathan has, there are the payroll costs that usually take up a bulk of the costs. Obviously the fastest method to reduce the cost on people was to get rid of the dead weight these organizations were  carrying around for unnessessary projects or simply in an inneffective workforce. These are the numbers that we track on a grand scale. This is also what we hear the most of… “My friend lost their job”. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the agency that tracks these numbers. Their report for Washington State has things like, construction jobs being down 12.4%, Education and Health Services, Other Services, and Government as having an increase in jobs (1.3%, .3%, & 1.2% respectively), and a total of only a 4% drop in the last twelve months…

What do all these rises and drops in wages mean to the value of the goods we are buying and selling? Looking further at the data, the rise in the average hourly wage at a national level is roughly $5 over the last 10 years, that’s $.50/year. With an average hourly wage of $13.27 in January of 1999 and $18.43 in January of 2009. This doesn’t even include the rest of the real cost of hiring employees. Clearly we as employees cost more money these days (even if the output we are making is worth less due to decreased demand). The result? A paycut…. Of course!

The average paycut seems to be 5-10% (reflecting that on the hourly wages, 5% of $18.43, puts us back at the hourly wages of August 2007 – 10% puts back to the hourly wages of March 2006). With these kinds of cuts should we be looking to value our assets at these levels? The stock Market is much lower than the ’06 levels, the current value of the Dow is at 1998 levels. Should we be looking at wages from these levels? I sure hope not, that’s more of a 25% paycut…

So if we aren’t going to lay off a bunch of people, but we need to make our companies operate at the levels of 2006 and 2007, and perhaps even 1998. There needs to be methods for doing so, paycuts, benefit reductions, and furloughs seem to be popular choices. A few that I have heard about recently are summarized below. What about you? Are you an employee or a business owner? Are you part of a cost reduction? If you are an entrepreneur – are you paying yourself less?

Some non-layoff measures I’ve heard of lately (local and not so local):

Paycuts:

EMC Corporation – 5% accross the board for 2009, perhaps re-instated in 2010, then again maybe not. Executive staff took a previous paycut.

Siemens Business Services – Managers & directors took a paycut

Denali Advanced Integration – 5-20% paycut depending on level and margin contribution. Raises and bonuses frozen.

Microsoft – lowering the amount they are paying vendors by 10%, removing cost of living adjustments this year.

401(k) reductions:

EMC Corporation – no 401k matching

Chase (wamu) – no 401k matching

Furloughs:

Siemens Business Services – 5 days mandatory

USBank – US Bank’s furloughs were voluntary.

King County – 10 mandatory days (everyone takes them at the same time), Cost of Living Adjustments still happening (so more base pay, plus a few days off w/o pay)

Planned Parenthood - 5  mandatory days (take them at your convenience)

Add more in the comments or email and I’ll add them to the list…

If you don’t know anything about the feature sets or the products have a look at Eileen’s intervew with Ian Hameroff first.

Now into the reviews and explanations of the features…

• Martin has a list of features
• Oz has the pre-reqs to install Exchange
• Exchange Genie steps through the GUI install screens & the Command line install
• Scott Schnoll has some interesting posts as well, including:

full steps for an install

Video review of DAG

• More Install steps
• Amit reviews

Switches available for setup

Resource Mailbox Properties in EMC

Audit Logging

• Gold Systems takes on the UM Install
• The Three UC Amigos review What is new with Exchange 2010 UM
• Mark has a review of the client access features
• Oliver covers OWA and ECP
• E.J. Dyksen covers Mail Tips
• Adam Glick Demos Exchange 2010 Mobility
• Nathan has details on Configuring Certificates
• Steve Clagg has an Introduction to Attachment Inspection in Transport Rules
• Paul Robichaux has a few interesting posts

Admin features in OWA

Listing of PowerShell Cmdlets for Ex10 beta1

Information Protection and Control

Database Naming

OWA 2010 vs. GMAIL

Exchange 2010 UM supports MP3

• Osterman Research covers Voice as Text
• Alexander discusses the Should you upgrade?
• Anderson covers:

 PowerShell Command Log

Installing Exchange Server 2010 (beta) – Part1

• David reviews the Exchange Management Shell in Exchange 2010
• Chris discusses the Web Services Managed API
• Henrick covers…

Exchange 2010 Management Architecture

Exchange Certificate Wizard

Diagnostic Logging 

Revocable E-mail Addresses

Exchange Management Shell button

Multi-Organization access from one EMC

Cross-Forest Mailbox Moves

Online Mailbox Moves

Using Remote PowerShell for Exchange

Exchange 2007 & 2010 admin tools on one computer

• Ewan has a brief overview of HA in 2010. Henrick goes into the basics of Database Availability Groups . Tim goes deeper into the concepts and architecture behind Database Availability Group along with
• Brett points out a few locations in the MS documentation that are useful
• Oz has details on what is stored where when it comes to Exchange Server 2010 data being stored in AD
• Ilse Van Creikinge covers registering Exchange security extensions

Products that are in the same Wave 14 are being talked about too…

• The SharePoint team talks about SharePoint 2010
• Mitch Hall is talking about Forefront 2010 for Exchange 2010
• John Fontana is talking about OCS 2010
• The MS Presspass has the basic coverage on the wave
• The Outlook team have details on Outlook 2010

Some issue resolution for those of you testing already (check the support forums first)… then have a look at these…

• Aaron Tiensivu covers the error that includes “The WS-Management service cannot process the request”
• Amit Tank covers Exchange Server 2010 Hub Transport Role Installation Failure
• Amit also reviews a long series of known issues and FAQ items
• Oz Casey Dedeal discusses the error “530 5.7.1 Client was not authenticated” in Exchange Server 2010

For those of you looking to learn the features and don’t have access to a lab or spare computers. I suggest you take a look at the Exchange Server 2010 training on the MS Learning site - there is clinic 6900 also. John pointed out some downloadable training from Microsoft.

Of course the most relevant – why upgrade? well because Exchange Server 2003 is on extended support now

I can’t speak for the “Think Tanks” or WTIA events, but the Seattle Lunch 2.0 events are Mingling events and they contain great startup-relevant information.
 
Over the few years that I have been leading/attending these Mingling events I have participated in numerous group discussions about how companies grew their startups. When I say discussion, I mean an active audience participation in discussions about what is most interesting to the group at large. The CEO/Founder contributions to the conversations have ranged from “started in college”, to “spun out of Microsoft or other BigCo”, to “had a bright idea coding one day”, to… well, you tell me what situation a company might be spawned in and we’ve pretty much had those kind of founders talking about it – if not let’s have one.
 
The great thing is that the intention of these events includes mingling and participating in discussions (a little presentation, demo, or Q&A to get things going) and then discussion and a lot of time to Mingle.
 
What do I mean by Mingle you might ask… well at a recent one of these events the Founder gave a demo and talked a little about the company (10min), followed by another 10-20min discussion/Q&A, then there was the hour of talking to the Developers, Marketers, Founders, and everyone else on the team that is actually required to make a startup function. So I guess it’s a little more then Mingling :)  
 
Come by the next Seattle Lunch 2.0 to see what I’m talking about…
 
These are not – here a couple people reflecting on the different about the tipping point for their company. These are – meet the team, founders, business model and ask any question you want.
 
Admittedly, the events are usually a little less formal. Presentation Zen is not required – Demos are fun, panel discussions are fun, heck just having the whole team around to hang out with for an hour or two is fun!! I will also admit that these are not held in nice conference halls or venues – they are usually in trendy facilities – like the offices where these companies spend their time (yes that means co-working spaces, shared offices, lofts in pioneer square – all w/o AC).
 
In addition to CEOs/Founders we’ve had speakers at these Mingling events that include authors, investors, lawyers, developers, architects, and well… we are open to just about anyone who has something relevant and is interesting to talk about. Keep in mind - the hoster of the event has their whole team there so you are never stuck talking to the CEO, when you really want to talk to the guy/gal that wrote the feature!!
 
These events also have the free food/beer model – if the speaker sucks (at least the food & drink were worth the time). I didn’t say corporate catered – I said YUMM!
 
A good analogy is a written letter in comparison with… Twitter. The letter is great, has it’s place, it’s norms, it’s value. Twitter – well it’s great too, but in a different way, for different reasons, and it has a different value. Both can get your point across, both can be valuable, but sometimes you need to choose between writing a letter or tweeting and sometimes you need to choose between reading a letter or reading twitter. The value in your message when you write and the value in your information acquisition when you read will vary. Plus we all know which one is more fun…
 
Of course if you are interested in hosting, sponsoring, donating or want to chat – don’t hesitate to reach out!!

See you at the next event…

• Built-in Archiving
• JBOD support (yes – JBOD)
• The updated OWA interface (details from Paul Robichaux)
• Mail Tips
• Updated Conversation View
• Some UM improvements (details from Technet Edge)
• Remote upgrade of Windows Mobile Clients
• Outlook connections moving from the Mailbox Server to the CAS
• Updated transport rules
• Updated Admin tools (including remote powershell support)

Of course the features that got me the most interested were all around HA, storage, and the database again – I guess it can be hard teaching an old dog new tricks… The database story is continuing down the path that was started with Exchange Server 2007 and now there are no more storage groups, clustered mailbox servers, or support for replicating Public Folders with the improved database replication technology. Yes that means Public Folders still exist (I’ll talk more about that later though)…

There are lots of things to talk about and I will post some additional information about the features soon as well as a better analysis about what it means to you. In the meantime feel free to go download the Exchange Server 2010 beta, read through Scott’s installation instructions, check out Joel’s features posts and forums, read through the press releases including Mary Jo’s announcement. Of course Microsoft is announcing details on their Exchange Team Blog as well…

This includes the announcement of the next version of a number of products including:

• Exchange Server 2010 (previously e14)
• Office 2010 (previously office14)
• SharePoint 2010 (…14)
• Visio 2010 (…14)
• Project 2010 (…14)

Well you get the picture, the “Wave 14″ has been un-officially announced… I’ve heard rumors that tomorrow there will be details on Microsoft’s website and that the final pre-release announcements were happening today (press briefings, technical briefings, etc). There isn’t anything on the Press Release site yet…

…..so the rest of us bloggers, twitter’ers, analysts, and journalists will do our best to hold our breath until tomorrow when we can talk about the details.

Looks like they are using facebook, youtube, linkedin, and a number of blogs to promote their virtual datacenter launch today. Best of luck!!

I think I am a great helpdesk support tech, but I would really like to make a change and move up the ladder to become an entry level email admin, what should I do?

Wow!! The first step here is to recognize where you want to go – and this tech had it nailed!! If you are in this position – this first step is a biggie!

After further discussion I found that this person already had identified why they wanted to go into email administration, why they felt they were competent enough, and  what they wanted this to lead to.

The technician felt that email was looked at in the company as high priority application (despite it not being a core business application) and this person wanted the corporate visibility and close customer interaction that this would give them. Further, the technician realized that there is more training freely available for things like email administration then more highly customized applications so they felt they had a better shot at growing their skill sets.

The technician had been fielding outlook related tickets for some time and had begin to read more support articles on the web. Having already achieved a computer related associates degree and working on a MIS degree, the tech felt that they could comprehend things beyond the basic outlook issues.

The end goal for this tech was far beyond email administration though. The tech was looking to get into enterprise architecture (which is drastically different then basic email administration) – but the tech was thinking that with the support calls they were taking interacting with groups all over the company, it was easy to assume that an email admin would gain insight into these other areas.

Impressed as I was at the ambition, I was skeptical of the question…. I had never been approached in this way before for such candid advice. Happy to be in a position to give the advice though, I thought carefully and started with the basic response about how to learn the technology. I then setup some follow-up time to make sure that this person was going to be successful in their long term goals. I wanted to post the advice I gave here for others to use. First the basics of learning the technology, I’ll post on the other stuff after I actually deliver the advice!

The first bit of advice was simple – go get a book, a VM, and some time!!

Starting to read about and play with these things is always the first step. Understanding the tools and the concepts behind using them begins to even the playing field when approaching a new technology. Think about when you learned to drive – the first thing you did was to get a book and take a class about driving (or maybe your parent took you into the car and gave you some one on one instruction). The first step here was understanding what the tools were (guages, pedals, gear shifter, etc). The second step was to take a car for a spin!! Yeah it was thrilling to get behind the wheel – a danger to society - but it was in a safe environment with people watching over you or at least controls in place to prevent a disaster. Step three? Well you practiced!! You practiced driving, you re-read the manuals, and you asked questions of your parent or instructor about how to actually drive and what to do in different situations (4 way stop, 5 way stop, etc).

Learning a new server product is not a lot different – and should be approached in a similar fashion. If you jumped behind the wheel of a production email system today you would be a threat to society – if you jumped behind the wheel (or administration tools) of a virtual test environment – like a controlled driving practice – you would be less of a threat and more likely to learn something. Add to this some knowledge about what the tools are called (what are the guages to look at in the email system? What pedals make email go slower and faster? How do passengers get in and out and do they need to buckle up or can you buckle up for them?) There are loads of questions that the books will give you instant insight to. This is why starting with a book or a class from no knowledge is critical. This is also why starting in a test environment is critical. Applying that basic knowledge from the books is easy to do incorrectly (yes – push the gas pedal but not THAT hard). 

With a healthy dose of book/class knowledge and some real time investigating the different components of the email application, such as:

• How does email come in and out of the system
• How do users access the email from their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices
• How are spam and virus messages captured
• How are mailboxes added/removed from the system
• How are resource/shared mailboxes and distribution groups handled
• How are size limits, email addresses, etc configured

A savvy technician would be ready to spend some time with a production system working on basic tasks with confidence. This confidence is the key, a team of email administrators and architects would rightly be weary of letting just anyone touch the system, but being able to demonstrate an understanding of these basic components – a tech could easily convince a more senior administrator that they are worthy of an opportunity to learn more.

Obviously there are more things this tech is interested in learning from me, and we are planning to chat again late next week – I’ll post again after we chat….

Well, luckily I have some great customers who want Microsoft to pay us to do work for them and they assigned some of these vouchers to me. This is wonderful and I was excited to go claim my vouchers. The problem is that when I logged into the website to claim my vouchers, I found a slight problem with my Windows 7 operating system….

Apparently, Microsoft is willing to pay us to deploy their server software for them… but they don’t want you to be using any of their more modern desktop operating systems to do it!! No Vista or Windows 7!!

The Pacific Northwest UC Doers group is still going strong!! Fourth Quarter in a row and we are going to move to the Microsoft Campus for a little while. We have had the last few over at the gracious McKinstry offices (Thanks you so much, we hope to return to your offices soon!!).

This meeting will be held on the heals of the INTERACT 2009 conference so there will be loads of great people to meet and things to talk about. More info to come soon!

If you have something to discuss, have a presentation you’d like to give, or have things you’d like to see on this quarter or a future quarter’s agenda – drop me a note and let me know! I could talk all day, but I’m sure the rest of you have more interesting things to talk about!

Please rsvp via email to info@ucdoers.org or on Upcoming

ok, now time to grab the kids and head to Oahu – see you all in a week :)

blah, blah, blah

My mom is on twitter, my wife is on twitter, my company is on twitter, mostly everyone I know is on twitter. This is all good for twitter, it makes twitter useful. In fact, it has inspired twitter to go look at selling, make some improvements, and look at making money again. Have a look at Read Write Web’s latest post regarding the proliferation of twitter. This thing is definitely going mainstream (hint: if you are mainstream – go create an account)!!

A couple years ago, we were at the same cross roads with blogs and blogging. We may be a little earlier in the cycle with twitter, but I would also pose that our culture is more accepting of these tools, so it’s still the right time to make the prediction. When we were at this cross roads last time, I wrote a nice little prediction blog post. Dated December 18th, 2006 – My 2007 Prediction: Blogs Will Be Replaced garnered a bunch of people telling me I was wrong, telling me that blogs were growing in proliferation and would be the ultimate supremacy for brand management, community interaction, etc. Yes – blogs didn’t disapear. Yes – blogs are great community interaction tools. Yes – Dave Winer is still blogging (despite his promise). Yes – the concept of blogging is great for news reporting, signaling, and information disimenation….

But Blogs were replaced – they were replaced by twitter and to some degree facebook. As marketing departments took over blogs and corporate employees (such as Microsoft PMs) began getting blog posts added to their annual and quarterly goals, the early adopters, the people who made blogging popular, the crowd that tested, evangelized, and vetted the technology moved on. Sure the bloggers still blog a bit (I still blog at this blog) – but along with everyone else (including Dave Winer), I spend a lot more time on twitter – twitter has replaced my excitement for blogging the same as it has for most bloggers who started earlier in this decade with the new cool thing called blogging.

So the question is – what will replacae twitter? Like my earlier blog post about blogging being replaced, I don’t know the answer. I do know that an opportunity exists for a few entrepreneurs. There is the space of helping people get onto twitter (some entrepreneurial consultants have started this already – but there is room for more). There is also the space of creating the next thing for all of us early adopters of social/community interactive/writing/commenting tools to use.

We need to go somewhere – our current tool has been taken over by the mainstream and thus will be replaced.