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What is company culture? Why is it the most important thing in the company? The culture should be an invisible thing. It should also have some level of organic growth to it.

Sure, you can add in perks to the company, like free lunch and some ping pong tables, these things are wonderful, but they are just a piece of this puzzle. How Do You Grow Your Culture?

It all starts with leadership. Culture is something that comes from the top down. Want something out of your employees it starts with you. Leading by example can slowly just transform your company. As a leader, people are watching you. They are trying to see how you react and how you would handle situations. If you want the company to start going in the right direction, start the process yourself.

All workers contribute to culture, but you as the leader are going to set the table. Are you properly communicating the values and the goals you want to your team? Project Planning

There are times in every company and business where you need to try to push the team a little harder. Deadlines start creeping up, and large projects come out of nowhere. It happens and will continue to happen.

These are the moments where you team needs you. If you can jump in and help out with the workload, I think that would go a long way. Sometimes, it is best for you to stay out. But, help those people; protect them from distractions. Offer to get them all a few pizzas for staying late.

Saying thank you goes a long way when you ask more out of your employees. Listen

Just think about this for a scenario. You crushed it all week and beat that deadline, and it is a Thursday, and your boss came up to you and said: “hey, you’ve been killing it comes in late tomorrow.”

It is always good to remember the team and to remember the people. These are the horses that are going to level up the company.

Be respectful of their work and their schedule. If you gave them a week long project on Monday, don’t give them another one on Tuesday. Trust the Team

Trust your employees. I know you might be thinking that you got burned in the past. But, you know what. Trusting some of your best people is ok. If you have a person on your roster for five plus years, and you need them to execute a project, get out of their way. Let them run lead and just be a resource for them. You want to be able to have a team that you can go to with an idea and walk away and have it handed back to you in a nice neat little folder.

You have assembled a group of people working on a common goal. They might have ideas about what should be done. Be humble and learn from them. Understanding

It is where the “douche effect” can become out strong in bosses. If one of your employees comes to with an idea and you, HATE it. Maybe don’t say “I hate this that is stupid.” (True Story)

I want you to pause and think for a moment. A little hesitation can go a long way here. Maybe even throw in a look upward to sell it. Then just say, “Thank you for coming to me with this. I will take it into consideration and see. We started doing X, but I will see if this makes sense in our plans. Good job, thank you.” This lets them down easy and makes them feel heard.

I would also like to share a true story. If you have a person at your desk, and they bring negative news, and they are in tears because they tried so hard to avoid the problem, take serious note of that. That is a person WHO CARES. They felt so emotionally invested in this situation that it caused them to cry because they didn’t want to let you down. That is a person I want on my team. Support that person and help that person. Don’t just shrug off those tears with “Oh why is this upsetting to you.”

Being in an environment where nobody listens to you, and nobody trusts you to do anything is extremely demoralizing to a team.

There are a lot of unhappy people sitting around you, and you might think that everything is perfect. Would you rather lose your top people or have to listen to a few dumb ideas? Change Takes Time

Changing the company culture doesn’t happen with an email or deciding to wear sneakers to work. This takes work by the leadership and all the workers to buy in. First, in foremost it starts from the top and getting the leadership to set the values and the goals of the company. Then it goes from there.

This past weekend, while in the car, I saw a new section in Spotify. The section was called “Shows” and inside of that were categories for audio and video shows. There were a ton of clips and what looked liked to be podcasts. Unbundle?

Lately, we have had a trend of unbundling applications such as Facebook with Messenger and Youtube with Youtube Music and Youtube Gaming.

Spotify has always been the leading streaming app for music for me and the people in my circle. Even if I am not a fan of the design and have tried to get people to switch, it has become a dominate force in the game. So much so that one of its main competitors, Rdio, has closed. And even with the rise of Apple Music and its laundry list of flaws.

This could be an interesting spot for Spotify to innovation on the podcast experience. They could have a nice syncing system for the audio shows between desktop and mobile. If they found out a way to share clips between your Spotify contacts that could be an experience that is worth making a change to.

There was a new podcast I was listening to that I want to share just a minute snippet of it to some friends. Having something that like built in and then being able to use the Spotify network could be a powerful thing.

This should be an opt-in experience for the users. I think if they separate the actions. They can iterate off the best of the bunch. Video

The podcast integration I can understand. Spotify might be aiming to be the one-stop app for audio. I will take that. But this video integration is what is baffling me.

Do I want to watch a Ted Talk on Spotify? I mean a healthy alternative is going to be a good thing for apps like YouTube. But, Spotify just can’t offer the same experience for video as it does in audio in the same app.

I tried to watch a few videos, and a lot of the content was just nothing special. I was also unable to use a Chromecast to cast the video to my TV. I was able to get the audio being played out of the speakers. Give me a reason to change

I use Pocketcasts for my podcast and of course, I watch most my videos on YouTube and other different video services. The test is whenever theses new services launch. Do they add a new feature that would make you want to change your behavior. So, far Spotify is making me rethink my music service more than change how I can consume podcasts. Step one to becoming iTunes

I am fearful for the future of Spotify. In theory, I think that having podcasts makes a lot of sense. Even Google Music announced podcast support. I think a lot of work needs to be done on that end to make it a better experience. Spotify won’t be used for anything more than an occasional quick listen of an episode. I think anyone that’s more of a power user, with a lot of subscriptions, will stay with their existing app.

The thing with an app like Spotify is the use cases I have for it. I need that app to be fast. It already takes me two clicks to get into a search.

If they are going to be added in other verticals, they should start to look at their app and start changing the user experience.

In May, of this year, I started writing every morning. It was just something that I was experimenting with. I started with just some writing prompts I found online. Then I switched to the more daily pages routine. As, of writing this post, I have written a minimum of 750 words a day for 202 straight days.

When November hit, I wanted to try to do something different. I was getting married that month, but I wanted to change up my daily habit.

I also decided to this on October 31st and the goal of a NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts on November 1; you start working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.

So, with the wedding going on, I want just to finish. I wasn’t going to worry so much about word counts. I just wanted to finish a story.

I never had attempted to write fiction since college. I study journalism in college, and I always loved a good story. But, actually trying to attach a piece of fiction with some structure and some purpose was something that I have never done.

The first week I struggled with this concept. I was replacing my morning pages with this fiction writing, and it was a shift for me. I was so used just to doing a brain dump each morning. So, changing up the style of the writing and trying to keep my story arch was challenging. To keep things flowing for my, I switched the style of how I was writing the story, so it was more scaleable for me and made it easier to jump in and out of when I needed to.

The other problem with the first week was I had a rough idea that I liked quite a rather lot. But, that was it. It was a rough outline.

There was not any real preparation for the story our outline. I wrote out a few sentences but I need to have some more structure to help keep me focused and in a general area.

So, the first few chapters were a bit all over the place. The main story kept changing its mind. After, five days I sat down and I just wrote out a bullet list of stuff that should happen in-between and that helped get the story going and made the writing a lot easier.

I learned a lot from doing this; it was a challenge, and it got me thinking in a way that I have never before. I almost want to go back and rewrite the story a bit more. I believe that during the month and the writing process I fell in love with the idea and this fictitious scenario I drew up. Then the other part of me is scared to read it because I wrote in 30-minute chunks at 6 am for a month. There are bound to be some will mistakes in it.

Writing for a purpose like that was motivating in a sense. It is different that just clearing your head of ideas. While writing the story, I found that I was using characters and scenarios from my life. It was hard not to pull that stuff into the story. It was not something that I set out to do. Storytelling is an art form and being able to bring in the interesting characters you met in life and having them interact a skill, and it was damn fun to do.

In May, of this year, I started writing every morning. It was just something that I was experimenting with. I started with just some writing prompts I found online. Then I switched to the more daily pages routine. As, of writing this post, I have written a minimum of 750 words a day for 202 straight days.

When November hit, I wanted to try to do something different. I was getting married that month, but I wanted to change up my daily habit.

I also decided to this on October 31st and the goal of a NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts on November 1; you start working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.

So, with the wedding going on, I want just to finish. I wasn’t going to worry so much about word counts. I just wanted to finish a story.

I never had attempted to write fiction since college. I study journalism in college, and I always loved a good story. But, actually trying to attach a piece of fiction with some structure and some purpose was something that I have never done.

The first week I struggled with this concept. I was replacing my morning pages with this fiction writing, and it was a shift for me. I was so used just to doing a brain dump each morning. So, changing up the style of the writing and trying to keep my story arch was challenging. To keep things flowing for my, I switched the style of how I was writing the story, so it was more scaleable for me and made it easier to jump in and out of when I needed to.

The other problem with the first week was I had a rough idea that I liked quite a rather lot. But, that was it. It was a rough outline.

There was not any real preparation for the story our outline. I wrote out a few sentences but I need to have some more structure to help keep me focused and in a general area.

So, the first few chapters were a bit all over the place. The main story kept changing its mind. After, five days I sat down and I just wrote out a bullet list of stuff that should happen in-between and that helped get the story going and made the writing a lot easier.

I learned a lot from doing this; it was a challenge, and it got me thinking in a way that I have never before. I almost want to go back and rewrite the story a bit more. I believe that during the month and the writing process I fell in love with the idea and this fictitious scenario I drew up. Then the other part of me is scared to read it because I wrote in 30-minute chunks at 6 am for a month. There are bound to be some will mistakes in it.

Writing for a purpose like that was motivating in a sense. It is different that just clearing your head of ideas. While writing the story, I found that I was using characters and scenarios from my life. It was hard not to pull that stuff into the story. It was not something that I set out to do. Storytelling is an art form and being able to bring in the interesting characters you met in life and having them interact a skill, and it was damn fun to do.

I saw The Big Short this past weekend. It was an excellent film, and it did a fantastic job of explaining what happened back in 2006-2008 better than most things I have ever come across.

This movie got me thinking about some financial startups that we have seen over the last 3-5 years. There has been an uptick in people trying to “replace” your bank to make it simple to buy stocks or even set up different savings accounts.

There is a new batch of startups that are innovating in the financial sector in really impressive ways. They are bringing tech into the financial world and are making it easy to consume and easier to manage money. If you talk to most people, they don’t properly save the right amount of money. They don’t know how to invest.

I will make a confession that I use a lot of these apps. I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to money. I have an elaborate system that works for me, but might not be best for everyone.

As always, it is your money so only use and do things you are comfortable with. It might be from the movie, but just make sure you put money in spots where you are comfortable. There is nothing worse than having problems with money.

Simple

Simple was one of the first startups that I found attempting to change banking. The startup based out of Portland, Oregon and was, as the name suggests, trying to simplify the banking process. I signed up for Simple back in July of 2013. The service at that point was invited only, but signups are open for all at this time.

A few things set simple apart from most other banks. The first is that they have an incredible customer service team. They have responded to my emails very rapidly, and whenever I needed to get on the phone, they answered. The conversation was quick and painless, and I was never on hold for more than a minute or two. If you have ever had an issue with one of the bigger banks you know this is far from the case with them.

Simple has a different way of setting up your account. When you first log in you see a big number on the top of the page. That is what is safe to spend. They take out all of your pending transactions like checks and other debits that might not have cleared.

The best feature is Goals. This is what sets Simple apart from most other banks. Usually, if you have a checking account you open up a savings account, you set up an auto transfer, and you go from there.

But, with Goals, you make a new goal for something such as rent. Then set the amount and the date you need it by. Simple will then let us say 1.25 a day and move that into your goal to stash away. The great thing is you can have as many Goals as you want.

The thing that I found about Goals is it makes something like budgeting and saving very easy and almost just happens by default. There are a few updates that I would love to see to Goals one day such as reoccurring Goals that just dump the money back into your Safe to Spend so you can set up auto pays for some bills. Digit

Now, if you don’t mind your bank and checking account setup, but you might be a terrible saver, then you should try Digit .

Digit is an app that has no interface and is all done via texts. Digit is a saving platform that intelligently saves from your checking. It studies habits and trends, and it decides how much it can take without you ever noticing. Most, of the time for me the transactions have been tiny.

When you sign up, you can connect your account to one of your banks. There are a few options you can do from here. The most important one is setting a basement for an account. Say, you don’t want Digit to do its thing if your account his $200 bucks. Then Digit will stop. You can get either daily or weekly texts that show your checking account balance and your savings balance.

The thing about Digit is that it gets out of your way, and it will be a part of your workflow as much as you want it to. I found it to be helpful to get these text reminders of my balance. They were never 100% up to the minute, but if you get a busy week and have a few bills coming up, it is nice to know that things are still floating.

Also, there is something refreshing about not having another app to deal with and another interface to learn. Digit is simply a contact, and it can certainly help you save and save rapidly. In my year tests, I was able to save a nice little sum. It works well for me as a rainy day fund, but I can see this being a nice tool to get people into the habit of saving in general. Investments

My goal by using all of these tools is to spend less time checking the balance and trying to automate as much as possible. I have a pretty good system on lock down for bills and savings, but I always wanted to dabble in investments. In my head, it seemed liked the most complicated thing ever.I was worried about a bunch of different monthly fees and having to manage all of this accounts. I just wanted to automate this aspect as well.

I found a few apps that took the pain out of the investment process and had provided some simple and mobile-friendly solutions. Disclaimer – I have used all of these as apps with a small amount of money and for a limited time. Sumday

Sumday created by one of the largest global investments companies, BNY Mellon. The interface was clean and simple, and it seemed like it was easy to get my money out if I didn’t know what was going on. There are a lot of “cool” ways to get money to your account such as having a hashtag on your social accounts. But, I drop in a few bucks on the first of the month and just occasional log in to see if anything is up. At the moment, I am down a little bit. If I learned anything, this is a long game, and I shouldn’t panic.

It is fun to check and see if there is any action and I am sure over time there might be a better move. I don’t check weekly or even monthly. But, it is fun to watch and experiment with. Acorns

Acorns connect to your checking account and will round up your transactions and invest them.

Every Acorn account insured up to $500,000 by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). That sounds official to me.

There are fees with Acorns under 5K is a dollar a month and over 5K is .25% per year.

The rounding up your transactions is fun and with all this investing it takes time and it is fun to watch things grow and letting those small amounts start a slow blossom. Also, if you love great app design, the Acorn app is brilliant and a joy to use.

Overall, investments are something I still don’t fully understand, but Acorns and Sumday break down the barriers to entry and make it easy for anyone to gets set up in this finical workflow. The Future

The app market continues to flourish in this section. Just this past week I found a new batch of apps that seem to take the promises of saving and making banking easier one step further.

Just recently I found a new checking account called Chime. Chime does something cool with savings accounts. They round up all of your purchases and then dump that money into a savings account for you. It is an excellent combination of Simple and Digit in some sense.

They also promise to pay a 10% bonus on your roundup savings so that you can increase your savings faster. I mean, if that’s the case you can’t get an interest rate like that anywhere. I am strongly thinking about giving them a shot to see how it works and if they do pay out that 10%.

[Qapital] and [http://sweep.co] are taking on the savings accounts. Qapital has a goals system, and they ask you to apply a rule to the goal. It can be something like save a dollar week one and then two dollars week two and so on.

Sweep takes a similar approach to goals and calls them buckets. Sweep continuously tracks your bills and expenses. It is like a budgeting app on steroids. I like the aspect of the automation but, I would love if they would pay your bills for you. That is one thing that remains. Sweep is iPhone only at the moment, so I haven’t given that a fair shot. Next Steps

Do you hate your bank? Do you hate your money setup? Do you regularly find yourself with issues? Are weird fees always showing up?

There is no better time to try out a different app and a different workflow. As with anything that is money related, only use things that you are comfortable. You don’t want to wake up one day with no access to your money. Most of these apps are FDIC insured, so there is a level of protection there. There was a report that I found during my research that said 40% of young adults are not putting money aside for savings accounts.

This is what makes some of these apps so critical. We can sign up and just let them do the work. These are the next wave of financial applications. We are not stuck to use Bank of America for everything.

So please, in some way, start saving and making sure that you have easy access to that money because nobody else is looking out for your balance.

YouTube recently announced their new paid service called YouTube Red. Naturally, I had to sign up for a free trial and see if it was worth adding to my list of subscriptions. Features

Youtube Red has three main features that it will add to your YoutTube experience.

Ad Free Background Play Offline

The removal of ads is something that everyone will get behind but something I didn’t associate with Youtube all that much.

Background play is one that I have been most excited about. However, paying a premium for a feature like that seems to be a bit of a stretch for me. That should be something that is in the YouTube experience for all users. Content

YouTube has a deal with creators so that every video will be added free. There was a bit of a controversy around this. As Youtube bullied everyone into joining Red. If you didn’t allow your videos in Red, your videos might not show up in search results. This move has caused some companies to leave youtube and even some of the larger ones. But, there has been slight noise about the requirements once the product did finally launch.

It is a nicer user experience all the ads go away. However, it is hard to support such a heavy-handed option like forcing everyone into a service. ADS

I never thought that I was a heavy YouTube user. That may be because YouTube has become a part of our lives. I think that is what makes it a little hard to think of this as something to buy.

I never had a moment while watching a YouTube video that the ads pissed me off. Hulu on the other hand recently announced a subscription plan that would cut out ads on their platform. I have already seen the same shampoo commercial five times while, writing this. Background Play

This feature is the most tempting for me. If you are a Red subscriber, you can close the Youtube app, and your video will keep running. I know that might not seem like a big deal, but this is one of those features that I have been craving. I feel like whenever I use the mobile app, I want to hope out and check out another app and just let the audio play. I find that if I leave the app, I end up not finishing the video. This is a killer feature for the app but, it probably should be a default setting. I don’t know why they need to throw this under the premium tag. YouTube Music

After YouTube Red was announced, they also released a separate music app. This is another dark horse for YouTube. Through using the app, I found it is one of most enjoyable ways to listen to music. The search is spot on, and they have a little toggle switch to go back and forth between video and audio stream.

This is also another section where Background Play comes into the game, which takes the app to another level. This streaming service might be able to replace a Spotify or Apple Music.

I would love to see an easy and simple way to share song without other people. A one click the button to send a song in hangouts? Even post list link on Twitter. Music is usually a shared experience. When, you find that great track you want to send that out to your inner circle. There is something about the sharing features in Spotify that keeps me going back to it. It is a service that I would love to change. Secret Feature

Google Play Music is a solid music offering that I have used in the past. I like how I can merge my library with paid tracks. However, there is nothing compelling enough to switch from Spotify to Google Play.

Google Play Music has family plan pricing of $14.99 for up to 6 accounts. If you split that up, it comes out to $2.50 an account. If you sign up for Google Play Music, you get access to YouTube Red. How It Compares

If you are like me, you have a million subscription services. Here is the list of my current media subscriptions.

Spotify Family – $15 (2 accounts) Hulu – $7.99 Netflix – $9.99 Amazon Prime – $99yr HBO Now – $15

YouTube Red doesn’t replace any of those for me. One day it could take on a lot of these services. Right now Red falls into the category of something that would be “nice” to have. The family plans and Google music integration do make it an attractive alternative.

Still, the best parts of YouTube Red are features that I wish the app already had in place. The Background Play should be something turned on by default. I don’t want to have to pay 10 dollars a month for the privilege of that. The idea of paying $120 a year so that I can close the app and continue to listen to my video seems a little absurd.

I wrote the above while having a free trial to YouTube Red. I don’t ever remember noticing YouTube ads all that much beforehand. But, ever since then the ads have been so annoying. I guess once they go away it is hard to go back to them.

Last year, around this time, I got an invite to get early access to a strange device from Amazon. Amazon was releasing a speaker that you could talk to. This was something that I would expect out of Google more than Amazon.

I was extremely skeptical of the device and even the video demoing the features. Overall, it just seemed wonky. Amazon did two things that always makes me want to order: They put it behind and invite and gave me an early bird discount.

When I first received it, it was a bit underwhelming. I showed off the speaker to my wife and a few friends. Everyone thought it was cool but, I don’t think that anyone wanted to buy it right away.

Slowly, over the year, I kept getting email after email with updates and notices for Alexa.

Everything from being able to shut off your lights in your house to being able to control you TV if you had certain devices.

One thing that always amazes me about the device. It is superb at being able to pick up your voice. I have been 10 feet away and have said the hot word “Alexa” and it recognized and was ready for instructions.

Amazon has recently released an app store for the Echo. They have labeled the section “skills” in the companion app. There are now over 100 new skills that you can add to your device. The skills range from asking Alexa to “fart” to walking you through the seven-minute workout and even a game of cat facts.

The product seems to be in a continuous development cycle. There has not been a week go by where there are not new integrations and services to tie into your device.

I want to walk through some of the more notable and interesting upgrades that have come to the product recently. These are also features that I find myself using more and more each day. Calendar Recap

“Alex What’s On My Calendar”

You can give Alex access to your Google calendar. Each morning you can ask what is on the calendar and get a nice recap of what is coming up. If you are like me and have a shared calendar with your partner, this is a key to no longer having forgotten events. This is an awesome hack to use in the morning. Add Calendar Events

Alex just updated this week with the ability to quick add events into your calendar. The functionality is in the “skills” store.

An example of the phrase is “Alexa, tell Quick Events to add go for walk tomorrow at 3.”

Doing, that can be a little on the wordy side if something is big. Sometimes, it is nice to be able to at lease quickly block off time for an event. Shopping/To Do List

Alex has its shopping list that goes into the Alex app or shows up on your Amazon account. On Amazon.com, there will be shopping and a todo list under your wishlist section.

Being able to add casually things to your shopping list, or to do list, while in the house has become an awesome experience.

Amazon does have voice purchases for products. You can ask Alexa to order you some soap. Alexa will look into your order history to see it will say something like

“I didn’t find that in your order history, but Amazon’s Choice for soap is x. The order total is $. Should I order it?”

You do get prompted to confirm or reject the purchase. But, that is one feature that I am too scared to try just yet. I don’t want to randomly order five hundred bars of soap. IFTT

IFTT is a service that connects apps and web services to together. So, for example, you can have Alexa’s shopping list go to a Trello board. You can then have Alexa’s to-do list function go to a different service such as Evernote. You can have Alexa call your missing phone. Yelp

Amazon has partnered with Yelp to get restaurant data for the speaker. How many of us have been trying to figure out what places to eat? So all you have to do is ask Alexa: “Alexa, find me a nearby Chinese restaurant.” It will even tell me if stores are open since Yelp has the hours in their database. Traffic

I am lucky to have a 3-4 minutes commute to work each morning. However, in the Alex companion app you can set a home and destination address and simply ask, “Alexa, how is traffic.”

Amazon Echo has come a long way since it was released last year. Also, this Fall Amazon has announced that they are going to release Alexa inside the latest FireTV. I have the old one, and that software has not been rolled out to my model. Amazon is secretly going to own the house with these devices and their low-cost tablets as well.

Amazon’s Alexa tech is something that I want baked into more tech products. I want to see it in cars. I also find that when I use the companion app, I want to dedicate voice commands inside of it. That would be another fascinating twist as well. If Amazon wanted ever to get back into the phone game making Alexa, the core would be the best way to do it.

The attempt Amazon made into phones was a complete disaster. However, Amazon can take a page from what Microsoft is doing with Cortona and release an Alexa app that would become an assistant.

Alexa is one of those devices that make you feel like you are using something for the future and the best part about it is that works and works well.

Three Products That Want To Change How We Eat

I hate cooking. There are few activities that I hate more than cooking. As I grow older, I find myself caring more about my health. With this, I have come to realize that cooking needs to be part of my day and part of my weekly habits. I can no longer live off of two boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and still manage to stay fit and live a healthy lifestyle.

Over the past few years, there have been startups who have attempted to solve the problem of cooking. Some of these would mail you the ingredients measured out with a list of instructions to follow. This approach was interesting, but I was paying a premium for people to cut up ingredients and put them into little bags for me. If you like cooking these type of products were probably really helpful as the result was always a good, healthy dish, with ingredients you recognized.

However, the problem was still in the action of cooking. The preparation was not the problem for me.

Maybe I am just lazy, but I went searching for a better solution. I had found a fitness routine that worked well for me, but I still ate poorly. I need a solution to this that would add or tweak my diet.

Soylent 2.0 Soylent is a meal replacement drink that is supposed to be like created to be something like the perfect meal in a bottle. It has all the shit you need in a meal. Soylent has gotten a lot of buzz in recent months. The 1.0 of the product was just a simple powder. To get the final shake, you would need a blender. That, of course, did not interest me as the goal was to see if I can eat healthily and do as little work as possible.

I have been keeping an eye on the progress of Soylent and saw that they recently released the product in a small bottle form. Each bottle would count as one meal. This took care of my blender problem, and I was super excited to order them and have breakfast solved once and for all.

The case of 12 bottles arrived, and it took me a few days to try to have one of these for a meal.

Now, this might be because I am used to eating eggs or Cliff bars for breakfast, but the taste was just hard to get around. I feel like it is something that I could get used to over a certain amount of time, but the taste was hard to work with at 5:30 in the morning.

Conceptually, I love the idea of Soylent, and one day it could be implemented into the healthy living tool chest. However, currently, I think they need to do something about the taste. I would love to see a starter kit created with a few trial flavors that can get you ready for the full Soylent experience.

I still have a few bottles left from my original purchase, and I think that I will try to drink three bottles write about it. There might be something to it after you get used to it.

Soylent is still something that I am going to keep on my radar and will try again when the 3.0 product is released, but it is just not ready to get into our day to day habits just yet.

Sereneti Kitchen I was listening to an episode of This Week In Startups, and Sereneti was being demoed during a Future of Food Showcase. The scene was during the Launch Internet Of Things conference. There were some different products demoed, but this was the only one that wowed me.

Sereneti is one of those products where you see a little glimpse of what it can do, and you can’t stop thinking about all the uses for such technology. The company said they were just showing off a prototype, and this product is 12–18 months off from being consumer ready.

So, Sereneti is a device that will cook for you. During, the onstage demo they made a simple omelet. The essential component of the thing is this mechanical arm that does the work.

Think of Sereneti as if a crock pot met a 3D printer. The device has some connected capabilities. Such as setting up timers and being able to get these little trays of the ingredients to make your recipe. The founders kept stressing that they are going to work with chefs and get a huge database of different food that this thing can create.

I honestly don’t care what it can make. If this thing can make ten things well and even if they are simple it would be a must own for me.

Let me paint my dream scenario here. We all look at our phones first thing in the morning right? We wake up, and we can tell our Sereneti what type of oatmeal we want or the kind of eggs we want and set a timer for delivery.

This company is the closest thing that I have found to my dream device. They have taken out the pain point of the creation process. Now, if they can make this into a consumer product will be a different thing.

I think there will be a market for this product even if they just nail a certain amount of meals and then release patches to increase the knowledge base.

Bento Bento is a delivery service that, at the moment, is only in San Francisco. It has a twist on the delivery concept that makes it much more attractive.

Bento has their own kitchens and drivers. This is how their website explains their food. All of our food is: • Asian inspired • Prepared in a healthy manner — No MSG or additives added. We never abuse sugar, salt or fat. • Sourced responsibly — We hold our suppliers to high standards so we can stand behind the source of our ingredients.

The app allows you to pick a main, and a side dish for your bento and the choices are different every day.

I love this concept as it allows you to get some quality food delivered to your house. It gives you new options and enables you to get that takeout and be able to eat still well. The price and the process are incredibly compelling.

Sadly, I think Bento is going to be hard to scale up and won’t hit my small town in the coming year. I love the more on demand apps coming to the food industry. Bento, Uber Eats, Postmates, and even Amazon Prime Now. There are a lot of delivery services that can simplify parts of the food creation or delivery process.

Bento has a unique take on the home delivery, and I like how they are focusing in on one thing and trying to do that well.

What’s Next So far, there is not that perfect solution in the market. Living in a small town, I don’t have access to a lot of the on-demand services.

Startups like Plated and Blue Apron just don’t do enough for me to help solve my issues. Things like Instacart, Amazon Prime Now, and Google Shopping Express would be more helpful if they ever got into town.

Sereneti is the most interesting food startup that I have come across, and it is the most exciting tech, and I can’t wait to see it.

I think that there is a massive push for a more healthy lifestyle. We all know we need to get 10,000 steps, and we have wearables to track our posture.

The food industry is still something that is ripe for changes and ripe for significant changes during the mobile revolution.

It is still way too easy to eat poorly. We have the technology and the ability to change the consumption channels to solve the various needs of people. We are getting there and when we get devices like Sereneti being made a mass scale it is going to change things. It is going to be hard to ignore the fact that you can have your omelet waiting for you and not get yourself that donut in the morning. I still dream of the day where our food could be automated and set once and all.

Prototyping is one of those things that always interested me. It was something that combined design and code so well. I also thought that if you were going to write code for the design process why not just start coding. FramerJs was always interesting because it used CoffeScript and anyway I can keep writing JS was ok with me.

Skillshare released this intro to Prototyping class, and I decided to take the Framer finally out for a test drive. I love a good Sketch document, and Framer has excellent support for importing all of your Sketch files and layers right into the app. FramerJs gives an 8 hour trial for the app. There was something about the trial that made me have this sense of urgency. I wanted to use it way more often than I normally would in a trial because I felt like the time was running out on me.

The class was broken up into three sketches and allowed you to wet your whistle on what Framer can do and how it could work into your workflow. The class was not super in-depth but it was something I was able to spend a few hours on a Sunday afternoon with. It was fun to be able to write some code an interact with your Sketch documents. It felt like the natural next step for projects that needed. Prototyping is something that ever design project will need to do. When

Here are my results from two of the class assignments. http://share.framerjs.com/lm31mdazu5t2/ http://share.framerjs.com/ybpzd8i4io7d/

I have been spending some time getting postcss into my workflow. I started using it with gulp in my build process. The best thing about postcss is this plugin echo system.

http://postcss.parts/ – A searchable list of plugins

Below are the few plugins that I used in my last few projects. https://github.com/postcss/postcss-simple-vars – PostCSS Simple Variables https://github.com/postcss/postcss-mixins – PostCSS Mixins https://github.com/antyakushev/postcss-for – https://github.com/antyakushev/postcss-for