THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’ve really stopped blogging here, go read ryangraves.org

Last night I wrote my first app in Python. It’s dead simple, maybe 1 or 2 steps up from “Hello world.” but I’m pretty excited about it. The game, asks you to guess how old Santa is, you have to guess from 1-60 until you find the ride number. I’ll embed the game here once [...]

The image above contains some of the most interesting data a business could have on an individual. This is heat map of my foursquare checkin’s in San Francisco. It’s powerful data, and it’s only static. Here in lies the info to make assumptions & predictions about my behavior that will changes services I use and [...]

Last week I got an email that requested that I post a very specific tweet to my followers. In fact I would not have the option to tweak or edit the tweet at all, but they were willing to reward me for it, with cash. I’ve gotten a lot of request in the past to [...]

This week I had back to back experiences with iPhone payment systems. I figured I’d document it here and show the differences between the two. Also I’ll shed some light on which, in my opinion, will win. First, above is the image I took after signing my iPhone based receipt generated by Square. I had a delicious [...]

For those interested in how I slept last night, here’s your answer. This graph, capture by the Sleep Cycle iPhone App, shows when I was in my deepest sleep and when would have been best to wake up. I went to bed at 11:21pm last night and woke at 6:23am, 7 hours and 2 minutes [...]

So, it appears that Google is populating suggestion searches on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, but apparently not Islam. At first I was very skeptical of Google censoring after hearing a story on CNN, so I wanted to see if it were true on my own. Well apparently it’s true. My only guess at why they would [...]

Have you heard of Waze? It’s a mobile app that serves the purpose of a Garmin or any other navigation tool except it has the ingredient those other tools are missing — remember the one that I keep telling you will start to integrate in any successful application — social. With Waze you can report [...]

Events are the things that bring us together, in real life, around a specific topic. Whether it’s a Victoria Secret Fashion Show, or a Monday Night Football Game, or an app launch party, people collect together in real life or with a shared common experience like watching the same TV show at the same time. [...]

This blog post is not meant to be insightful or meant to share an opinion on any particular topics. It’s sole intent is to ask you your opinion. I have a question. Is the casual style of writing that comes along with blogging a good thing or a bad thing for society? Some times I [...]

These days it seems like 25% of the ads on TV are for app this or app that. The iPhone app store just hit 100k in applications. Now the Verizon/Motorola/Google Droid comes out and says iCan do everything that the iPhone can’t. You know, Droid Does. One of the coolest things about this Droid phone [...]

staying power – n. the ability to endure or last. Some startups today seem like they’re cool features or tools (insert twitter tool here) but I just don’t see how some of them will be around in a year or 2 when their budgets dry up. I could be totally wrong and maybe Twitters tool [...]

As described in their new release, “GetGlue.com is a social recommendation network for interests like books, music, and movies. GetGlue.com offers a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with everyone. Users can also add GetGlue to their browser to more quickly build their taste profile and get [...]

In my short time in Chicago, I’ve realized that there are more folks into tech startups than many people realize, however our smaller but still passion startup community doesn’t quite have the “presence” and sense of availability of other startup hubs (ie. Bay Area & NYC). Hubs have events that pull these communities together and [...]

There is a new trend on the web and both startups and investors are taking note. Fred Wilson has called this trend, “taking the web offline”. Others call it the challenge of “local”. Companies like Loopt and Foursquare are taking this problem head on. As the only web nerd amongst my group of friends I [...]