Technology-wise, I download podcasts and talks from a variety of sources on the Internet, both manually and with a “podcatcher” such as Juice, then burn them as data files to a CD. I bought a CD player for my car that plays MP3 CDs (a Sony CDX-GT300). Each data CD holds about 20 hours of podcasts. Because my CD
player has a front-panel AUX input, I also have the option of plugging my MP3 player into the unit.

Sources

My favorite sources for podcasts are the following:

• IT Conversations
  • Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron Chair (from Pop!Tech)
  • Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice (from Pop!Tech)
  • Neil Gershenfeld on the Fab Lab (from Pop!Tech)
  • Clay Shirky on Ontology is Overrated (from ETech)
  • Jason Fried of 37 Signals on lessons learned building Basecamp (from ETech)
  • Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity (from Accelerating Change)
  • David Brin on our ability to cope with accelerating change (from Accelerating Change)
  • Cory Ondrejka on Second Life (from Accelerating Change)

Several series on IT Conversations have been particularly rewarding, especially the talks from the Pop!Tech Conference, held in Camden, Maine every October; the talks from the O’Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETech); and the Accelerating Change Conference held at Stanford University in November. IT Conversations has archives from the last two or three of each of these. Some high points:

IT Conversations also archives the TechNation NPR radio show featuring interviews with scientists and technologists by Dr. Moira Gunn.

• The TED Conference
  • Al Gore on Global Warming (the first six minutes show that Al could have been a standup comic if he’d wanted a different career)
  • Amy Smith of MIT (a winner of the TED prize) on making charcoal appropriately

Richard Saul Wursky’s Technology, Education, Design Conference, held in Monterey, CA every year, features an amazing lineup of important and influential thinkers and doers every year. This year they started putting the talks online. Each is 18 minutes long, and they cover the gamut from global warming to appropriate technology to architecture. Every one is fascinating. Favorites are:

• Science Friday Podcasts (from NPR)

There are a number of other locations I’ve downloaded talks from, but those have the best overall selection. For other talks, I use Google to find out if thinkers I’m interested in are featured on podcasts, or I
check their blogs or websites. For example, Robert Sutton, the Stanford professor who wrote Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense, gave a great talk at a Stanford event that he links to on his blog.

To find talks by Kathy Sierra, the awesome author of the Creating Passionate Users blog as well as the Head First Java books published by O’Reilly, I searched Google and found this fantastic talk from the SXSW Conference.

I hope you are able to download and listen to some of these amazing, mind-expanding talks. I’d love to hear your feedback about them, and to get your recommendations for good talks and good sites for finding “brain food.”

My product philosophy holds that two critical factors for a product to be successful are a) that it has to work – to do what it’s supposed to do, and b) it has to be engaging – people should look forward to using the product. The “good experience” concept covers both of those factors. Hence, naturally, I want to continue to get information and inspiration about good experience.

There are other aspects to beating your competitors, but these two particular points seem pretty obvious to me. I’ve always been amazed at how many products don’t do well on either score. With my last product, we would go into head-to-head evaluations with our competitors, and our product would work in the eval, and theirs wouldn’t. Competitors failed along a continuum – from not being able to complete an installation in the first place, to not successfully performing the basic functions, its reason for being.

Some products failed later than others, but even if the other product didn’t fail, we almost always won the evaluation anyway. That’s because our product was better, in a key sense – it was more engaging to use. In that particular product space, most products approached the problem in a certain way that was, you might say, the “standard” approach. Our product approached the problem in a different way, one that turned out to be easier for customers both to understand initially, and to work with over time. So we not only won the evaluations because we worked, but because the customers liked us. As Kathy Sierra puts it, we made them feel like they rule!