2010 was a great year. I rarely write these retrospectives (only 2008 I think), but i think about writing them every year. It is so cheesey, but also a fun exercise in memory and retrospection.

So.. here goes.

2010 was a great year. I spent a bunch of time helping startups, hanging out with friends, spending time with Hiromi, traveling and enjoying life.

#Work#

I spent most of 2010 doing my best to avoid deliverables and enjoy not having a day to day job.

I started out 2010 in San Antonio, TX hanging out with my friends at Rackspace. Rackspace is an awesome company and is powered by a great group of people. They are doing some neat stuff and are fighting a good fight. I am excited to see some of the stuff we talked about come to fruition. The coolest of those things is Open Stack taking off. This changed everything in the cloud world. I finished my Rackspace gig in April. It was a great opportunity and hilarious to hang out in a mall. I was also excited to have Rackspace acquire my friends at Cloudkick. That was a great move. Congratulations to everyone involved.

After the Rackspace gig was over, I had nothing else planned. It allowed me to jump into my next plan. Learning about Startups, Venture Capital and the business of business. ;)

#Startups# 2010 also allowed me to further my interest in venture capital and startup funding.

I spent a lot of time with Sandbox Industries. They have a bunch of neat things going on and are succeeding in helping change the Chicago startup landscape. I am excited to see what 2011 brings fro Bookyap, Lab 42 and Marbles: the Brain Store and the other Sandbox startups.

I also had a chance to hang out with my friends at DFJ Mercury. Blair and Aziz are awesome. I also am super excited about my friends and DFJ portfolio companies Infochimps and Graphicly. 2011 is going to be awesome for them. I can’t wait to see this crew at SXSW 2011. It should be insane and fun.

Startup funding has changed quite a bit in 2010. I was lucky to be at the forefront of this change by being a Angel List scout. You can learn more about it on my scout blog post. Interacting with Naval and Nivi has been awesome. They are great dudes who are changing the face of startup funding whether the industry wants it or not. It will be neat to see how 2011 turns out with early stage funding.

I cannot wait for Chicago to see the funding impact of Groupon’s success. It is really exciting to see my friends achieve so much and I am very excited for how this impacts Chicago in the next 5 years. My buddy Leon Chism wrote a post on this topic awhile ago, I suggest you read it.

Speaking of startups in Chicago, 2010 was a record year for startup culture and execution for us Chicagoans. We saw the rise of Groupon, the Chicago hacker news meetups and a few good conferences. I am super exctied to see what this Chicago startup community achieves in 2011. Stay tuned.

#Technology#

In 2010 I launched a few neat applications. I soft launched CTA Alerts with Dan X. O’Neil - a aggregation of various alerts in the Chicago Transit system (with the coolest URL shortener - trn.st).

I launched Supertracker - a really neat “track everything” via xmpp site powered by my friend Julien’s startup Superfeedr.com. SuperTrackr got a bunch of writeups and was doing crazy incoming PuSH traffic. All scaled magically by App Engine.

I also launched the hilarious ProximityCheckin.com - a site that merges your Google Latitude location with foursquare checkins. Originally I wanted it to be automagic - but that is complicated. I am still experimenting with it and should have some progress shortly.

All of the above applications were weekend projects built on App Engine. I enjoy App Engine and can’t wait to see what is next for that platform.

In 2010 I also got addicted to personal informatics. I got a withings scale and a fitbit and started tracking all sorts of things manically. I hooked it into my personal site and made some graphs.

I also started tracking my location as well. You can see up-to-date location infomation on my personal site as well. Including a relatively accurate real time display of my location. I love Google latitude and am excited for all the things that can be powered by constantly updating location information.

I also scored a really neat award based on the work my buddy Dan X O’neil and I did on the CTA api. You can check out my write-up to learn more. I love the civic hacking.

2011 is going to be an amazing year for technology. My simple “2 word” predictions are: Cheap Android, More Javascript, Kindle Epub, more Nodejs, auto scaling, app engine, and minor AI. I am excited.

#Personal#

In 2010 we moved from lincoln square to wicker park.

We hung out in Japan for a bunch of time and we spent a bunch of time in Greeley, CO. It was nice to spend some quality time with Hiromi’s family and my family.

My brother and I played Minecraft a bunch. It was a bit like when we played legos as kids. However, I was better sharing the pieces with Minecraft. Here is a map of our world as of 01/01/2011.

One of the best parts of 2010 was hanging out with my amazing wife Hiromi. She is awesome!

It was a great year and was awesome. Things were low key and everything was wonderful.

#Some 2010 statistics#

Here are some stats on various things in 2010:

Social

• ###Twitter###
  • I tweeted an average of 12 times a day.
  • The most tweets I tweeted was 52 on January 10th. This was one of my first days hanging out at Rackspace. Apparently I was enjoying hanging out with all my friends.
• ###Foursquare###
  • I checked into an average of 2 places a day.
  • The most checkins in a single day was 9 checkins on March 14th during the checkin frenzy that is SXSW.
• ###Flickr Photos###
  • I uploaded an average of 1 photo per day.
  • The most photos I uploaded in a single day was on July 20th when I scanned and uploaded 100 of my ticket stubs. Check out the set.
• ###Google Reader Shares###
  • I shared an average of 10 shares a day.
  • The most shares in a single day was 50 shares on [January 7th]. It was my first day in San Antonio and I apparently was waiting to go into the office.

Health

• I tracked my weight 263 days and my steps 142 days. I wasn’t very good at tracking my sleep, I only tracked 65 nights.
• ###Sleep###
  • Of the nights tracked, I slept an average of 7.1 hours.
  • My average bedtime was 2:18 am.
• ###Steps###
  • On average I do an average of 7197 steps a day. That is about 3.4 miles per day.
  • I was a gigantic slacker on July 28th and only took 203 steps.
  • On August 9th I did about 21423 steps. I was at a lollapalooza afterparty and dancing my ass off. It was awesome.
• ###Weight###
  • My weight in 2010 was hilarious. It was all over the place. Check out this graph.
  • I started out at about 178 lbs in the beginning of 2010.
  • On June 6th I was the heaviest I was in 2010 at 180 lbs.
  • My goal was 170 lbs and I achieved that around October 2010. On October 29th I weighed in at 166.9 lbs, the least I weighed during 2010.
  • I currently weight 172.5 lbs and I blame the holidays and candy.

Travel

• I traveled more in 2010 than I have any year previous. I was out of Chicago around 88 days. That is about 23.84% of the year away from home.
• Of the 87 days, I spent 68 days (18.63% of the year) traveling in the US and 20 days (5.48% of the year) traveling internationally.
• Within the 68 days spent traveling in the United States I spent time in the following states: California (4.66% of the year), Texas (7.40%), Colorado (5.48%), Massachusetts (0.82%) and New Mexico (0.27%).
• I spent 20 days (5.48% of the year) in Japan. It was amazing.

#2011 is going to be awesome#

I am very excited for everything that 2011 is going to bring. I have a lot of plans. Stay tuned.