“The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande
The quick summary would be “checklists keep you from screwing up the easy stuff so you can focus your wit, experience, and creativity on the hard stuff. This was a surprisingly interesting book; especially the case studies where simple checklists have made tremendous enhancements to health, safety, quality, and financial outcomes.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my Voxer Walkie Talkie app appearing in the New and Noteworthy section of the iTunes App Store. The app has been around for 18 months so I guess we’re not new—must be noteworthy!
In case you hadn’t heard me blathering about it on Twitter…the app that I’ve been working on the past two years, Voxer Walkie-Talkie, is the #1 app in the social networking category of the iTunes app store (Facebook is #2). Voxer is also #1 in the Communications category of the Android Market.
It’s nice to be working on a hit again. It’s been a while.
With the America’s Cup World Series and the Volvo Ocean Race going on right now there is a tremendous amount of exciting sailing footage to watch. The ACWS is a series of in-port races designed to build interest in the America’s Cup as a spectator sport. Although the VOR is a race around the globe, there are a series of in-shore races at each way-point. The difference in how these two organizations have approached the television graphics for the races is like night and day.
Let’s check out the Volvo crew’s Live Eye virtual reality presentation:
Wow, virtual haze, and virtual city behind the virtual boats. At least the virtual water is more or less the right shade of virtual blue. This is the same style of graphic display that professional yacht racing has been using since forever. These types of displays evolved because yacht racing typically took place offshore and this was just the only thing you could do to show folks back on shore what was going on. It’s boring as hell, and there is no reason to resort to this sort of thing for an in-shore race that is blanketed with live footage from helicopters and chase boats. This sterile showing of stuff that isn’t the actual race just promotes the idea that the spectators are not really part of what is going on, that the race is not for them. This display doesn’t even give the poor viewer any real information. The teal boat is in front, the black boat is next, and the red after that. How much space is between them? How big is the time difference between them? If you were a fan you could tell that these boats represent Telefonica, PUMA, and Camper—but if you’re new to the sport, or just flipping channels and happen to see it, there’s nothing there to draw you in.
Now, compare that to the work that Stan Honey is doing with his LiveLine system.
LiveLine is way more live than Live Eye. Here we’ve got an incredible augmented reality display on top of live race video from a helicopter. We can see the distance between the leaders, which leg of the race it is, the track each boat has been following. We can see national flag for each team, and the team’s name. We can see the (yellow) lay lines, and the rounding gates. Very importantly, we can see the approach circles around the gates (the rules change slightly inside those circles). We see the (red) course boundaries. It’s phenomenal.
As one boat is overtaking another you can watch the distance counter wind down—100m, 90m, 80m, …—and you get excited wondering if he’ll really pass. You can get all jingoistic watching your country’s flag overtake some other country’s flag. If you’re a racing sailor you have so much info that you can really geek out on watching the fine details of a race the same way a baseball junkie tracks the game stats. More importantly, you see the real boats. You also see spectator boats right there against the coarse boundaries. In a lot of the footage you can see actual human spectators going nuts on shore—a shoreline that is just a few hundred meters away, and not three miles offshore like the last America’s Cup was. Seeing this presents the event as a spectator sport. It makes for interesting TV.
Also, as a software developer myself, I have immense respect for the LiveLine team for the ridiculous amount of 21st century technology they have in their system. That is some seriously hard work. Meanwhile, Live Eye is on par with what video games about boats were doing over a decade ago. (screenshot from Sid Meier’s Pirates!)
