Max Milhan

A month ago I blogged about Google Flu Trends measurements of flu-related search terms and how it related to official data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. As it turns out, flu cases came in quite a bit below what Google was predicting. “Flu Trends is meant to be a complementary tool to the […]

You know those days when you wonder if you locked up the house and if you left the lights on? What if your spouse locks their keys inside? Thanks to what many are beginning to call the ‘internet of things’, those hassles can be addressed with technology available today. In the future, our home automation […]

Amazon Web Services, which Amazon began offering in 2006, is a service provided to many important products that people use every day. NASA, Netflix, reddit, Foursquare, Dropbox and Pinterest all use Amazon Web Services to power their service offerings and to be billed dynamically based on usage. WIRED had a great write-up about the service […]

Remember playing Snake on your first cell phone? Or maybe, like me, playing Snake on your mom’s first cell phone? Apps  for iPhone and Android that mimic the original game have millions of downloads. Better yet, remember the Tamagotchi? This little pixel monster would beep in your pocket until you digitally fed or picked up after […]

Agile development methodologies have a number of important tenets, but one of them is a short time to market. An agile team decides the first core functionality, builds it and gets feedback on it. It’s like picking out the corner pieces of a puzzle to start. Then each iteration adds a few pieces to the […]

As individuals, we like to be reassured that we’re making the right decision. Most of the time we don’t need the exact plan, but some relevant information. Seth Godin points out that, in many instances, we over-rely on the exact road map when in fact there is likely a problem and solution that is close enough: The […]

Many news outlets have reported that this year’s flu season has hit early, is unusually strong and will result in the worst flu season in a decade. I recently discovered Google Flu Trends, which is a project based on Google Trends. Since Google performs 4.7 billion searches per day, they are sitting on a mountain […]

Investing in innovation is a gamble that usually ends in flop or fortune. Frequently today it falls to startups to make those wagers as they may have less to lose. Seth Godin argues instead that “with great power comes great irresponsibility” and that existing companies don’t have to always play the safest route and ought […]

For years, Starbucks has served only dark roast coffee drinks, implying that the dark roast was a better roast and appealed to everybody. I’ve previously written about a very interesting TED talk where Malcolm Gladwell discusses the trend toward understanding customer preferences instead of relying on one absolute “best” product.  Gladwell actually mentions coffee at about the […]

I saw an interesting video today about attention to detail and quality control. In the video, David Lee Roth describes a tactic that the band Van Halen used to test for attention to detail and be warned of possible red flags in the preparation of large shows. In the video Roth explains that they used […]

Use Cases Determine Design A few weeks ago LinkedIn released their iPad app; it was immediately praised for it’s slick interface and immediate usability. With a full-featured and flexible site like LinkedIn, most users expect a recreation of the original desktop website with a minor design change for tablets. What LinkedIn actually delivered shows more […]

Last October I posted about Amazon’s foray into book publishing in order to get around fixed pricing agreements on e-books. An example showed the same price for a paperback book as the Kindle e-book, despite the added costs of actually creating the book. Several news sources are reporting that the Department of Justice has looked […]