“Jaiku was not much more than a year old when we were acquired. It was like hitching a ride on a firecracker!” says Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku.

“I poured my heart and soul into designing the service with our small team,” he says of the microblogging tool similar to Twitter. “As a sociologist I was convinced microblogging had the power to change society (see Egypt) — and I thought we would keep building the company for a long time. But we didn’t anticipate usage would explode so fast. Our back end had scaling issues, and our mobile client was for Nokia’s Symbian phones, which turned out to be an impossible platform to develop for.”

So in October 2007, Jaiku agreed to a sale to Google (rumored purchase price: $12 million).

At the time, Engeström (right) and co-founder Petteri Koponen wrote, “Our engineers are excited to be working together [with Google] and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together.” Google Product Manager Tony Hsieh wrote, “We’re excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.”

A time of excitement
Looking back, Engeström remembers the excitement of those days. “We joined Google with the assumption we’d build a new, more scalable service that would be tightly integrated with a small project called Android, which I thought was the best thing to happen to the mobile industry and was led by Andy Rubin, who had the cojones to take over the world,” he says.

“At the time, most people still thought microblogging was a passing trend: superfluous status messages a small population of geeks texted to each other on their Sidekicks and Treos. I was convinced microblogging was the defining social innovation of the decade, and that it would become ubiquitous with the oncoming age of smartphones; so it was exciting to think we could leapfrog to a completely different scale and have Google’s near-infinite engineering resources behind us to meet the exploding demand.”

Unique visitors at Twitter and Jaiku back in 2007. (Source: VentureBeat)

Industry insiders also felt the prospects for the collaboration were bright. RWW’s Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote, “With easy group creation, RSS import and threaded conversation, amongst other features, Jaiku is probably a superior service to Twitter.” A Softpedia piece said, “One thing is sure: the Jaiku products will be improved a lot.” Even Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, had kind words for the deal: “Those guys have a keen grasp of mobile, and it’s probably a good fit for whatever Google’s cooking up.”

Closed to new users
But after the purchase, Jaiku was closed to new users and quickly slipped into “the Google black hole,” according to reporter Farhad Manjoo. Three months after the acquisition, signups were still closed. Engeström wrote on the company blog: “To be honest, a lot of our time in the early going was spent on getting to know Google.”

David Lawee, the Google Vice President in charge of acquisitions, told Manjoo that moving a new company onto Google’s systems takes 3-6 months and enables scaling. But problems continued after that time frame for Jaiku. After ten months, Jaiku was still closed to new users and existing users were complaining it was too slow. Engeström responded, “We feel the short term pain, too.” All the while, Twitter was gaining traction.

Then, in January of 2009, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced changes to Jaiku: “We are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.”

But nothing much really happened after that. The site is still up but its blog hasn’t been updated since 2009. The About page says, “The service is maintained by volunteer Google engineers on their spare time.”

During the NCAA basketball tournament I heard announcer Jim Nantz telling viewers to go to CBSsports.com for “tournament related social media.” A week later I noticed a category at Maria Shriver’s site for “social media.”

Strange thing is I’ve never heard a non-tech person use the phrase “social media.” Normal people mention being friends on Facebook or reading someone’s tweets on Twitter. They don’t say, “I want to get some social media.”

It’s a good reminder of how easy it is to get caught up in industry jargon and how we talk instead of how they (i.e. customers) actually think/talk. The phrase you use internally isn’t necessarily the one you should use with the outside world.

Billy Corgan, Jack White, Trent Reznor, The Edge, Daniel Lanois, Joe Perry. They’re just a few of the big name guitarists who swear by the strange sounds, textures, interfaces, and custom paint jobs of Zachary Vex’ boutique effects pedals.

“Being weird makes me stand out from other pedal manufacturers,” Vex says. “Weird sounds get people talking. There are a number of musicians who want to produce sounds that make them stand out from the crowd. Our stuff appeals to those players.” And those players are willing to shell out too: The pedals cost between $250 and $500 each.

The light bulb moment
The first pedal Vex ever built was formed out of a small plastic fishing tackle box. “My older brothers got me into electric guitar and they worked at an injection molding company so we had lots of these plastic boxes around, and they and my cousins played through a Maestro Fuzz Tone at my uncle’s house, which I found extremely exciting-sounding,” says Vex. “In high school I heard that sound again. A student was in a practice room with a guitar, amp, and some little box with sliders on it which sounded identical to a Jordan Boss Tone. I knocked on the door and introduced myself, and he explained he’d broken his Jordan enclosure so badly he had to re-house it. A light bulb went off for me. I realized I could build my own effects. I used a schematic from an article in Popular Electronics (my mom got me the subscription) and built my first fuzz in 10th grade, and sold it to that student for $10 a few weeks later. He loved it.”

Vex then went on to build and sell tube amps and amp modifications throughout the 1980s. He did electronics tech work, owned a recording studio from 1985 to 1991, and then worked as an independent recording engineer/producer until 1995. That’s when he started Z.Vex Effects.

Startup funds came from a strange source; The city paid Vex to relocate him and his roommate from their loft because a Federal Reserve Bank was being built next to the property. Vex lived off that money for a couple of months and was able to take a break from recording to work on electronics.

Vex: “My first Z.Vex pedal was an improvement on an Apollo Fuzz-Wah fuzz, which was the Octane. I showed it to Nate at Willie’s American Guitars in St. Paul and he immediately ordered three. I hadn’t planned on going into business, it just happened by accident. I started making a living within about two months after the pedal company started. A meager living, but a living. I believe my apartment was about $300 a month.”

“Being weird makes me stand out from other pedal manufacturers.”

It’s crazy that actually being able to email your doctor is still so unusual in this day and age. It’s one of the many “bizarre habits that have been ingrained” in the world of primary care, according to Dr. Tom X. Lee. And that’s why Lee started One Medical Group, which offers personalized “concierge” care to patients for $200 a year.

We start by offering same-day appointments that you can schedule conveniently online. In the office, we respect your time by meeting with you on schedule so you know you’ll be back to work on time. We also believe in building more personalized relationships with our patients, so we offer longer visits which means you have more high-quality time with your doctor. And after your visit, our online services make it simple to contact your doctor and even renew prescriptions without coming in for a follow-up visit — saving you both time and money.

When Lee started One Medical Group (OMG?), he said, “it was very clear that health care organizations were lacking both the service hospitality mind-set of hotels and the operational efficiency you’d see in manufacturing industries.” It now has several thousand patients and a growth rate of 50 percent a year, gained mostly by word of mouth.

Letting customers schedule appointments online also helps the company be more efficient. Most primary-care offices have at least four administrative employees per physician. OMG has cut that ratio in half.

Hello Health
Hello Health is another medical provider attempting to tackle the various unpleasantries of the typical doctor’s appointment. Some of the features of Hello Health:

Online Scheduling
The Online Availability Calendar lets you schedule appointments from anywhere.

Secure Email
A safe and convenient way to communicate with your healthcare provider.

Prescription Renewal
Request prescription renewals online and for pick up at your pharmacy.

Secure Instant Messaging
Text-based, a simple way to access your healthcare provider.

Video Visits
Meet face-to-face with your provider without leaving home.

Lab Results
Save time and review test results and other important information online.

Hello Health emerged from the house calls and same-day “e-visits” of Dr. Jay Parkinson, a NYC doctor. When he launched his practice, Parkinson accepted PayPal, but not insurance. 300 patients signed up in the first three months. He said, “I run this entire thing off my iPhone and a laptop. I can access any patient records from my iPhone. Patients can make an appointment on my Web site and it’ll text me and I’ll go see them. This is, to me, what’s missing from medicine: personalized attentiveness.”

“The Doctor of the Future” talks about the evolution of Parkinson’s system. At Hello Health, patients pay a $35 monthly subscription fee and $100-200 an hour for online or office visits. Brief email queries are free.

There’s no receptionist, so doctors greet patients as they arrive. And patients can rate visits too. “You can rate a visit, comment on it, share it,” Parkinson says. “Is that innovative? Man, I don’t know. It’s paying attention to what’s awesome about Flickr and then doing it.”

Seems strange that bringing simple basics like email/live chat access and customer ratings to an industry can still be considered “groundbreaking.” So it’s nice to see companies like these challenging the status quo and picking a fight. The health care industry could use the shakeup.

Exit Interview is a Signal vs. Noise series that talks to founders to see what happens after companies get acquired.

In October of 2006, Conde Nast’s Wired Digital bought online news aggregator reddit.com. “Our goal will be to build reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same,” Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital at the time, said in a statement.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit (right), stayed at the company for three years and then departed in October of 2009 saying, “It’s shocking to see how far the site has come.”

Below, Ohanian discusses how he feels now looking back at reddit’s path.

How do you feel about the acquisition of reddit?
I had so much going on in my life that I felt relieved more than anything else when we sold reddit. The site materially changed my life in a lot of ways, but I’m really proud of the three years Steve Huffman and I spent there after the acquisition. We could’ve comfortably left day one, but I know I personally was going to do my entire term because at the very least I owed it to my new employers that they get their money’s worth and to ensure the community that did so much for us. Plus, it was still lots of fun.

Fortunately, they were very interested in not screwing up a good thing, so I enjoyed a tremendous amount of freedom and we were largely left to guide the website as we saw fit. I was always dabbling in other products that I’d farm out to talented redditors I’d contract development of small projects to — things like reddit.tv we could tie into advertising deals without ruining the purity of the reddit.com experience. That particular site was built by a redditor named TriteLife for me, but has since been entirely rebuilt by a volunteer redditor who missed it so much after its run ended that he wrote a new one himself.

There have been bumps along the way, for sure, but we weathered some really rough economic times without ruining the user-first approach to product that keeps the site nearly ad-free (and when there are ads, they’re not obnoxious). Off the top of my head, I can’t say that about any site as big as reddit save Craiglist, which is a rather exceptional site.

A human-powered airplane. That was the challenge set forth by Henry Kremer in 1959. For 18 years, nobody could do it. But within six months of trying, Paul MacCready built and flew his Gossamer Condor (below). The difference in his approach: While others needed a year’s worth of effort for each test flight, he created a plane that he could fly, fix, and fly again in mere hours. Aza Raskin explains:*

The problem was the problem. MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself. And a negative side effect was the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding of how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, re-test, and re-learn cycle went from months and years to hours and days…

So what’s the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

[Thanks to Tim for the link.]

MacCready is a fascinating guy. Some deeper digging — this 1991 interview with MacCready and “Unleashing Creativity,” a keynote presentation he made in 1995 — reveals more interesting lessons from the Gossamer project…

Trust your subconcious
In 1976, MacCready was in debt. He had guaranteed a friend that he’d repay a $100,000 loan he used to start a company that failed. Something in his brain clicked when he realized the £50,000 Kremer Prize for human-powered flight was still up for grabs. The value of the British pound in 1976 was exactly $2. MacCready credits his subconscious with making the connection. “The prize equaled the debt! Human-powered flight suddently became attractive, motivating,” he said. “The only big ideas I ever came up with arose from daydreaming.”

Whenever he hit a sticking point with the project, he gave up on it and went off and did other things. “This is a fairly acknowledged way of coming up with inventions,” he explained. “You get yourself all full of details, still can’t figure out how to overcome the problems, and you give up and then, suddenly, an idea pops into your mind, or a dream, or something else you are doing, shows you a way to handle it that you would never have gotten by sitting in your office and grinding along in a good linear fashion. It requires getting away, looking at it more dispassionately, or not even looking at it.”

Dropping the topic from his “conscious priority list” led him to a hobby study on a different topic, observing the speed and turning radius of various soaring birds. “The subconscious again shouted, ‘Aha!’ The light bulb of innovation glowed over my head. And the Gossamer aircraft concept emerged,” he explained.

Naiveté can trump people, time, and resources
Other teams had more people, time, and resources. They made sophisticated aircraft that didn’t come close to winning the prize. He said, “That proved that those approaches were not very good. Plus I couldn’t aspire to make such complex, elegant aircraft as they had made.”

In fact, MacCready felt his inexperience was actually a strength. “Each British team had a specialist for every discipline, and so the wing structure was constructed starting from conventional structural design by an excellent structural engineer from the aircraft industry,” he said. “I have no background in aircraft wing structure. Thus, in my naiveté, I started from first principles (with some insights left over from building indoor model airplanes in the 50s and hang gliders in the early 70s), pretended I never saw an airplane before, and came up with the Gossamer Condor approach that permitted a 96’ span vehicle to weigh only 55-70 lbs. The British engineers also knew about indoor models and hang gliders, but they knew so much about their specialty that an easier approach was not apparent.”

“I pretended I never saw an airplane before and came up with the Gossamer Condor.”

The advantage of inexperience is a concept others have pointed out too. Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp: “I just think there’s actually a huge power to inexperience. In the context of deeply entrenched problems that many people have given up on, it helps to not have a traditional framework so you can ask the naive questions. That can help you set goals that more experienced people wouldn’t think are feasible.”