My wife and I are on a quest to learn how to take insanely great pictures.  We are just starting this journey and I invite you to share it with us if photography is a passion of yours.  The picture above is one of our first attempts at taking the kinds of photos that have a "wow" factor that transcends a regular photo. The photo was taken by my wife; that's my friend Keoni on the left and me on the right.

My first step was to learn about cameras and settle on the right one for me.  After doing a lot of research, I chose the Panasonic Lumix GX1.  I explain below why I bought this camera and what I think of it, and I'll be posting more in the community section as I learn more about how to take world-class photos.

We've been using the "lock & unlock your door with an app on your phone" solution from Lockitron for two years now.  In fact, here's a blog I wrote in 2010 with a video showing how it works.  As early adopters, Paul, one of the Lockitron founders, was great about coming by our office to fix the early version of Lockitron whenever it had trouble.  We were happy users of Lockitron version 1.0.

And that's all I heard about Lockitron for two years.  But it turns out Paul, Cameron & team have been super busy.  Today they launched a new version of Lockitron in a really smart way.  It's so impressive that I'm going to spend a few minutes dissecting it, because we can all learn from what they've done.   I'd also like to invite anyone from Lockitron to give more detail on my observations in the comments section below.

The first and most obvious thing they did was use a Kickstarter-type approach to their launch.  When you visit www.Lockitron.com you see what I've taken a screenshot of above.  (I'd be curious to know if they're using a while-labeled Kickstarter-type service, or more likely, just taking the best from Kickstarter's approach and doing it in-house).

As I've outlined in the screenshot, they set a goal which (purposefully or not) is now massively oversubscribed.  It makes you feel like you have to get in on the action.  

I try not to get too political on this blog.  But politics is something I'm deeply conflicted about.  As a business owner, I want the government to stay out of my way.  But as the son of an immigrant, I value inclusive domestic policies.  I don't feel like either party represents me well.

As I've written about before, there are only a few things I know to be true.  And nothing in politics is among them.  But there are definitely some things I think are true about politics today which really bug me:

1) Politicians seem to think they need to know the answers to everything.  They're dealing with some of the most complex issues on the planet.  It's OK to say "I don't know."  It's OK to lean on experts for answers to inform decisions.  It's not a sign of weakness.  I wish more politicians would be honest about that.

2) Politicians rarely talk about the cost of a decision.  Every action incurs a cost.  I often hear promises, but I hardly ever hear about the costs that will be incurred to execute on those promises.  I wish, when a special interest group asked for something from a politician, s/he would respond with "what would you suggest be cut to provide for that?"  And then let whatever group is affected by that proposed cut have a say in the matter.  There's no framework today to have discussions like that.  

3) I wish politics were a part-time job for people who had other day jobs.  It used to be that way.  Politics should be an amateur sport, not a professional one.

Matt Wise is a co-founder of Cosemble, a hot new social ticketing engine that's been getting some great buzz.

In the video above, I caught up with him in the kitchen of SOMAcentral, where we both work, as he was telling me about the magical "moment" when strangers started using Cosemble on their own -- people that he didn't have to ask to use the platform.

It's a feeling like no other that any successful entrepreneur can tell you about:  The feeling of creating value.  Of having made something, from nothing, and the joy of watching strangers use the product or service that was once just an idea in your head.

As Matt describes it, when the first event was created on Cosemble that wasn't from them prodding friends to try it, he and his co-founder Andy just stared at the screen in disbelief that the ticketing platform was actually working.

There's a great BusinessInsider article about how Facebook has recently begun focusing heavily on retargeted ads.  The crux of the story is this:  The holy grail in advertising is knowing a user's "intent," because if you know what they intend to do, you can influence their behavior through advertising.  Facebook has been working for years to discern "intent" via a complex formula that creates a social graph for each user, with big data mining algorithms that seek to divine what a user will be interested in based on that graph, so ads can be targeted in real-time to those users.  

And instead, what's proving best at monetizing off "intent" is good, old-fashioned ad retargeting, which Facebook has recently started doing.

What struck me is that for the first time in years, a Facebook ad recently caught my eye.  And it was a retargeted ad.  

As my co-founder Isaac recently pointed out, "Even Apple has its failures" and one of those is Ping, the music social network Apple is pulling as of September 30th.  (If you haven't heard of, or never used, Ping, that's probably part of the reason why).

Apple is a tremendous company that I respect greatly.  It's a good lesson that even the most valuable company in the world can't do everything well.  There's something magical about maniacal focus.

Apple's new iPhone 5 looks stunning.  But the most significant thing about it isn't the new form factor, or the sweet Panorama picture taking capabilities, or the turn-by-turn maps functionality, or any of the new jazzy features.

The most significant thing about the iPhone is its fast LTE speed, which is on what by all measures looks to be an exponential curve.

The new iPhone5 can reach speeds of 100mpbs.  That's probably about 10x to 100x as fast as your home cable or DSL connection.  100x, today.  And who knows how fast the next iPhone will be. And what does this speed mean?

It means that the iPhone -- and all smartphones -- are becoming the brains behind your digital persona.  As a human being, you're analog.  The phone is digital.  It's your gateway to the digital world.  It's you, digitally, in your pocket.

This massive speed increase means that your phone becomes the brains of everything you interface with.  Many media companies call mobile the "2nd screen," meaning it's a secondary device after the TV.  That's wrong.  Mobile isn't a screen at all.  It's going to be the way you choose what content to watch, on any screen.  The mobile phone replaces the cable box on top of your TV. Just look at AirPlay -- a way to send whatever you want to watch on your phone to a connected device, like a TV. Now imagine AirPlay-type capabilities on any surface, with the phone as the conductor of the symphony you call life.

I've moderated and participated on a bunch of panels where the topic was something like "HTML5 vs. Native apps, which will win?"  And I've always said that native apps aren't going away, and my co-founder Sean has often pointed out that HTML5 won't be replacing complied apps so long as mobile hardware is changing drastically every 6 months (HTML is a trailing standard that can't keep up with innovation on the hardware side).  

But here's the real smoking gun:

The Facebook engineering team, in a blog post, writes, "we realized that when it comes to platforms like iOS, people expect a fast, reliable experience and our iOS app [that was heaving leveraging HTML5] was falling short."

This is really significant.  Facebook has a lot of incredibly good reasons not to rebuild its app natively.  Facebook doesn't want to be beholden to Apple for its distribution channel and access to its users.  Facebook doesn't want to have to create and maintain completely different and incompatible codebases for various distribution channels.  Facebook arguably has the very best web engineers on the planet.  And yet they've moved away from a heavily dependent HTML5 strategy in mobile.

So for anyone saying they're going to completely move to HTML5 and stop (or not start) native app development, I say that approach will only work if:

My startup, Socialize, is a part of a great media accelerator sponsored by Turner Broadcasting called MediaCamp.

Turner has created MediaCamp specifically because it believes that it needs to be proactive in thinking about what disruptive technologies could affect its legacy line of businesses, and how to take advantage of them vs. having them disrupt its business.  It's definitely forward thinking of Turner to dedicate the resources necessary to fund an accelerator program, especially when its parent company, TimeWarner, made $29 billion in revenue and almost $3 billion in net income last year.

In fact, media companies face the classic Innovator's Dilemma: It's hard (impossible?) to dedicate meaningful resources and focus to technologies that aren't generating billions of dollars in revenue and income when the current business is a cash cow.  Obviously, startups don't have this problem.

We've been having a spirited debate about the Innovator's Dilemma at Media Camp, and how Turner has been addressing it.  But here's the thing I can't quite rationalize and understand:  What's a meaningful disruption timeframe for a media company to plan around?  And specifically, how does any company predict that timeframe to take meaningful action on it when they don't know what disruptive adoption curves might look like?

The reason I'm asking this question is because of graphs like this, of world population growth, that looked to be linear for a long time but were actually more than exponential: