:Michael Anuzis

You heard it right - I’ll lay down $ for tiny ninja doodles. They could be doodles of anything ninja related. It could be a bunch of ninjas in a tree. Could be a ninja disguised as a pirate. Could even be a corn on the cob dressed like a ninja. I need as many mini-fun ninja doodles as possible to incorporate into ninja-based educational material.

You can come up with the craziest/zany-est ninja doodle idea you can think of and let me worry about finding a way to incorporate it into the lessons. No limits on the funky kind of stuff I’ll buy. I’m thinking of paying around $5 per doodle, purchasing up to ~20-50 doodles, so, up to around $250. I know my price is cheap, but it’s also a reflection of how small the doodles are I’m willing to accept. They could be 2″x1″, 3″x2″, 1″x1″, any random ninja doodle. (I actually would like a corn on the cob in ninja garb, if someone can doodle that; probably around 1″x1.5″)

The only thing is the doodles need to be in a digital form, e.g. a JPG or GIF file. If you can doodle it on paper and convert it to digital without it looking too weird that’s fine.

So, if you’re interested go ahead and send me a sample of what you can do! 1-2 sample doodles is fine, & if your stuff is usable we’ll chat about an on-going ninja-doodling deal based on how many you’re interested in making.

If you’re not much of a ninja doodler yourself, but you know someone who is please pass this post on to them. I could really use a great doodler. Thanks!

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Quick Background: Android is an open platform for mobile devices developed by Google that is expected to enable incredible innovation by allowing developers anywhere to create and share applications for their mobile phone. To spur development on the platform, Google offered $10 million in prize money for the top 50 applications developed for Android before the phone’s launch.

The Results Are In! You can read about the top 50 winning applications here. The five I found most interesting are below:

AndroidScan - Use your phone to scan a barcode, get pricing information from dozens of stores, product reviews and more. Never make a bad purchase again! (by Jeffrey Sharkey)

BioWallet - A biometric authentication system for Android. This application features iris recognition and can act as a password safe and provide single sign-on for other Android apps. Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez

City Slikkers - a Pervasive Game (alternatively Location Based Game) which takes place in the real-existing city. It is designed to connect a large number of players through-out the world and change the way the surroundings are seen. The central idea behind the concept is to give people the opportunity to symbolically interfere with the everyday urban environment and come into contact with previously unknown people. By PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems.

Locale - Locale is one of 7 Android applications submitted by MIT students. It enables you to set up location- and time-based profiles for your phone, so you can make it shut up when you’re at work, forward calls to your landline when you’re at home. Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan.

SplashPlay - SplashPlay offers the next generation in musical tuition and learning to play the guitar just got a whole lot easier. Simply attach the pod and light panel to your guitar and start strumming to your favourite songs in minutes. Songs are sent to the pod from a mobile phone or computer using a USB or Bluetooth connection, giving total portability. Other features include a guitar tuner, guitar metronome and a hands free, Bluetooth foot pedal. The product will provide an easy, portable and fun method of learning music.

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I’ve been blogging for over a year about designing a gadget that tracks the unified environmental efforts of millions of people and allows everyone to celebrate their contribution. A few weeks ago it looks like Google released a gadget called ‘Energy Saver‘ that does just that.

It doesn’t allow people to track their contributions in as many ways as I’d like to see, but it does provide a beautiful/simple way for people to make a difference with hardly effort at all by “Enabling and optimizing your computer’s power management settings to help save the world energy.”

If I wasn’t already working on a different startup, I’d love to take this idea to the next level with my domain greenolution.com. Previous posts of mine detailing that business model & vision:

- The Greenolution Pitch
- Three Design Opportunities for a Brighter Future
- Anyone Join Me for $25 Million
- Count Down Your Carbon

If you combined CDYD and Google’s Energy Saver gadget and threw in a global goal, a gadget easier for people to paste on social networking sites than the Google Gadget, and some greentech product recommendations on the most cost-effective technologies currently available, you’d have my idea for greenolution.com.

Aside from possible ad revenue, you could add an e-commerce portion of the site to sell the greentech conveniently to consumers/businesses, or at least collect affiliate earnings.

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The most refreshingly practical startup advice I’ve heard this year. Brace yourself!

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As usual, I’m working on a startup company that I think will change the world. Not yet ready to release/announce it here, but I just saw an inspiring seminar by Paul Graham that mirrors my sentiments on benevolent startups and wanted to share it with you.

The video below is from Startup School, a collection of free seminars given by some remarkable speakers.

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That’ll be the headline in a few months after my latest startup goes live. I’ve already discussed severe inefficiencies & redesign opportunities with the current educational systems. The time has come to take action.

This startup has been under development the past several months & it’s nearly time to unveil it to the public. Half a year ago I released a couple low-quality Game Theory lessons on YouTube to see the kind of response I’d get and what kind of market was out there for the concise teaching of academic material. Below shows some interesting feedback (see the comments.)

F’d up comment aside (hey, can you say he’s wrong?), if that’s the feedback for the junk recorded while hardly awake yet, I’m excited to see the impact & education I can provide when I invest significant time & effort and make it twice as fun. Wish me luck.

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If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’ where he shares his thoughts on life & death, you’re missing out. I couldn’t agree more with his approach to making the most of life despite a rapidly impending death.

I’ve embedded Randy’s full lecture below (1h 15m)

Some of you may prefer this shortened (12 min) version he provided on Oprah.

& for some different thoughts with the same aim, you might enjoy this podcast where I share some of my personal strategies for keeping it positive despite impending death. Enjoy!

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I don’t normally post music videos (in fact this is the first one ever), but being the most amazing video editing I’ve ever seen I wanted to share it with you. Watch it full screen if you want to catch the hidden stuff.

Fun Fact: Played soccer with Joe (red tie) in elementary school. His hair hasn’t changed since.

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Just finished recording an mp3 that I’ll be using in place of an alarm clock every morning when I wake up. I’m using Jakes MP3 Alarm, free software which will play an MP3 at a time you specify. I used Audacity, free MP3 editing software, to record the mp3 and overlay a pleasant background to my voice.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t stick to my last morning routine for even a week. I think the weakness was that all too often when I’d wake up I just wouldn’t have the instant self-discipline to tear myself out of bed and start exercising. The night before I could always sit there for a moment and say “When I wake up I WILL exercise and meditate,” but by the time my alarm would go off the previous night’s determination would have faded away.

I’ve always thought Jackie Chan had it easy in this regard. His dad threw cold water on him and forced him to wake up and work out for an hour. Chan didn’t have a choice, so sure enough he got up. I might not have someone over here throwing water and then forcing me to get up, but I’ve always liked the idea and leveraged it in the Mp3.

Another weakness of the previous routine was that all the items in my first option set were hard-core cardio, and some mornings you simply don’t wake up feeling cardio. This time I’m including the hard cardio option (Kung Fu), but also including Tai Chi and Qi Gong as options. Millions of Chinese people wake up to Tai Chi every morning and enjoy stellar health. It should at least be an option.

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