ebunoluwa.com

After 8 months of blogging, I’ve decided to shut down my breakdancing blog, Celebreak.net. It was a tough decision but my life in Japan isn’t conducive to regular blogging. So I put it to sleep last night.

I struggled to really define Celebreak because it was hard to categorize my posts. Though everything was related to breaking, there was no distinct, unifying tone. Sometimes I’d blog as a historian and talk about breaking’s embarassments and evolution. Othertimes, I’d be a journalist with a burning desire to break a story and inform the masses. And some posts were just me thinking out loud…

I’m really just a guy who loves breaking and wanted to tell the world about it.

Fortunately, the last 8 months of blogging have been fruitful. I learned a lot more about breaking, it’s history and its culture. On a professional level, I also learned how to write better, effectively use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, tweak for SEO and leverage the force known as Twitter.

The Celebreak.net domain name will expire sometime this year but the archives will remain alive at http://projects.ebunoluwa.com/celebreak. Like children, I love all my posts but also have some favorites:

• How did Junior (Wanted Crew) become the Rick Astley of Breaking?
• Interviews with B-Boy Photographers Carlo Cruz and Peter Tsai
• Breaking on the Big Screen: Flashdance
• Breakdancing around the World series (includes Uganda, Iraq, Kazakhstan and many more)
• The film Detours and how it addressed Biting
• The Breakploitation of the 80’s and subsequent breakploitation posts
• Planet B-Boy Movie Review
• Breakdancing on College Campuses
• Campaigning is Battling

I know that’s a lot of fav’s but how do you select just a few when there are so many to choose from (no such thing as an ugly baby :-D)!

It’s the end of Celebreak but not the end of my breaking. Despite being in rural Japan, I’m still dancing and have even found a few interested students at my schools. And I also have a few other breaking + web ideas so I may be back internet b-boying in no time.

Living on the West Coast was a liberating experience. Leaving the Bay, I knew that not only would I miss the people, I’d also miss the city. I frequented many spots in San Francisco to clear my mind, meditate or just enjoy the view. The Edwardian and Victorian dwellings, beautiful scenery and unique composition of SF were a constant source of inspiration and the embodiment of California’s soul.

Here’s a video I made to pay homage to some of my favorite spots:

California Soul - a SF b-boy video memoir from Ebunoluwa on Vimeo.

The US is currently going through a recession resulting in hard times and layoffs. Each week, the number of unemployed Americans increases. I unfortuantely became a part of these statistics…

…but I’m using this unexpected turn of events as an opportunity: I’ve accepted a contract with Interac to teach English in Japan for one year and will be starting in April.

I don’t speak Japanese
I’ve never been to Japan
I don’t know anyone who lives in Japan.
And I’m sure to stick out like a sore thumb.

I’ve never been so excited!

I started a separate, dedicated blog at http://nipponder.blogspot.com to document this new, thrilling experience.  I look forward to teaching, learning the Japanese language and culture and seeing more of the world!

Now that we’ve celebrated Obama’s inauguration, it’s time to start scrutinizing him and holding him to his promises!

Just generated a Wordle Cloud of Celebreak.net:

I had know idea that I typed Ellen Degeneres’ name so often!

Today marks my 1 year anniversary as a product manager (PM): 50 PRD’s, 500+ logged bugs, all sorts of testing and countless meetings.

Dilbert on Product Management

I didn’t really know what I was signing onto, but then again, what new PM really does? PM positions are like snowflakes. Duties differ from job to job and are tailored to our respective companies. However, one common description is that PM’s fill the gap between business and technology. This spot can be overlooked when first starting out but is essential to any growing technology company.

After 3 years as a consultant working in all stages of the SDLC, I found that my interests lay in filling that gap. Though I pursued computer engineering in college, I also got an early taste of business and wanted to deal with both. Software Product Management was a perfect fit. In addition, there was a Silicon Valley start-up, Tobi, which had an open PM position in an industry I love: fashion. Their mission is to build a web 2.0 e-tailing website, using personal stylists to create a truly 1-to-1 online shopping experience (versus today’s typical, ineffective catalog model). The opportunity was too good to pass up.

As vague as PM is, I’ve found that they’re even more loosely defined at smaller companies. My job, as the sole PM, is to act as the middle-man between the company’s business units (Marketing, CRM, Operations, Purchasing and Creative) and Engineering for both the front-end store and back-end, enterprise-level office system. This entails being a generalist and wearing many hats. My duties include–but are not limited to–business analysis, requirements gathering, deriving use cases, functional design, UI design, user acceptance testing, quality assurance testing, user support, road mapping, project management and writing release notes. When engineering has questions about business use, they contact me. Similarly, when business users have questions about the back-end system, they also talk to me.

It’s been a challenge that I’ve enjoyed meeting. The dynamic, agile environment has tested my waterfall roots and given me the flexibility and creative freedom to get things done by any means necessary. Plus, working with every department within a young, growing company has provided the unique opportunity to see how a business is operated and built from the ground up.

If you’re an engineer or developer with curiosity beyond the code, I’d highly recommend becoming a product manager, even if just for a while. Whether you build a career in it or go back to dev, having experience in both will give you a valuable perspective on how technology companies are operated as a whole.

Gigaom.com had a post today entitled “5 Trends That will Separate the Strong From the Weak in 2009“. It’s an interesting read but in the last part in particular stuck out to me:

Business models sink or swim. Several new business models have emerged this decade, among them VoIP, social networks and online video. But with a few exceptions, they haven’t been profitable. 2009 could be something of a crucible for them. Companies offering products or services for free will be tested as ad dollars remain scarce.

The pressure will force companies to be creative about monetizing technologies that have proved popular. Those that simply won’t bring profits will survive, there just won’t be any publicly traded companies behind them.

This articulates something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Some of these social media startups are cool but I think, for the most part, social media should complement a business model and not be it. Companies who bet all their chips on a free service are either blindly believing the hype or not thinking things through. And if they think they can build a profitable business solely from ad revenue, they also need to think again; studies have shown that people generally ignore them. And for those who don’t, browsers like FireFox have extensions that block them anyway.

Now that I’ve said that, I still think ads works, just not the way many companies attempt to leverage them. You need a smaller company and a realistic ad strategy. Show me an ad when I’m most susceptible. Why would I click on an insurance company advertisement when looking at my aunt’s birthday party pictures on facebook? It’s about the context, not the content.

Puma started reissuing Puma Clydes in 2005, 37 years after they first came out.

“In 1968, the legend was born. A style icon on and off the court, the signature shoe was made famous in the 1970s by N.Y. basketball hero Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He asked for a wider last and more colors so that’s what we did. Three decades on and still the essence of cool.”

I waited 3 years to pick these ones up:

Puma Clydes

Facebook. Myspace. Twitter. The list goes on…

Just a few years ago, we were afraid to put our personal information online. We were warned against having our last names on the internets. We feared everyone on the other end of our dial-up modems was out to get us. That our lives would be infiltrated at the drop of any personal data.

But now we volunteer it.

And we should. People are going to search for you. Apply for a job? Google search. Is someone interested in you romantically? Facebook search. There’s no stopping it. And since avoiding it is futile, we should embrace it.

By trying to remain private, we relinquish control of our internet identities to whatever search engines index and what we forget to make private on social networks. But by accepting the web’s new world order,  we take the first step towards defining them. We should make sure that if people search for us–and it’s usually a good thing if they do–that they find what we want them to see.