Communitech is a terrific organization in the the Tech Triangle, and this morning I had the opportunity to speak about Tilted Pixel for five minutes as part of their “Tech 5″ portion of the event. Tech 5 provides student entrepreneurs a chance to present their company and the challenges and successes behind it. What a great idea for furthering entrepreneurship in the community!

The event went really well and I met some great people. The main speakers from VideoLocus did a fantastic job in their talk of developing a video compression technology and heading down the extremely tough road of transforming it into a standard. Stories of small start-ups becoming major players are very inspiring and anyone starting a company or considering it should be looking to learn from as many people who have done it as possible.

Applause to Communitech for continuing to do such a great job of bringing Waterloo region tech together and promoting entrepreneurship.

The Google Finance beta has just been launched, and I’m not sure whether to be surprised or not. Google is clearly going after not only being a portal in the traditional sense, but almost aiming to rebrand the internet itself to “Google” as it becomes the provider of all our most used content and communications. I actually found out about the GF launch through the built-in RSS reader in GMail, and then researched more through the Google search engine. How are they doing it?

Google is Repeatedly Building a Better Mousetrap, and Turning Disadvantages into Advantages

I’ve been thinking about Google for a good portion of today and I’ve noticed two key factors that allow services such as GMail and Google Maps to succeed. The more obvious point is that any new product is a better mousetrap. It’s why they have so many incredibly skilled and creative people, and why the Google job application is famous in its own right. Google Finance already has slick features such as being able to type an industry name to get all stock quotes and integration of major news items as markers directly on the stock information.

A second point I find interesting is that Google seems to be very aware that its the “new kid on the block” when it launches yet another product that competes head to head with established giant business. Google manages to benefit from this by not being tied to an older architecture. It has the luxury of executing the following steps:

1. Examine existing product.
2. Create a solid new architecture using its vast R&D capabilities.
3. Add several powerful “pillar” features from the get go. In other words, have something people will use and talk about.
4. Release a “beta”.
5. Perfect the product from public user feedback without suffering the negative criticism and public dismissal that would occur if the product were labelled “finished” or “1.0″.
6. Allow the viral nature of the internet and generally superior product to suck users away from existing companies.

Now here’s the catch: while Google is executing all this, competitors have their heads in the sand. At some point word of Google’s plans becomes known. In order to react the competitor must now respond to these exciting new features by building them on top of an existing complex platform. As this excellent interview with a Hotmail product unit manager shows, major changes to a system with millions of users are not a simple or cheap process. Meanwhile Google has had the advantage of planning out these features from the start, and in many cases having the luxury of developing them before the competition learns of what they are.

This advantage is compounded by the deep pockets and excellent human talent that Google has. It is able to play the role of the new kid with innovative new ideas, but where the new kid would be bought out or destroyed by the larger companies, Google has the major resources to required to fight head to head to maintain its advantage.

While Google has had some negative publicity recently, as pointed out by the ArsTechnica article that alerted me to GF’s launch, it is evident that it is continuing to follow the above formula and consequently drawing users to more and more of its services. Is this good or bad? We’ll just have to see.

I’ve decided that this will be the last update for some time on this morning experiment. As described below, the experiment has succeed greatly so far and I will continue with the early rise routine. I am on day five now, getting a lot done, and feeling great.

The biggest challenge right now is simply sticking to waking up at 5am every day. On Sunday I faltered and woke up at 6 instead of 5 despite two alarms insisting I need to be up. The consequences of this were immediately clear. I was disappointed that I had overslept and felt hurried the entire morning. After my usual morning routine and breakfast it was already 7:30 and this felt very late to begin work. I felt less motivated to get things done, lacking that “super productivity” high that I had been getting from waking up early. Oddly enough my mood wasn’t sour. In fact my partner in crime for this experiment commented on how amazingly cheerful I was, and how my great mood helped her wake up and get into the day (she has been having less success with being excited about waking up early).

On a familiar note to 7:30 feeling late to begin work, I woke up in bed on my own this morning wondering if I had maybe overslept the alarms I had set. I was in that “feeling rested but wanting to sleep more mood”, the kind that I get when I oversleep. I got up to check the time and found out that it was only 4! These events show that my body is rapidly adjusting to the timeshift I have imposed on it, making me feel confident that I can continue waking up this early.

It’s all in the Attitude

Over the past four days I’ve noticed a very strong link between my mood, mindset, and productivity. I had succeeded at waking up at 3 in the morning the first night due to a very strong desire to do so. Contrast this with the typical “I hate mornings” attitude where the desire is to keep sleeping as long as possible. I’ve had varying degrees of success and attitude in waking up the past four days, but simply wanting to wake up earlier has allowed me to have a great morning just as soon as the sleep wore off.

Similarly my housemate and I have both noticed that there is a real way to affect how you’ll wake up in the morning by your attitude and intentions the night before. The 3am wake-up is the most obvious example, but this has also applied to the results achieved on other days. From now on I’ll be sure to spend a few minutes before bed imagining how good it will feel to get up and start the day early.

Next Steps

My goal is to fully adapt to the 5am routine and then experiment with tweaking it. I want to find the optimal waking time for myself, and the optimal hours of sleep. I am also interested to see how this routine will ultimately affect weekends and exam studying. I will address the results of these tweaks in my 30 day update.

So You Want to Wake up Early

Waking up this early has been a very positive experience and I can’t wait to see how much better I function in the long run with this routine. If you want to try something similar, my experiences show the following may help:

• Start now, not tomorrow. As with anything from taking up a new hobby to quitting smoking, the universally effective technique is to not put it off. Set your alarm for 5 in the morning right now. You’re off to a great start!
• Make sure you have something to do in the morning. Getting up in the morning feels great and makes it possible to accomplish what you want before everyday life bogs you down. Your best energy should be funneled into your most rewarding and creative tasks, not into going grocery shopping, sitting in a lecture, or getting the kids ready for school.
• Enter the experiment with the most positive attitude and your results will match. Self full-filling prophecies are powerful stuff, so put them to positive use.

Steve Pavlina has some more ideas on rising early in his How to Become an Early Riser article. In particular he addresses that the appropriate time to go to bed is when your body is tired and quotes his own times to be typically 10-11pm for a 5am waking. This is one thing I really wish to try and may be a solution for not allowing a later night to ruin the sleep schedule and energy of the subsequent day.

Note: Steve is now a polyphasic sleeper, but I don’t see myself going that far anytime soon!