The Four Minute Mile

It was called the greatest sporting achievement of the 20th century by many.  No one believed that a human can run a mile in under four minutes.  The belief was considered an ultimate barrier for generations.  This disbelief was until one fateful day in 1955 when the British medical student Roger Bannister broke the barrier by a hair.  He ran a mile in just under 4 minutes.  Unbelievable feat!  Never in the history of mankind had such had an accomplishment ever taken place.

But within one year the record was broken again.  By seventeen other people!
What does this tell us?  The clarity is profound for me as an entrepreneur.  The barriers are often mental.  We convince ourselves that it cannot be done.  It is not until we see others do it that we believe it  might  be possible after all.  Such was the turning point for the entrepreneurs in the Middle East and many Muslim majority countries when Maktoob, an Arabic language web portal and email service, was acquired by Yahoo for $160M last year.

“Tell the stories”   – telling simple stories about how somebody did it makes a huge difference in somebody’s life – some place far far away.  This was my main message as I attended and spoke at the TechWadi event at the presidential summit on entrepreneurship in Washington DC this week.  This was a follow up from President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo on June 2009 when he promised a new beginning on how US communicates with the muslin majority countries in the world.  Obama asserted that a new chapter in US foreign policy that is based on mutual respect and dialog will usher a new era.  Well this was the follow up and it was a great week. We had the opportunity to hear so many stories from entrepreneurs from 55 countries on how they innovated and created compelling companies.

I was moved by the story of Puni, an Indonesian entrepreneur who invented, sold and installed 60 micro power plans that can generate water if there is a water fall of 3 meters or more.  She told the story of how it brought electricity to remote villages and how that changed lives.  I was also moved by  the story of a Turkish entrepreneur who started a service to enable remote order taking and delivery of food from restaurants by signing up 4000 restaurants.  He is doing 22,000 transactions per day and is very profitable.

Several initiatives were created and the US State department is encouraging collaboration and providing the infrastructure now that should make America’s greatest strength and innovation (Entrepreneurship) its strategic piece of diplomacy.

The Power Struggle 

There are a lot of things that I love about my iPhone 4S – but one thing that I really would love to see change is the battery life. Despite a brand new phone, these days,  I barely get through a whole day before I need to hook it up to the charger.  I am determined to understand the issue or swap the phone. But one hour at the Apple store with a “genius” is all it took to solve this problem.

1)      Biggest culprit: location services.  Of course you need the location service turned on for Siri, maps etc. But I was shocked to see that I had 30+ applications with location turned on.  Some of these apps I had used over a year ago and only once.   If you want to turn off all of the applications that use location services, here is the path:  Settings à Location Services – action: turn off.  I now only have location services activated for the ones that I really mean to use – just Siri and Maps.

2)      Bluetooth is the next offender  for battery life consumption.  I do use Bluetooth to link with my Blue Ant hands free in the car, but I don’t always have a need for Bluetooth (for example when I am travelling). So I turned this off:  Settings à General à Bluetooth .

3)      Getting your emails: there are 3 ways that iPhone receives your emails. Push, Fetch and Manual. Here is the difference:

  1. Push is the fastest – email is checked constantly – several times a second automatically and obviously takes the most power as CPU is active
  2. Fetch is when iPhone seeks and checks at an interval chosen by you if any new email has arrived at the server and then downloads it.  You can chose a setting to fetch every 15 minute, 30 or 60 minutes
  3. Manual is when the iPhone checks the email server for a new email only when you tell it to or when you open the email client by tapping it

So my iPhone was set to get emails from my 9 or so email accounts almost all using the PUSH setting – oh boy! This must be draining.  Obviously from the power consumption point of view you would want all of these email accounts to be Manual but we need speed.  So what I did was to set my work email to PUSH and all others to MANUAL.  So when I get a work email (or whichever one is most important to you) and you will open the email client when you hear the beep.  All other accounts will be checked ‘manually’ and I will see all of the new emails at once. Path:  Settings à Mail, Contacts, Calendar à Fetch New Data à Advanced

Well I have to report that modifying these 3 issues did fix my battery drainage problem.  I can now end the day with heavy use and still have ~15% left by midnight.

Now I must work on improving my relationship with Siri.