Boy, these are tempting – an attractive internet retrieval device:
Check ‘em out: www.chumby.com
My Chumby Channel
November 18th, 2007Forrester Research: Customer Advocacy 2007
November 6th, 2007Echoing what I’ve been preaching for years now around my day-job, firms that are seen as customer advocates will reap rewards in measurable increased wallet share. This takes “soft” business cases built around “blue dollars” and adds real substance to them.
This also extends into the Community play of for transparency and value to the customer, as nicely codified by Geoff Livingston in his article on “The Seven Principles of Community Building”
In addition, it’s really nice to see a company like Forrester using YouTube to distribute their talks.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU7WuBRzOlY]
My take on Open Social
November 2nd, 2007
Riiiiing… Rrrinnngggg.
Hey Hugh, it’s me, Lawrence. I gotta talk to you about this new open standard that’s going to revolutionize the way we drink: It’s called the Dixie Cup.
It’s really great. What we’ve done is wax coated a plain old paper cup, and now it’ll hold more types of beverages… it’s almost universal! I mean, from Grapefruit Juice to a Gin and Tonic, this thing holds up. It’s going to change the way companies think about distributing and consuming fluid.
Right out of the gate we have agreements from Rubbermaid, PG and Acme Co to modernize their fluid distributions to be transitionally contained by this exciting open standard, and Saul’s working on a logo as we speak.
We also see an expanding market for dispenser apparatus; think about it: every house in America with a Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen. You could show up at a party with Dixie Cups and KNOW they’ll fit in the hosts dispenser apparatus.
Oh yeah, we turned the cone shape into a flat bottom to increase lateral stability thereby extending its intra-usage utility. Ted’s doing some R&D around optimal radius to metacentric height ratio to maximize stability.
Buy Dave a new phone
October 31st, 2007
This is great: Guy Kawasaki opened up a BoutyUp fund so everyone could pitch in and get Dave Winer a new Diamond encrusted iPhone. Details here:
http://www.bountyup.com/bounty/Buy+Dave+Winer+a+Jeweled+iPhone
It was when I was doing a freelance gig, producing the online version of the 1996 Bank of America Annual Report (kindda ironic, as that’s where I work now), and after showing my client the usual four tiers and types of pages the site would comprise, and getting them approved, and going into production to grind out a couple hundred pages just to have the client (yep, that was you, Cliff 
) say:
“Blue… could we change all those table headers from grey to blue?” Read the rest of this entry »
Phone as Input device
October 29th, 2007It never ceases to amaze me, that the best experience we seem to come up with for feeding a computer, after multi-touch this-and-that and semantic wonderment, and peer2peer, socially syndicated gobble-d-gook, are text fields, radio buttons, check boxes and menus.
My Dad used to say that he had an unparalleled skill at creating errors on “those Web forms” which he didn’t even realize were called forms. Read the rest of this entry »
What did I do today?
October 28th, 2007Woke up. Made coffee. Made breakfast for the kids. Touched base with the blogshere. Brainstormed a new product idea with Donna. Signed up for Last.fm. Signed up for medium, whatever that is. Signed up for some voice-to-blog thig Guy twittered about. Created a new amp/pedel cobo in Garage Band. Learned some new minor chord voicings for a song I’m working on. Jammed a bit. Worked with the girls on piano. Vacuumed a 5 bedroom house. Did some laundry. Made the girls lunch. Fixed the comments section of my blog Installed a spam deterent thingy, since I decided to remove registration to comment. Took the kids to a park.
Fairly productive day.
All that’s left is to: Go grocery shopping. Get the kids to bed. Re-record part of a podcast. Take out the trash. Take out the recycling. Run some backups. Maybe relax and work on this song that’s manopolizing my frontal lobe. Go to bed.
From Joe’s phone
Problem Solving by Design: Introduction
October 24th, 2007If you’ve ever struggled to make a decision … you’ve engaged in the design process, though you may not have even known it.
In the next 5 chapters I’m goign to describe the 5 phases of design: Discovery, planning, design, execution, and follow-up.
Amazing experiences
October 24th, 2007My professional objective is to come up with the most amzing experiences imaginable.
Imaginable.
Think about that word for a minute.
Imaginable.
Not experiences we know how to build… Not even experiences we know.
Just great experiences which will make people say “that was amazing! I want to do it again, and I’m going to tell everyone I talk to about it.”
And I don’t worry about who’s getting the credit; whose “incentive compensation metric” is getting boosted, ’cause that kind of thinking leads to the siloed brain-rot that drives disintegrated experiences that customers hate.
The most amazing experiences: that’ what I’m going to work on.
How project teams learn about agility
October 24th, 2007Listening to conversations between designers and developers is an endless source of amusement. Contributors and visionaries from both camps will always have expectations and frame questions from the view of their own professional specialty.
It gets even better, when a programmer and a designer discuss working Agile methodologies, and gets even better when they have varying appreciations of what exactly agility is. Read the rest of this entry »