Action Engine had a booth at the NAB 2008 (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas this year, in their nascent “mobile universe”pavilion.  Newly added to the show, the powers that be in the NAB event office queerly decided to place the pavilion smack-dab in the intersection of patch-cord vendors, RF antenna suppliers and power conditioner companies.  Needlesstosay, not the best fit for a mobile applications company. Still, I love all things broadcasting and video media creation, so I jumped at the booth duty.  In addition to possessing the snottiest of fanboys, I do have to give NAB props for having the best swag and coolest boothes ever.

Ad:tech is the trade conference for digital marketing wonks of all stripes.  “Digital” in this particular context means putting ads all over the internet: SEO, paid search placements, flash web advertising, television 2.0 (whatever that means), email marketing (the bastards) and for the past couple of years, mobile marketing - in particular banner ads on WAP sites.

Mickey Alam Khan, the editor in chief of the Mobile Marketer news site was heading up a panel discussion about the future of mobile marketing and invited Action Engine to participate. Provided, of course, we were sandwiched between actual customers and not slideware presentations. This wasn’t a problem at the end of the day, since the panel included Richard Trumble, the Exec Director at Wall Street Journal Digital (a customer of Action Engine) as well as Eric Eller, SVP of products and marketing at Millennial Media (a recent marketing partner of Action Engine).  I sat between them.

I really was not supposed to be the talking head for this show, the honor was supposed to fall on Scott Silk’s shoulders (Action Engine’s erstwhile CEO) but at the last minute he had to drop out.  But as any PR person worth their salt will tell you, dropping out of a speaking gig is verboten.  Getting on a panel is free publicity after all, and finding a slot requires more than a little begging.  Since Scott couldn’t go, the opportunity rolled my way (helped by the fortuitous sick leave of the SVP of Sales, the unavailability of the VP of Marketing, and the absence of our usual other talking head — but hey, every little bit helps).  The problem was, I didn’t have much in the way of prep-time in 26 hours I had from agreeing to go until the time I took the stage. So in the time I had, I banged out a list of talking points, memorized them and did my best to sound informed and spontaneous. Here’s what I had to say:

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AD:TECH TALKING POINTS
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State of the (mobile) advertising industry (at least from the perspective of mobile applications)

• As I see it, mobile advertising is bound up in four parameters: Who is being advertised to, Where you are reaching them, How you are getting to them and What you are doing to get your message out.
• (Who) The landscape is large, mobile subscriber market is by and large saturated; everyone who wants a cellphone has one. This is a great addressable population.
• (Where) Cellphones are new the ubiquitous and addictive device, it’s called a crackberry for a reason (iPhone users are coming along shortly with their own substance abuse allusion as well.)
• (How) WAP has basically been figured out, it’s now the de facto lowest common denominator experience. But the fact is WAP *is* the lowest common denominator experience … getting positioning on that could be similar to having placements on a blog, not on the New York Times site.
• (What) We’ve seen an amazing up take in mobile application installation. The iPhone app store had 10 million downloads in its first weekend, as a result, carriers (who are not AT&T) are scrambling to figure out how to replicate that sort of experience with their subscribers.

• In getting these applications out, the market has started to see a growing user expectation: content is “free.” In fact Wired magazine had an issue with the cover story all about the price point of “free.” This is carrying into the mobile universe as well.
• At the CTIA trade show AT&T Fast Pitch I did for Mobile MySI, Scott Williams the VP of Mobile told the AT&T panel “Users just won’t pay for content, they see it as a free good” as a result they had to monetize in other ways. That way is advertising.
  This is being validated by the entrees of the big web marketers (speaking in the subsidized application universe, not the WAP universe) of Yahoo and Google.
• Yahoo has the Go3 platform, which explicitly includes a markup tag called <ad>.
• Google Android is open source and free, but all Google applications are free. They aren’t being wholly altruistic; a $200 million plus investment is going to draw dividends via advertising.

What makes mobile advertising hard?

• Mobile advertising is hard like a weekend long jigsaw puzzle, not hard like vector calculus. Technical issues are being addressed by the mobile industry for things like transcription, management and all that.
• The difficulty is in an advertising industry’s workflow. It’s dedicated to print and to a lesser extent web marketing. But banner ads on the Wall Street Journal homepage are not immediately repurposeable to running on a WAP site, they’ll need rework to match MMA standards.
• There are also rich opportunities, such as video pre-roll. With larger phone screens, the experience can be very compelling. But resizing existing video isn’t a great solution – there was a reason why television watches failed in the 1980s (remember those?) Image quality wasn’t great… nobody wants to watch Kerry Wood pitch a no-hitter when the baseball is the size of a single pixel.

How can mobile marketing succeed?

• Consider mobile marketing to be its own thing entirely and build a process around that. Don’t make it like the web but different, or like television, but different. It’s a complete universe onto itself.
• Millennial Media has done great innovation work with its “serial thriller” concept, a storytelling ad format. Now make that work for video, audio and text. “Make it work!”

UPDATE: Mickey published an article regarding the panel discussion (sadly my title is listed incorrectly, since I had run out of all my business cards).  The article includes almost nothing of what I had to say — which isn’t much of a surprise actually the folks there were more interested in SMS and WAP advertising than in-application advertising — but at least Action Engine got three mentions.  The bulk of the article was devoted to an almost transcript-like coverage of what Rich Trumble had to say.  Oh well, on to media event number three !

For the past few years, friends of mine Sandro and James have been kicking off the backpacking season with a trip up to the Rachel and Rampart Lakes in the Alpine Lakes region of the Cascade Mountains.  Both areas are very beautiful, while taking some work to get up to.  This was my second year coming with them and based on our experiences last year, it’s been something I’ve been greatly looking forward to the entire year.

This trip started out with a bang, literally. The evening before there was an unexpected  set of thunderstorms, not the most inviting idea considering the hike alternates between high forest and open plains areas. We set out regardless, considering that the mountain ridges might buffer the worst of the weather and the trail report was pretty favorable.  It claimed “some snow” on the trail, but mostly clear with trillium flowers sprouting up along the path.  In hindsight, there ought to have been ominous foreshadowing music.

To say “some snow” was a wild underestimate. In fact, there were areas of up to nine feet of snow judging by the depth of the tree wells going up the path.  Whole areas of the trail were obscured by snowfall and it took the master pathfinder — James Wittingham Spencer — to keep us on track.  It didn’t click at the time, but the waterfalls were far more active than usual, owing to the massive amount of snowfall and the very delayed start of any warm weather. This would have an impact on the path up, something I’ve never had the circumstance to do before: fording water. For those who do not know (and as I said, I didn’t until it was brought up) fording a stream involves taking off your boots, striping off your socks, removing the lower half of your hiking pants and walking through water barefoot. However, in this case, it was barefoot in snow melt.  Very recent snow melt. Perhaps around 33F. And lots of it.

By the time we made it up to Rachel Lake, it became obvious that the trail report was woefully inaccurate, collectively we had all packed inappropriately and on the upside, this was going to be a trip with a great deal of solitude.  Rachel Lake had about 60% ice cover and most of the campsites were snowed under. It had take us far longer to get to Rachel Lake than we had expected, just short of 5 hours.  We were tired, cold and faced with the prospect of hiking further in diminishing sunlight.  We set up camp in a day use spot of Rachel Lake.

The next morning we started off on a day hike to see the Rampart Lakes and whether or not we should relocate camp.  The morning was warm and had some sun so the heading up hill was going to be an easy enough affair.  Our original plan to ascend Mt. Alta was largely out of reach, the point having been shrouded in deep cloud cover, so Rampart Lakes it was.  If Rachel Lake was merely frozen, the Ramparts were arctic tundra.  Everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow and ice — including things I have not seen before, like rivers and waterfalls.

Hi, bitskrieg.

chrisgregoire (chrisgregoire) is now following your updates on Twitter.

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Chris Gregoire — for those who do not know — is the current governor of the state of Washington.  I’ve already committed my vote to her re-election and I also work part-time on her campaign.  I just find it kind of spooky that my governor is, well, “following” me.

Update:  I am now also connected to Chris Gregoire on facebook!

To keep things manageable, we’ve instituted a buy-one, get-one policy. All the kids pull a name from a hat and buy his or her a gift. No muss, no fuss. This last year, I decided to opt out entirely of Christmas gifts (well, half so — I still bought the gift I was assigned to give, I’m not a complete ass) for myself and asked people to do something kind instead. When I was asked by one of my sisters what I wanted, this is the email I sent around:

Hmmm. Here’s what I’ve come up with: everyone’s off the hook for Christmas with me this year. After thinking about it for a while, I’ve realized that everything I need I already have, and anything I’ve ever wanted I don’t really need. So rather than a gift this year, I instead have a few requests to make (don’t fret they’re easy).

1. Clean out your closet (I mean this in a literal, not a figurative way). Find a few pieces of clothing you have which you haven’t worn in over a year, that doesn’t fit you or that you have had second thoughts about. Give them away — doesn’t matter to whom. Organize the rest. (Bonus points for doing this with the junk drawer.)
2. Say something nice to and do something good for a complete stranger. Don’t expect anything in return. The gift is in the experience of giving, not the investment for a thank you.
3. Consider giving a gift to increase peace in the world. You can, for example, use Heifer International (www.heifer.org) to give a flock of geese to a family in Cambodia ($20), or make a microloan (www.kiva.org) to a woman entrepreneur building a sustainable economy in Africa ($25) or you could help remove landmines from playgrounds in Cambodia with www.changethepresent.org ($50).

The third is entirely up to you, but I would appreciate hearing about the first two. And yes, I will still be sending out presents and cards; even I know that not everyone is excited about providing fishing poles and nets to a village in sub-Saharan Africa.

Pretty easy stuff.

Happy Holidays Everyone !

-Chris

For the most part, everyone respected the request and I got some pretty nice emails about how clothing trends from the 1980s were no longer in dry storage. The one person who didn’t honor the “no gifts” policy was my mother. This was to be expected, of course. I ought to preface the remaining story to clarify that I’m not the easiest person to buy for. Having no dependents beyond two cats, general impulse control issues and readily disposable cash make for a pretty consistent kickline of instant gratification in my household. In this particular case however, I was taken entirely by surprise.

I had two wrapped items under the tree, both relatively small in size. The first item turned out to be a set of heat-resistant rubber spatulas. Apparently my mother was looking for one the last time she cooked in my kitchen, could not find one and opted to use Christmas to correct the egregious oversight on my part. Nice, trivial, easily used at home. Perfect. The second was a pair of tempur-pedic house slippers. Same “NASA”(r) quality visco-elastic memory foam everyone’s grown to know and love, just in a foot-sized package. They’re uber comfy and keep your toes quite warm to boot. (Exactly where she bought these are a mystery to me, I was actually looking for a pair after I tried on my brother’s and loved them. By the look of them, they are something you can only find at an airport Brookstone store, while in between delayed flights, late at night on alternating Fridays. Either they make like two a month or they’re shipped in from the Twilight Zone. Possibly both.) It wasn’t until I was getting ready for the drive home that she told me I had a third present waiting for me, except this one she didn’t manage to put under the tree, it was in the trunk of her Jeep.

Standing behind my mom’s truck with the trunk door popped, I could see this was no minimal present. First off, it was a cube, easily two feet on a side, gift wrapped. Secondly, it sat atop a wooden stand not entirely dissimilar to a trucking pallet. Thirdly, when I tried to take it out of the trunk to toss it in the car I realized it was incredibly heavy. Won’t budge an inch, listen to the suspension creak as I move it, who ordered the metal plates kind of heavy. I was thinking perhaps mom had bought me a lifetime supply of lead buckshot.

Enlisting my brother Matt to get it from her car, I tore off the gift wrap. Underneath, was a non-descript cardboard box. I lifted up the box to discover my mom had bought me a safe. Not a Sharper Image executive plaything safe. Not a RonCo “protect your valuable documents” safe. A bone fide, where’d-you-stash-the-blood-diamonds-damn-you kind of safe. A safe with thick reinforced steel walls, meant to be permanently installed into your foundation or perhaps cunningly hidden behind that Monet hanging in the palor. (With Ms. Scarlet and the candlestick.)

It took me six months and an industrial dolly to get it up the cruel stairwells in my house. This coming holiday season, I’m asking for MP3 downloads at the Amazon store.

Not all the trips are stamped sequentially, it seems to me that border agents play a game of stamping where they fancy. Also, not all countries stamp your passport. Switzerland, for example, just looks to see if you have a passport. They don’t even go as far as to *scan* it. Bizarre neutrality.

On to number two !

A pictorial summary of my travels:

Ordinarily the things I end up seeing are pretty standard fare. There are tantrum throwing children (in the range of nonage to dotage) with their attending guardians attempting immediate appeasement of some kind — plenty of these in point of fact. There are the self-absorbed, searching for something which really frames their individuality adequately, found generally in a retail setting. The absentminded are a frequent sighting. Generally it’s all banal stuff. But sometimes, just sometimes mind you, I witness a moment surprising and beautiful.

Today I was browsing around Barnes & Noble in the Pacific Place mall, running in silent mode if you will. Bookstores are almost a sure thing for soaking up hours of my time, and I needed to kill some waiting for Bill to be done with an appointment. I should note that my library at home is at a point where I stack books vertically on the shelf in an effort to economize the limited space. My ‘to read’ pile is now 10 items deep and easily as many months old. I really should be laying off the bookstores.

I walked the rows. Biography, Investments, Military History, Current Events, Islam (a section which seems to be growing rapidly, particularly in the area of ‘critiques’), I wandered past them all. I stopped for a bit in the Culture section where I saw a series of books based on the website PostSecret. PostSecret is an open art project for anyone to share a secret publicly by mailing an anonymous (usually handmade) postcard to a post office box. The postcards are scanned into an image and posted to a website for the world to see.

From I have seen on the site I can tell they range from funny notions (’I put boogers in my husband’s soup when we fight’) to secrets of terrible weight (’I knew you were being molested but kept silent so that it would not happen to me’). Reading the secrets feels incredibly intimate.  I think it’s brilliant, just enough to perhaps be divinely inspired in the secrets shared.

I popped open the book, skimming the secrets shared inside. While flipping over the pages I buzzed past a torn sheet of white paper stuff pushed into the binding. I figured it was an inventory control note or just some random scrap so I flipped back to remove it. This is something of an idiosyncrasy of mine. I like my books pristine before I take them home.

What I found inside was actually a handwritten note, scrawled with tight penmanship. The lettering was smallish as if the writer were trying to hide the note from someone else. Perhaps even from himself. (I’m guessing the author was male.) This is what the note said:

We’re sitting here next to each other writing our secrets to put in this book … I hope she comes back on her own, and looks for mine…

maybe then she’ll know I love her.

And that was the moment. I carefully put the note back into its former place and returned it to the shelf. I didn’t have the heart to buy it and break the circle. I hope she comes back on her own too.

HEADING DOWN
I flew down Monday to help set the booth up and prep for the opening day of the show. Truth be told, I find Vegas to be something of a mixed bag. I’m not a gambler, I can’t say that I’m a big drinker/partier, and I get uncomfortable in crushing crowds of humanity. So, rather than any of that, I like to hunt out the absurd (turns out there’s an abundance of it there), stake my claim, sit back and watch the hilarity ensue. It’s great fun for a few hours at least.

It turns out that I wouldn’t have to travel that far, in fact it seemed like absurdity had come to me. Driving in from McCarron airport (after waiting in taxi line reminiscent of the old E-ticket rides at Disney) the taxi passed a casino that I have never seen before. Particularly, one named “Terrible’s” (I can only imagine if there was truth in advertising, I never actually went in.) The second bit actually came about when I stepped into the convention center to get to the show floor. I accidentally came into the wrong side of the show and found myself in — The International Pizza Expo. Who knew there would be an entire show dedicated to “The best sauces ever” and “Freezing to Save”? Well, now you do.

SHOW BOOTHS ARE THE NEW McMANSION
Despite the number of trade shows I attend, I am almost always amazed at the sheer size of some booths. Charitably I can say that some of them were merely monstrous in size, others are better described as temples to Mammon. The price tag of these installations can quite easily top 5 million dollars, which does not include the shipping, construction, hook-up and deconstruction charges. These are by no means minor affairs when it comes to the big boys.

In terms of booth design fad, this was the year of the JumboTron. ‘Trons where visible from nearly ever vantage point on the trade floor, some kicking out enough light to cast shadows from nearby foot traffic. (Interesting fact: CTIA now uses 25% “green” electricity. By “green” I think they really mean to say electricity to power green LEDs.) Ericsson, Nokia and a couple of hardware vendors all decked out their spaces with JumboTrons, all blasting out images of youthful (generally large breasted) women delighted to be doing something with their mobile. Interspersed are animated text sequences extolling virtues of the company usually in a self deprecating relate-to-us-as-real-people-too kinda way (”700 million messages a day? Big Deal. Go for 8 billion.”). Last I checked real people have yet to install video screens 30×30 feet in size to share their vacation pictures. If you know otherwise, please share.

Leading the pack with ‘Tron usage by far was LG who not only had two large screens on either side of their booth facing outward (one pointed squarely at a blank causeway wall), but they also installed five smaller screens (only 3×10) in the front of their booth. The booth was actually less of a booth and more of a dance club really. They had a D.J. booth with someone spinning disks from start to finish each day, an intricate light show from a ring of IntelliBeams handing from joists above — enough to make any metal or new wave band happy at any rate — and to top it off they had funky listening pods that faced a rotating statue: a statue of a silver angel delightedly holding a cellphone to her ear. Apparently, yes, the Host of Heaven can indeed hear you now.

WORKING THE BOOTH, THROWING THE AT&T FAST PITCH
More than half the fun of any trade show is working the booth and pressing the flesh with people who walk up. The people you meet usually fall into one of five categories:

• people who want to sell you something,
• people looking for your swag handout,
• people convinced they are smarter than you and wish to prove that point,
• the incoherent and baffling guy, and
• the occasional prospect.

This show didn’t deviate from the model. All these people came by to wrangle.

I actually had more fun presenting for the AT&T Fast Pitch than working booth duty. Fast Pitch is an invitation-only program where application providers do a pitch to a panel of AT&T judges about picking up their application for distribution. Fast Pitches last a maximum of five minutes — they have a debate timer which angrily beeps when your time is up — and the vast majority of the pitch has to be a demo. AT&T assesses the applications based on (according to the invitation anyway) innovation and originality, market appeal, ease of use, device support, ease of integration with the AT&T network. I pitched two Action Engine applications: the Dow Jones news application and MySI Mobile. At stake was a first prize of $25,000 and promotion on MEdia Net’s “What’s Hot” spot for a week, and $5,000 for the second and third place runners-up.

The Dow Jones pitch took about six minutes from in the door to out the door. Dow Jones is a pretty neat application; it actually encompasses the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch properties. When we finished the demo the AT&T panel gave a blank look said they didn’t have any questions and shoo’d us out the door. Not the brightest of prospects.

The Sports Illustrated pitch by contrast was stellar. In addition to AE staffers the VP of Biz Dev for mobile at Time Warner came along to the meeting. After the dog-n-pony the AT&T panel lit up with questions: How are you going to keep the application fresh? (We’re planning regular updates to coincide with events like the swim suit issue.) Would you consider adding video or streaming audio? (Maybe, we’ve looked at it but waiting for the best possible user experience to come around in terms of technology. Not right now though.) How many devices are you planning to support? (BREW, Java and RIM for a total count of like 160 devices.) The mood changed swiftly with the last question: Would you consider doing a subscription-based model? (No. Customers consider news to be a free good and charging them for it kills the business model. We have to remain advertising supported.) It was as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Needlesstosay, we weren’t invited back for the final three.

Anne Baker (AE’s phenomenal VP of Marketing) and I were curious as to who the final three were so we stopped back at the Fast Pitch room to ask. (I’ve left the names of the companies out, I figure that sometime in the future I’ll need to get another job in the industry. That hasn’t stopped me from linking to relevant sites however.) The finalist list was actually a bit baffling to us, based on what we knew about the judging criteria. One of them was a human guided search engine which has received some interesting blog traffic as well as an un-fan MySpace page. They ended up winning the $25k. One of the other applications is a location-aware service for telling you what stores are having sales nearby. It’s a great idea in concept but the model has some serious holes, the least of which is getting merchants to actually populate the service with information. At last report the SBA estimated there were 22 million business in the US, if even 10% of those were retail outlets that means the service would need to scale immensely with an entire legion of account managers to support just the backend. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Finally the other winner was a company that made mobile flash card software. FLASH CARD SOFTWARE?!?!?! Ugggh.

WALKING THE SHOW FLOOR
I usually reserve walking the show floor for the very last day of the show. By that time, most of the fidgety sales people have left for the airport and the remaining folks are generally worn down to a nub. All this makes it easier to get plenty of free disclosure on topics that most companies would sooner not talk about with complete strangers. It’s always a good time.

I didn’t get as much time as I would ordinarily have liked to spend on the floor, so I had to make the most of my time by asking shotgun “emperor has no clothes” questions basically from the get-go rather than making it a punchline to a chat. Of note I remember six companies in particular (I’ve avoided using their names here as well, but follow the links if you’re really curious) that stood out. They ranged from incredible awesomeness down to the ridiculously stupid. As in “how did you get funded?”, jaw-droppingly stupid.

At the top of the pack was a French company that did mobile video compression. Their claim was they could push 24 frames a second (movie quality) video to a mobile device in such a way that the video was crisp enough to notice fine detail, but did not trade battery life for the quality. In general, video quality is the enemy of battery life since codec algorithms are PhD discrete waveform analysis complex. However, they delivered the goods. In their booth they had seven devices all running movies concurrently (”The Bourne Identity” and “Wild, Wild West” stood out) like a movie studio in miniature. A developer gave a a demo of their live television transcoding abilities, showing me a live stream of the BBC and then CNN. The image was crisp enough to read the ticker on the bottom of the screen. For a canvas of only 320 pixels by 240 pixels I thought it was nothing short of phenomenal. I chatted with their VP of Biz Dev, exchanged business cards and talked briefly about doing a licensing deal with their libraries. (Although oddly enough she didn’t know what a library was when I mentioned it.)

Another company was a mobile screen design consultancy based in Sweden, presenting inside the Texas Instruments booth. I had read in Computer World that they were working on a phone top interface for the Google Android platform and I wanted to see a demo if they had one to share. (Oddly enough, Google was not present at CTIA, but the CEO of AT&T brought them up in his speeches somewhat regularly.) The experience they are working on explores using the third dimension of space (horizontal, vertical and depth) as a contextual element for data. This was something I have seen before when research at Microsoft had been investigating just such a concept for a future version of Windows but I’ve never such a thing on a mobile. The phonetop used OpenGL to animate the background, transitions between view panes as well as overall transparency a la the Aero “glass” look on Vista. The demo was running on an emulator the size of a three-ring binder — certainly not a real world scenario by any means — so it remains to be seen what the actual UX will be in the field. I hope it’s at least close to what I saw.

Rounding out the best things was at the dominant Japanese wireless carrier. They had a series of kiosks highlighting games running on their phones. The game that knocked my socks off was a variation of the Sega videogame, Armored Core. What made it remarkable was how similar the gameplay was to the console game; the mecha were engine rendered with jump-jets, full fighting modes and interchangeable gear. It also looked like it was a wireless multiplayer game, so you could fight against someone else on the network, which makes the phone more akin to the Playstation Portable than a phone. It was a geekacular moment.

From there I wandered over to the second largest search behemoth’s (relatively small) booth where they were demoing the upcoming mobile client. I’ve had an eye on their technology since it was announced, so I was pretty well versed already on what their offering was going to mean for the marketplace. Accordingly, I was really just there to pump the marketing reps for inside information. Sadly, there wasn’t much there to report in the way of new intel other than the fact the product remains in flux and will continue to undergo changes up until the release sometime 2Q08. I’ll keep a weather eye for when that happens — essentially this booth chat was neutral if not a bust.

Things went south from there. I stopped off at an astonishingly bad technology company from Toronto, Canada. (I’m embarrassed to even link to their site here, so I won’t). From the get-go I knew something was amiss when I saw that their company’s motto, writ large on the booth was “We are the answer.” Which only makes me wish I had queried their booth staff “To what question?” Anyway the whole idea around their technology was a “background thread application” which “unobtrusively” displays a full screen ad (not a coupon, but an ad) anytime the device owner finishes a phone call. That’s right, you hang up the phone with mom, and your mobile phone hawks Coca-Cola to you. Once the ad is displayed, the user can click “G” (I’m guessing for [G]o) and the application will open the advertiser’s WAP site. The company had flatscreen television mounted on their booth running a looped movie that ended with one of the characters excited about the prospect of being spammed continuously. On their mobile phone. Every time they made a phonecall.

My last booth of the show was of another Seattle area mobile startup. I’m not sure what the history is between Action Engine and this company, but just from the energy the guy in the booth gave out, it’s clear there is some hostility there. (If not animosity, but I’m not sure why that would be the case.) We only chatted for a few minutes about how the company was doing, how their platform launch was coming along and how they were planning on monetizing. (Most of the answers were “that’s on the website.”) He continued to remind me all along the way that they are our competitors (which here at Action Engine we do not consider them to be) and we should be developing content to their platform. We agreed to disagree on that point. I was curious about the guy’s background (his business card said he was a Director of Biz Dev) so I looked him up on LinkedIn.com. In his experience section, the first job (1997 to 2000) listed was at an ecommerce software company. He listed his title at that company as “Schmuck.” Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, I could never be that clever.

James planned the trip to be an all day affair: we were meeting for coffee at the Starbuck’s on Olive at 8:45 am, making the trek over to the O.P. for a few hours of hot springs soaking and ultimately returning to Seattle around 10:30 pm. Since it’s still winter-ish in the mountains, the trip was billed as a snowshoeing excursion. So we packed our snowgear, a clean (and more importantly *warm*) change of clothes, the necessary after-soak bath towel, some snacks and as is mandated for all backcountry trips, a full three bottles of red wine.

The morning we left the sky was a misty gray that threatened rain. However by the time we reached the parking area near the trailhead the cloud layer had burned away leaving only crystal blue sky and a very manageable cool temperature. I had checked the NPS website for the trail conditions in the morning, and despite it claiming there was up to four feet of snow in places, from where we parked there wasn’t even slush mound to be seen. It was a perfect cool spring morning.

We started out towards the trailhead leaving our snowshoes behind — at the time it didn’t make any sense to bring the extra weight on a journey which clearly didn’t call for extra snow gear. From where we parked, the walk to the trailhead is an easy 2.5 miles entirely on a paved asphalt road with next to no incline. A little past the first mile we started to see hints of packed snow hidden under the tree canopy shadow. This was to be expected, so we continued on figuring that returning to retrieve our snowshoes would be a waste of time. We reached the trailhead; the snow is now about 9-10 inches deep. Despite this, we make decent time, partly because we are taking a well trodden path, partly because we’re just all fast walkers. We start the hike up to the springs.

From the trailhead to the springs is an additional 2.5 mile hike (also labelled as an “easy grade” but I’m sure that is more applicable when there isn’t snow on the trail). The more we continue up, the more snow we encounter. The snow itself did not bug me at all — even when it became clear that the path we were on was easily 3 feet above the ground. What gave me a little pause were the valleys and rock streams we had to ford. Bear in mind that we are still walking on an ice path about a foot wide surfaced with a quarter inch of wet ice. From this vantage point, now scramble down a 40 degree incline to shimmy across wet rocks and then shimmy up another 40 degree incline. In hindsight, the Eagle Scout in me wonders why my safety klaxon didn’t go off. Finally, we make it up to the hot springs and find an unoccupied, off-the-path spring for us to use.

Now I have never been in a hot spring before, so I wasn’t particularly sure what to expect, beyond it revolving around nekkid soaking in 1) water that is hot, where 2) that water is being fed from a spring. To be sure, both of those points are accurate. What I had not considered were the implications of hot spring water trickling from the underneath a mountain: namely, dissolved minerals. The sheer amount of dissolved minerals gave the water an interesting deep sea-green color. It also made the water feel thick and soapy to the touch (this is, I presume, why water softeners use huge bags of salt). There was, I must add, an odor as well. Charitably one could say the smell was of slightly ripened egg salad (if one were uncharitable, the smell was not unlike a faint flatulence). We remained undeterred. Propping up our bags so they would not get wet, we stripped off our hiking clothes and settled au naturale into the pool.

At the start of our soak, the conversation centered around ideas. We opened the first bottle of wine and passed it around. A while later we were near polishing off bottle two and the talk had progressed to events and current happenings. By the time the third bottle ran dry (and no small amount of alcohol buzz going around) we were down to talking about people. In general: people we’ve slept with, people we haven’t slept with but for whom we would entertain the notion, and finally people we would never touch regardless of circumstance.

Right around this time, a large group of 10 people (about 5 couples) showed up at our pool. We had been making plenty of noise — and frankly shouting out some pretty outrageous things — in an effort to keep folks away. Regardless, a pack of European expats showed up. Upon seeing four grown men in the hot spring, fully half their group went to find greener pastures. The remainder put down their bags (not really daypacks, but *bags*) and started to put on swimsuits. Seeing this James let them know we were naked. The euro-hipsters then opted to go in the buff.

The newcomers didn’t stick around for too long, maybe about 30 minutes. After polishing off a six-pack of beer and two wine coolers, they promptly got out, toweled off and redressed. We continued soaking for a bit until the light had daylight began to fade.