ncubeeight

I conducted my MBA during a fascinating time in our world economy. We’d endured through a pandemic that shut down significant portions of our economy for nearly a year followed by surging interest rates as government response to the pandemic resulted in significant inflation and subsequent layoffs in my region. While this was a dramatic time for the world, it was a fascinating time to return to academia and evaluate the impacts to the global economy of natural and artificial stimuli. For our masters thesis we were asked to identify an opportunity in the economy that could be addressed by a new business entrant. In discussing with several of my MBA class cohort, we decided to focus on the blood supply shortage that resulted from the end of the pandemic . Why would the US go into blood crisis at the end of the pandemic we wondered. Shouldn’t that have been expected during the peak of the pandemic in 2020 or 2021? But it turns out that during the pandemic surgeries and car crashes dropped...

Six years ago, Meta launched the first consumer version of its VR headset, the Oculus Rift CV1. I had my first experience of that new media interface at San Francisco's Game Developer Conference (GDC). Oculus technicians escorted me into a sound-proof dark room and outfited me with the headset attached to an overhead boom that would keep the wires out of my way as I experienced free motion simulated environments that were crafted in Epic's Unreal Engine world-building game architecture. (This is the same developer environment that was used to create The Mandalorian TV series.) The memory of that demonstration is strong to this day because it was such a new paradigm of media experience. As I moved in a simulated world, parallax depth of distant objects shifted differently relative to those objects near. Everything appeared a bit like a cartoon, more colorful than the real world. But the sense of my presence in that world was incredibly compelling and otherwise realistic. Yester...

I am one of those people who searches slightly outside the parameters of the near term actual with an eye toward the long term feasible, for the purpose of innovation and curiosity. I'm not a futurist, but a probable-ist, looking for the ways we can leverage the technologies and tools we have at our fingertips today to achieve adjacent potential opportunities leveraging those tools. There are millions of people at any time thinking how to address new applications of any specific technology in novel ways to push the technological capabilities toward exciting new utilities. We often invent the same things using different techniques, the way that eyes and wings evolved via separate paths in nature, called convergent evolution. I remember going to a Google developer event in 2010 and heard the company announce a product that described my company's initiative down to every granular detail. At the time I wondered if someone in my company had jumped the fence. But I then reali...

My mother introduced me to a wide range of topics when I was growing up. She had fascinations with botany, ornithology, entomology and paleontology, among the so-called hard sciences. As she was a teacher, she had adapted certain behaviors she'd learned from studying child development and psychology in her masters degree program on the best way to help a young mind to learn without just teaching at them. One of her greatest mantras from my childhood was "Let's look it up!" Naturally she probably already knew the Latin name for the plant, animal or rock I was asking about. But rather than just telling me, which would make me come to her again next time, she taught me to always be seeking the answers to questions on my own.  This habit of always-be-looking-things-up proved a valuable skill when it came to learning languages beyond Latin terms. I would seek out new mysteries and complex problems everywhere I went. When I traveled through lands with complex written scrip...

When I was a physics student, my father started giving me mechanical pencils. You’d think all possibilities would have been invented by the 1980s. But some of these pencils were incredible feats of engineering with fun new ways to click out and retract the pencil graphite. I think my father had a point that there was always more to be invented, even for something so simple. We'd frequently look at bridges and discuss ways that they could be designed differently to distribute the weight and talk through the engineers' decisions around the common designs around us in the real world. Every time I'd invent something new, I'd diagram it for him with my pencils and he'd ask probing questions about the design choices I had made. One day, for instance, I’d invented a "Runner’s Ratchet Shoe." I was an avid runner in those days and would get sore knees and shin splints. The Runner's Ratchet was a set of levers attaching to the runner's ankle that would put t...

A decade ago, I followed the emergence of affordable 3D televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show for experiencing movies at home. One of the problems of adoption of the technology was the lack of media that mainstream audiences could view on the devices. If you were to have one of these advanced TVs, there was a lack of viewable content streamed or sold to those same households. It was just too much work to pair the content with the device. Filming in stereoscope is a complex process that isn't well supported by the commercial media channels to the home as it is for the cinema. While stereoscopic headsets are being released in significant volumes following the wave of VR as a mainstream consumer experience, the content availability challenge still looms. (IDC projects 30 million headsets a year to be released by 2026 across multiple vendors. Meta claims 15 Million sold to date.) This time the gaming sector is leading the charge in new media creation with 3D virtual environm...

Growing up in Oregon, where there are many volcanoes, my family would often go spelunking in the lava tubes left over from past eruptions. These caves formed where the outside of a river of lava cooled, letting the inside of the lava flow further downhill, leaving a hollow husk of the river's rock shape to climb in. Caves always invoke a kind of supernatural sense of awe for me. The sensory deprivation of the darkness gives a sense of humility we feel when we take ourselves out of societal context, bringing about a sense of ascending out of our ordinary self-awareness. When I travel abroad, I enjoy exploring caves and seeing the lore that has sprung up about them. In Bali, Indonesia are a series of caves that one can explore at the basin of rivers flowing down the sides of the volcanic island. However, the caves of Bali are man-made. Many centuries prior, people used tools to carve out the caves at the base of the river into a series of sheltered rooms. When the monsoo...