The potential of unencumbered communication between people, real people, was mind blowing. In those days we had “long distance calls” – you had to pay per minute to reach people outside of the arbitrarily placed boundaries (they were intentional, but created as a toll by telcos). This meant you really only called people that weren’t in your city when there was some sense of urgency, or you had business reasons.

Along comes the web, which gave those that cared to learn how, the ability to publish anything we wanted to – for anyone on earth to read. The history of the web is covered well elsewhere so I’ll spare you that rollercoaster. At the time, say 1995, big news media and publishers controlled the narrative, and people were simply one-way consumers – reading magazines, newspapers, and watching TV as the sole sources of information inputs. There were exceptions of course (the BBS, Usenet, FidoNet, Compuserve, AOL, etc.) but most people didn’t know about them.

The sense of wonder and possibility that accompanied this new Information Age has materialized in my world in the form of technology startups. I use the term startup, though it’s not really the best descriptor. It’s more like tests, or more commonly MVPs: I have an idea for a thing, dissect it, build it, then let a few people use it and see what happens. If there’s enough interest, I’ll add a revenue model and test/iterate.

By the way, this is a terrible approach for most founders and will result in a lot of lost sleep and relationships. If you’re looking for the quickest path to MVP, please pick up the Startup Owners Manual and read every page. I do not recommend the “build it and they will come” approach.

I digress. I’ve been reflecting on this ability to make things quickly quite a bit lately. It feels a little like a superpower. I can take something that exists as a simple idea to the computer screen in all of its glory. It may be ugly, but it will work. There’s a term in web development called “full stack” which means front end (browser/client side using HTML/CSS/Javascript etc.) and back end (server side databases/scripting languages, etc.). Today most people are trained (or choose) to specialize in one or the other. There are technical and non-technical founders, single founders in search of co-founders to fill some gap or even help formulate the idea itself.

I’ve been working on a few ideas and will present them here for your scrutiny and feedback. With the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro, one of these ideas has been occupying more time in my brain than it has in a while. It may be the first to materialize… it’s a new take on the web in 3D with no changes required to the web itself. It works with existing websites and infrastructure. More on that soon.

How about you? What’s your superpower?

A license is granted once the applicant, typically a spry and eager teenager, passes a written test and the state sponsored or licensed driving test. Permits are issued under certain circumstances, but require a fully licensed driver to be present at all times while the permitted driver is behind the wheel. There is an early age requirement for both the license and the permit, and both require a very basic understanding of the laws of the road and basic vehicle operation.

Likewise, a license can be revoked by the issuer for many reasons… DUI, medical issues, too many “points” for infractions, etc.

It is a license to drive. There is no right to drive. It’s a privilege, earned by proving your understanding of the law and basic vehicle operation.

I have a simple proposal that would revolutionize the safety of drivers and pedestrians, and would lead to a guaranteed increases of funding for public roads.

Ready for it?

This is an idea so simple, it’s unbelievable.

I’m a software developer by trade with 25 years of experience behind me. One of the items I have to deal with on a regular basis, and something everyone reading this is familiar with is the “Software License Agreement.” License agreements are the little modal boxes that appear when you open software for the first time. Or when boot your new phone for the first time. Your computer, tablet, TV… they’are all bound by license agreements.

My proposal is to tie a similar license agreement to the driver’s license. This license agreement could be updated whenever necessary to incorporate new technologies related to driving, tolling, and public safety. It would require that each licensee have a correct and current method of contact tied to their license (as is already required by law).

Every update to the physical license requires a new agreement. Get a new license? Change your address? Renew your license? Lose it? You must agree to the new terms. This would ensure that every US citizen would have to agree to the terms within the next 5 to 10 years.

Typically it’s incumbent upon the user to check the license agreement for changes periodically, but the grantor also sends update notifications via email, text message, or snail mail. In this case, media would most certainly cover changes. Each state office can issue updates via social media channels, or via a simple newsletter subscription.

Why on earth would I propose such a preposterous scenario? It’s simple. While most people are good honest law abiding citizens, there is an ever growing group of individuals that would follow the law to the T with a little more encouragement. States and municipalities have tried various versions of automating the law – red light cameras, speed traps (vans with speed sensitive cameras and measurement), and more.

If your state sees it fit to implement automated methods to ensure public safety, that could easily be incorporated into the agreement.

For example, all toll roads could become speed monitors. They know when you enter and when you leave each entrance and exit. This is a math problem. They already have the vehicle’s license plate, so tying this back to the licensed vehicle and its owner is simple. Other automated means of speed patrol could be implemented – autonomous drones, sign affixed apparatus, etc. If given a range of tolerance (+10%), this would be highly effective at deterring speeding.

Another item in the agreement is red light cameras, and other automated traffic safety items. Driving through a crosswalk when the pedestrian present notification lights are flashing, school zone infractions, passing on the right, trucks in the left lane on freeways, and the list goes on and on. All of these can be automated, and should be.

Imagine going through a toll booth, then hearing your favorite navigation app tell you that you’ve just earned a point on your license and a $75 bill from the state because your average speed between booths was more than 10% of the stated speed limit. That $75 would be charged directly to your toll bill. It’s simple.

This could be implemented in no time, and with a relatively small budget (that would pay for itself quickly), with a simple state issued Mandatory Driver’s License Agreement.

A state mandated license agreement could be updated when new technologies enter the market. For example, what needs to change when autonomous vehicles enter the retail landscape?

If you oppose this idea, I encourage you to take a step back and think about why. It will always come down to the law. Rules are made to be broken, laws are not. If you speed (like I do, mind you) then you’re knowingly and intentionally breaking the law. Any aversion to automated testing is a personal plea to allow you to break the law. I know for a fact that I’d speed less (I’ve already been far more aware, and try to stay under 10%).

Pedestrian safety is an issue that needs to be addressed, and current methods are falling short. We have the technology to solve this. And we should.

The idea was simple really – a central repository for your digital persona. Create an account with your email address, upload a photo (or photos), and any developer that uses the Gravatar APIs would automatically have access to your data to fill in profile information. It meant you could update and maintain your profile in one place and that data would be updated all over. It’s a one to many internet profile.

The time is now for a multi-dimensional version of this application. Here are a few ideas:

• Open, and decentralized using an IPFS style storage engine
• 3D avatars – as many as the user can create, but only one active at a time
• Support for the major model formats (3ds, max, c4d, maya, blend, obj, fbx)
• All avatars would have a well documented skeletal API for movement controls when used in 3rd party systems
• Tight integration with OpenSVR – the Social VR API
• Character inventory storage and retrieval – think cloud storage for the “bag of holding” with pouches for each application using the APIs.
• Toggles for things like user name display, microphone control, bubbles, and content rating controls
• Enable API based import – Sketchfab -> OpenAvatar with one click.

This concept would allow developers to spend less time building avatar systems, allowing them to focus on the thing that matters most – the experience. Users benefit by having the same avatar everywhere that matters. If you want to play Robo Recall as a fairy princess from wherever… well this makes that possible.

Being able to recognize other players by their avatar across all Social VR experiences would make the experience feel closer to reality. It might seem strange to see a photo realistic avatar in a cartoon world (like Rec Room), but that’s what needs to happen.

What do you think? Leave a comment below?

Here are more stories in the VR category.

The individual titles available are getting more immersive and users are spending hours, hundreds of hours, with HMDs engaged. Game titles like VRChat, Rec Room, and OrbusVR are taking off. Their common theme? They’re Social VR.

Each of the major players in the space have some form of home (or house) as their default location when you dawn the gear. All of them act as launchers for other experiences and applications. Steam VR launches and interacts with the Steam platform, Oculus Home/Dash interact with the Oculus ecosystem, and Microsoft and Sony have their own. Oculus Dash 2 is a step in the right direction, and even has some elements of Ready Player One. But what happens with Vive or Windows Mixed Reality users?

Facebook took a remarkable step last week by opening the once Rift exclusive Facebook Spaces to Vive users. Of course anyone could use it with Revive, but this is official support. It’s a recognition that the combined market is a much larger opportunity. But I digress.

One thing they all have in common is that these core launchers are not social in any way. I can’t invite you to hang out in my Cliff House, then jump into a game of Rec Room together and return the house upon exit. None of them work this way. Why? More importantly, why should they be?

Let’s liberate Social VR and make it open source and cross platform. Not just OS, but dev environment too. Maybe OpenSVR?

What if we could build an open API for Unity, Unreal, and WebXR that remembers the state of a user’s VR experience? As the user exits, this object would collect data about that specific point in time then save a 360 degree “live” image (like Apple’s iOS) of the exit point. It could track play/use over time and dozens of data points that could come in handy.

The 360 degree image captured at the time of exit could wrap the inner sphere of a teleportation portal. We’ve seen a form of this with 360 degree videos in Facebook Spaces. To play the game again, tap the sphere in High Fidelity or your preferred open Social VR platform. To play with friends, have them tap the same sphere, anywhere in the metaverse.

This sounds way harder than it is. This is a layer that gets built into the developer’s tools of choice. Similar things exist for iOS (Game Center) and Android, and Microsoft has the XBOX platform. What I’m proposing is 100% open source.

As we move toward work in VR, shared experiences with friends and colleagues will be transformative to human relationships. This is an important step.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!

The early days of VR were research (funded by the military), big business, health, and science. The latest generation is about intense immersive gaming – sweat, fatigue, adrenaline, and anxiety all present. The experiences are as genuine to your brain as they need to be.

As we move toward the future of VR, it’s important that we recognize its strengths and weaknesses. The immersion is real, the interaction is real, and the relationships are real, too. Affordability is no longer the barrier, with incredibly immersive HMD (Head Mounted Display) experiences starting at $276 and VR ready PCs at around $719 (less if you build your own). If you’re on a budget, Google’s Daydream platform is a good starting point, as is Samsung’s Gear VR platform– each under $100.

So what’s the opportunity? Here’s a fact: I haven’t seen a VR native spreadsheet, presentation software, or a word processor. No calendaring, time tracking, coding environments, email, you get the idea. In fact, I’ve seen very little in the productivity space that isn’t a simple github proof of concept done over a weekend to prove it can be done.

This isn’t to belittle the efforts of pioneers, to the contrary. It’s to point out that many of these were built before Sony sold 2 million PSVR systems, and Microsoft threw their hat into the VR ring with Windows Mixed Reality.

The opportunity is now.

Opportunity 1) games don’t require much in the way of input. In fact, many of today’s use cases don’t require a keyboard at all, and this is a good thing. Getting text into VR is a slow process: a) you learn to touch type, b) use a virtual keyboard with the same level of patience (and time) it took to learn the physical one (sometimes decades), or c) wait until dictation isn’t awkward in a shared physical space.

Opportunity 2) In the same way that the web changed what it meant to compute (“The network is the computer.” John Gage, Sun Microsystems, 1984), the web can change what it means to experience work. All of the major technology companies have web based versions of the basic productivity suites, and they’re all solid implementations. What does it look like to combine these with WebVR, an open, web based graphics library for virtual and augmented reality?

What’s stopping you from building TextEdit or Notepad for VR, using the WebVR A-Frame as the framework? Companies building VR tools for work today are going to be the Apple, Microsoft, and Google of the future. It’s an open, green pasture, and no one is on the field.

What do you think? Are we ready to start thinking about what it means to work in VR? Are you ready for meetings in a virtual shared space? Does VR allow home office workers to feel like a part of the team?

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been scaling way back on commitments for the past 6 to 9 months. From a hyper-reduced role in the Dallas Startup Community, to stepping down at Launch DFW, to fewer interactions with the City of Dallas, and even fewer within my own neighborhood (currently, The Cedars) and our neighboring communities.

I may have been “doing a lot of things” (and you bet I loved them all), but I did none of them with the focus they needed and required. The commitment was there, the excellence was not.

Over the past few months, Heather and I have been working on what’s next (you all know it as Epic Mini Life), and I’ve begun to dig into inboundgeo – deeper than I have in a long time. This is all according to plan, nothing new here. I do two things: inboundgeo and Epic Mini Life.

What I didn’t account for in the the plan, is how many plates I’d let fall, and how quickly their shattered remains would pile up. Instead of weaning myself and correctly setting expectations with myself and the community, I gently opened the door, stepped through – turning around ever so quietly, listened for the click, stepped backwards… and walked away.

This has had several consequences, and not all bad frankly. I’ve chosen to focus on my business above all others. This is new for me, and it’s been enlightening. But I’ve let people down, and that feels shitty.

Here’s where I am today:

There are zero emails in any of my 7 accounts. I’ve moved all of them to tasks in Asana (again), and have filed or deleted the rest. They’re requests for intros, requests for product feedback, advice, inboundgeo feature requests, and all kinds of things.

I will work my butt off to maintain inbox zero from here on out. That means that any requests of me will either be replied to immediately, or they’ll be converted into tasks to be dealt with at a later time. I’m setting aside 1 hour per day to get through as many 5 minute tasks as I can (things I think will take less than 5 minutes, but require more than a quick/terse reply). If it takes longer than 5 minutes, it will be dealt with as a scheduled item.

Here’s a new idea… I’m considering including person that made the request as an invitee in the task in my calendar. Let’s say I think it’ll take a couple of hours to complete. I’d include you as an invitee when I schedule the task. You can decline it (or accept) but at least you’ll know when I plan to work on it. What do you think?

Here’s my request to you:

If I’ve let something fall through the cracks – intros, feedback, phone calls, etc., reach out and remind me: msitarzewski@gmail.com. I’m happy to do it, and I hope this new system will allow me to stay on top of these things moving forward.

As always, thanks for your patience and your confidence.

Be you, and kick ass at it.

This is so weird. It’s abnormal. Maybe even impossible? No, but this lifestyle is in perpetual conflict with my desire to live high above, but directly connected by roots to the 24/7 vibe of the urban core. Walk, bike, use transit for the long haul trips. Everything is now, delivered to my doorstep, or streaming directly to my retina – by way of a fully immersive VR headset. That is equally attainable, in fact. But I digress.

What follows is a hypothetical recipe for achieving an off-the-grid life. To be clear, we have not done this, I’m interested in all of the feedback, however. Because, one day, we will.

1. Land
2. hOMe
3. Solar Power
4. Water
5. Food
6. Cooking

Land

I’m amazed by the surplus of remarkably inexpensive land across the country. These properties range from $10k to $50k, are between 2.5 and 4 acres, and contain the word “mobile” in the text, meaning they’ll likely allow a tiny home.

This spot is golden. It’s 3.8 acres of densely forested land near a lake, and a 15 minute drive from “town,” and it’s a remarkable $17,900. Yes, 3.8 acres for $18k.

The hOMe

The new hotness is the THoW (Tiny House on Wheels) – homes built on trailers with two or more axels – intended to be towed by a vehicle. They’re closer to RVs than a traditional mobile home (or double-wide). There are many differences, the details of which are far beyond the scope of this post.

And “tiny” itself doesn’t imply wheels – “tiny” can be the smallest permanent fabrication with just enough room to kneel and sleep. There are some simply remarkable builds in this style.

There are two primary ways to acquire a tiny home. First is to buy one outright. This can be a preplanned home, or used, and there are many options with each. If you’re going to order one, for the sake of this post, it’ll need to be designed for “off-the-grid” use.

The hOMe model by Tiny House Build is a fantastic floor plan. You can buy on the fly, or buy plans and build it yourself. The model in the video took the owners 4 months to build from scratch. Details: $33,089.72 221sq ft, plus two lofts 128sq ft. The full specs and plans are available here. This is an example of a modification to the hOMe, shown on FYI.

Solar Power

Off the grid means no city/county provided services. Power is the number one concern for many people looking at this lifestyle. There are many ways to reduce power consumption, and keep in mind that stoves in most tiny houses are propane. Add a wood burning stove and you can reduce power needs even more. Sure, $12,105.00 is a little on the high end – others have done it for less.

We won’t have a microwave or any appliances that will use as much energy, so I anticipate that our power requirements will be lower than the above systems can generate.

Water

Cistern tanks are the way to store water. The source of the water could be simple rainwater, a well fed system, or even delivered. Jesse & Alyssa, a couple in the northwest went through several iterations of storing water. Spend some time reading their posts. If someone else has done it, leverage their experience. Their blog is Pure Living for Life. Jesse said that you can expect to spend about $1 per usable gallon. I’d estimate about $1,500 for us.

If you’re capturing rain water or using creek water, you’ll need to filter it before using it for cooking or consumption. I’ve seen the Berkey Countertop Water Filter ($288.50) system in many tiny home builds. There are lots of things to consider with regards to water… but this is one of the tops if you’re not using city water.

Food

We’d have plenty of space, with rich soil to plant trees, veggies, and whatever else will grow. We’d want a greenhouse for year around needs, but the land would be used when available. I’d like a few free roaming chickens for all of the obvious reasons. We have one pescatarian, and no vegans in the family.

While I can’t think of anything else we’d require, bartering with neighbors is an option, and being close to a grocery store will make up the difference.

Cooking

Propane is pervasive in the tiny world. From full size to RV to single burners, the choices are nearly endless. If you have grid access, the sky is actually the limit – microwaves and toaster ovens included. Off grid choices are interesting too. Wood burning stoves provide some cooking capabilities, but think really far outside the box – to solar ovens and fire pit cooking.

What follows is a short story about each piece, then a video showing how this piece fits today. The concepts, taken as a whole, will form the foundation of an idea that could potentially change how we get things done in real life. It’s worth the read, and it’s a doozy. Grab a cup of your favorite whatever.

As always, if you like this content, please share it so others can enjoy it too. You never know who will read these things… they might be the one to take this and actually change the world.

Input: the human voice.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has taken many forms over the years. We know the keyboard and mouse, the stylus, touch, motion, and now of course we have person to person, or social chat. One of the fastest growing segments in tech is voice recognition, and owning the home of your users. This is voice to text to [internet/cloud/action] to text to voice.

Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, Microsoft has Cortana, and Google has, well, “Hey Google.” All of these services empower their owners to ask questions about seemingly anything, to change the TV channel, to order more diapers, or close the garage. They’re all early from a technology standpoint, and have varying degrees of friendliness and usability. But the core is here, and they’ll only get better with time.

All you have to do is talk, in your native language, and magic (or algorithms) happens.

Input: plain old text.

Another interface is text to text. We know these as chatbots, and you interact with them through several input channels: Twitter, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and dozens of others. Companies like Conversable are doing a great job in this space: “I’d like a large cheese pizza delivered to my house. Use my saved payment method.”

While one is initiated by voice, and the other by text, they’re just hairs apart from a technology perspective. Speech to text is nothing new, it’s been a work in progress since the earliest times in computing. Add assisted intelligence to the text output, and now we’re cooking.

Need something? Just type it, and the tech will respond.

Input: human emotion.

While voice and text are great inputs, video is an even better input. Recognizing a person has become so trivial that it can be done with a simple API call. Technology can be sure it’s “you” before you interact with it. Microsoft uses this to automatically log you into XBOX with a Kinect device.

More than detecting who you are, computers can also detect emotion in video. This used to require a room at a university, and was only done as a part of a research project. Today, we can accomplish this with just about any standard web cam, or a front facing camera on a smartphone.

We know it’s you, and how you’re feeling at this precise moment. “How can I help, Michael?”

Output: human voice.

Even the best synthesized voices still sound, well, electronic. Enter a new technology from Adobe called “vocal editing.” This tech was demoed at Adobe MAX 2016, and uses a recorded voice to allow the “photoshopping” of that voice.

It’s early, but this tech exists, and could be the voice interaction component of this idea. This demo uses a recording, just a few seconds long. Imagine what would be possible with dozens of hours of training recordings. The only input required after that is text. Text is the primary output of all of today’s Assisted Intelligence (AI) applications, like Watson for example (IBM Watson, How to build a chatbot in 6 minutes). This the next logical step:

This technology could easily be used in real time to allow “bots” to make calls to humans, and the humans would be none the wiser. They could even use your voice, if you allow it to. Bots can take voice as input (voice to text), and output text which gets sent back in the form of audio (text to voice), using this technology.

Any text input, from any source, with one remarkably consistent voice response. Maybe even your own.

Display: character-persistent, animated avatar.

When I had the original idea, the avatar the user interacted with was a simple CGI character, an obviously rendered character that would remove any interaction distraction. I wanted every touch point with the the avatar to be as simple as possible, so you’d spend all of your time focused on the task, and not distracted by its interface. This may still be the best option, but I see that gap closing quickly.

Here’s Faceshift at GDC 2015 (since acquired by Apple), but others (like Faceware, nagapi) exist in the market. Notice two completely different actors playing the same character.

Disney Research Labs has similar technology already in use.

The movie viewer never sees the actor, only the character. With the voice tech above, and a character representation, we’ve removed two persistence problems. Voice and character. Any one (or thing, including AI) can provide consistent human voice, and anyone (sex, build, race, location, whatever) can power the physical representation.

Every single time you interact with the tech, the avatar looks and sounds the same – no matter who the actor is on the other side of the animation.

Display: the human presence.

We’ve seen remarkable leaps forward in what is an age old (in computer years) tech called motion capture. Meat space actors wear a variety of sensors and gadgets to allow computers to record the motion for later use. This used to appear in only the best of the best games and movies. Just about everything you see in major releases today (from a CGI standpoint) is based on motion capture, if it involves humans.

Traditional motion capture was just a part of the process though. Scenes would be shot on a green screen, then through (sometimes) years of perfection, a final movie would grace theater screens or appear in an epic game release.

At Siggraph 2016, Epic Games (makers of the Unreal Engine) featured a new process that amounts to “just in time acting.” Instead of capturing the actors, then using that motion later in scenes, Epic used a process that rendered results in real-time. It’s mind blowing – using the camera in the game engine to record a motion captured actor-in game.

Display: enhanced human presence.

The problem with CGI and humans is something called the uncanny valley: “a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.”

Explained in Texan: “Well, it might be close, but it ain’t quite right.” It may be getting close enough.

There are several ways humans protect themselves from attack. One of the simplest is recognizing fellow humans. Sometimes they may want to harm us, other times hug us. But either way, we’re really, really good at recognizing deception.

Until now. This piece was created with Lightwave, Sculptris and Krita, and composited with Davinci Resolve Lite – in 2014 (two years ago).

In 2015, a video was released by USC ICT Graphics Laboratory showing how advanced skin rendering techniques can be deceptively good. Another video by Disney’s Research Hub shows a remarkable technology for rendering eyes. And earlier this year, Nvidia released a new demo of Ira.

Display: enhanced facial reenactment method.

An advancement I didn’t expect to see so soon takes standard digital video footage (a newscast or a YouTube video, for example) and allows an actor, using a standard webcam, to transfer expressions to the target actor. It’s a clever technology.

If the technology works as well as it appears to with simple, low resolution sources, imagine what could be done with professional actors creating 48 hours of source video. That could in turn be targeted by digital actors using a combination of the above video technologies. The interface to this technology would be a recorded human actor with transferred facial expressions from a digital actor, all rendered in real time.

Bringing it all together.

Inputs: voice, text, video, and emotion.

Processing: assisted intelligence, APIs: input to voice.

Outputs: text, human voice, and/or photo realistic CGI/animated characters/human.

But wait. There’s one more thing.

This is great for an AI powered personal assistant. Marrying all of this tech together into one simple and cohesive interface would make everything else feel amateur.

But what if we could add an actual person (or 4) to the mix. Real human beings available 24/7 (in shifts) to note your account, or to call your next appointment to let them know you’ve arrived early? What if your assistant could call the local transit agency, or cancel a flight using voice in whatever the local language happens to be?

All of the technologies mentioned above create and intentional gap between the inputs and outputs, allowing any number of “actors” in between. If a task is suitable for a bot to handle, then a bot should handle it, and reply. If a human is required, the user should never know a human stepped in to take control of the interaction. The voice, text, and display will be 100% the same to protect the experience.

Think about it: any language in (from either side), and your specific language and video representation out. If there were a maximum of four people that knew you more intimately than your family, but you knew you’d never, ever have to think about this problem again, would you do it?

In summary, I’ve outlined a highly personalized virtual assistant, with 100% uptime and omnipresence across every device and interface you have (including VR, but let’s save that for another time).

What you won’t know is whether you’re talking to a human, or machine.

If you liked this, please share it. Your friends will dig it too. Thank you!

It seems we all have huge and ever growing to-do lists. We add things left and right, from paying the mortgage to picking up pickles at the grocery store. We get bogged down in the minutiae, often missing the most important thing on the list because something else always takes precedence. Sound familiar?

For many, getting started is the most challenging aspect. Check email, do the Facebook and Twitter. Check out Google Reader (yeah, maybe that last one is just me). But then it comes time for work. You know, work, the things that provide the income necessary to keep doing whatever it is we do. They're all to-dos, yes, but something will always be the most important.

The same holds true for our personal lives. If you exercise, then making sure you get the right amount of time in for the day may be the most important thing you're going to do.

The most important thing is going to vary widely per person, and per day, but the gist is there. There are always important things that we really need to do. It's that one, single most important thing – be it work or play – that when checked provides a sense of accomplishment.

Imagine if, of all of the things you'll do today, you always did the single most important thing on the list. Maybe a challenge – a public challenge would make it more fun. One really important thing per day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It doesn't sound like much, but it could add up!

Here's the proposal. At the beginning of every day (yes, seven days a week) we tweet the single most important to-do on the list for the day. A meeting, an action item, a ride, picking your child up from school, whatever – just tweet it. Add the hash tag #1onmylist – which of course means “number one on my list.” Then, once completed, follow up with a tweet that simply says “Got #1done!”

For example: ” I'll get billing done today. It's way over due. #1onmylist “

Then follow up with ” Got #1done! Billing sent. “

I encourage you to abstract the details: “Have to get the proposal for Whole Foods done by 3PM” becomes “Have to get a proposal done by 3PM.” Likewise, “Manipedi with David and Brad at TechStars” might just be “Manipedi.”

What do you think? Want to see where it goes? What's number one on your list today? Tweet it!

I propose that we organize and promote a global potluck barbeque. Let's pick a day (the same day everywhere, and roughly the same time), and on that day we gather at day long parties and actually get to know one another. No planned pitches, no selling, no fundraising. Let's get to know the people we see in Twitter and Facebook. It's a pretty crazy idea, I know, “socializing.”

The gatherings could be in someone's backyard, or in a park with a grill – wherever you think is appropriate, and family friendly. Each event would need a host or an organizer, and there could be multiple parties in the larger cities or metro areas.

Here are a couple of Saturdays I've picked (from thin air): July 11th 2009 or August 8th 2009. If you have a better day, let's chat, this idea is totally open and I'd love the feedback. I wanted to schedule them far enough in the future that conflicts are less likely.

For Boulder, CO I'm thinking Eben G Fine Park.

It's a big idea that'll take a lot participation, so who's in? Do you want to help organize an event near you? Leave a comment below! Let's get started!

*In Boulder it's pretty easy to hang out with the people. It's a small, charged community, with lots of events and things to do. That said, I'm not sure people are getting to know people outside of their normal social circle. I'd like to see that change, starting with my participation in said events. See you soon!