David McCandless is a journalist who has developed a passion for making sense of data, beautifully. It’s a fascinating talk on finding patterns and truth through visualization, when data alone won’t suffice.
Measuring What Makes Life Matter
June 25, 2010 By View Comments
Great talk from hotelier Chip Conley at TED on building a business model based on happiness, and channeling Abe Maslov.
Gumption
December 22, 2009 By View Comments
Self-described change agent Seth Godin has put together a free e-book that I’d like to share with you. What Matters Now is a compilation of one page essays by over seventy notable authors.
One of my favorites was titled “Gumption” by novelist J.C. Hutchins. His message, like many contained in the book, is well-timed and thought provoking end-of-the-year reading.
Most of us settle in, and settle for what we have. Rather than pursue, we accept. Our lives become unwitting celebrations of passivity: we undervalue our work and perceive ourselves as wage slaves (and so we phone it in at the day gig), we consume compulsively (but not create), we pine for better lives (but live vicariously through our televisions).
These corners we paint ourselves into, it’s no way to live. There’s no adventure here, no passion, no hunger for change. Remember that relentless optimism you once had? The goals you wished to achieve, before settling in? They’re still there. You need a nudge to find them; a little gumption.
You can start that business. You can lose that weight. You can quit smoking, and learn to garden, and write that book, and be a better parent, and be all the things you want to be … the thing this world needs you to be. It requires courage and faith, both of which you can muster. It requires effort — but this effortless life isn’t as satisfying as it seems, is it?
Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that insists you’re over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is the notion of settling. Get hungry — hyena hungry. Get fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.
Flap ‘em. It’s the only way you’ll be able to fly.
As you think about the year ahead, tell me: what dreams are you going to fulfill?
Kaki King rocks TED
May 31, 2009 By View Comments
Rolling Stone magazine made Kaki King the first women on the Guitar Gods list. Kaki has a unique, percussive style that can’t be fully appreciated without seeing it. Fortunately for us, her entire 15 minute performance at TED is now available. It’s worth watching.
Now you’ve seen it. Have a nice Sunday.
Typekit: Real Fonts on Your Website
May 30, 2009 By View Comments
For years, designers have struggled with integrating interesting, expressive fonts into web pages. Until now, the general rule has been to stick to the commonly available font families — the default stuff installed on every Mac or Windows PC — and use images for anything out of the ordinary. This works ok, but (alt tags aside) search engines will not read your text-as-an-image. Not to mention the fact that it introduces yet another file to download, and increases the total weight of the page.
A new project from Small Batch Inc. looks to change all that. Typekit promises to give you the ability to embed fonts on any web page with full fidelity and typographic control.
Typekit is not yet available, but you can sign-up here to be notified as soon as it is.
Pinging your network
October 11, 2008 By View Comments
I got hooked on the concept of Twitter when it took off at SXSW 2007. I don’t often have time to write an essay, but I can generally manage 140 characters. Over time, I’ve tried and tested a number of Twitter-like micro-blogging networks. Jaiku, Plurk, FriendFeed. And social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook allow a similar status update.
I like to test a lot of different things, and some contacts use one network or another. I don’t have the time or energy to bother with the care and feeding of all of these networks.
Enter Ping.fm. The name pretty much describes the service, allowing you toping your various networks all from one place. Once you gone through and configured your networks, you can enter your update from the web, from a mobile phone or iPhone, or using your favorite instant messenger.
Ping.fm automatically converts URLs to shortcuts. You can post links to Delicious. And you can keep all your various networks up to date.
There is even a custom URL option that will let you use Ping.fm to post a new blog entry on your self-hosted WordPress blog (with this plug-in).
It’s still a young web company, and Ping.fm is still in beta. Fortunately for you, it’s a pretty stable product and as of September, the beta is now open. Check it out.
Dropcard takes business cards digital
September 26, 2008 By View Comments
Earlier this month at the Office 2.0 conference, I ran out of business cards. Maybe it’s happened to you. You fumble around in your pocket and come up empty-handed. Somehow I was caught off guard. I put in a new order online (our company has at least automated all of that), but still hadn’t received the shipment before I left for the Knowledge Leadership Forum two weeks later.
Dropcard aims to solve that problem, and could even eliminate the need for business cards altogether–a very green idea. I read about Dropcard on WebWorkerDaily and immediately saw how I could’ve used this.
How it works
The concept is simple. You register on Dropcard and can create two profiles: business and personal. You control how much or little information you want to share. When you want to send your “business card” to someone, you do so either via text message to 41411. When I meet Bill G., I can ask for his email, then send him my Dropcard by texting drop billg@windows.com to 41411.
If you’re using an iPhone, you can thank your lucky starts and skip the text message, opting instead to use the clean, web interface you see to the right. Either way, it’s quick and easy.
What happens next?
Once you send an instruction to send someone your contact info, they get a nicely formated email with all your details and a vCard attachment for quick import to Outlook.
Dropcard allows you to enter multiple phones, addresses, chat networks, websites and personal profile addresses.
There are no advertisements. Dropcard is supported by paid subscriptions. With a free account, you can send up to 15 Dropcards per month. $4.99 a month gives you as many as 20 profiles, and the ability to send up to 100 Dropcards per month. $9.99 a month gives you unlimited Dropcards.
Oh yeah, my old skool carbon-based business cards did finally arrive this week. I’m not ready to ditch them, but Dropcard will be a handy backup in the future.
Name That Tune: Playing Games with Midomi
September 20, 2008 By View Comments
Being the weekend, I’m sharing something a little more recreational in nature.
When I first bought my iPhone 3G (same day they came out), the lines were horrendous. But I did have plenty of time to learn about the new apps that were available. The Apple store employees were showing off their favorite apps, one of which was Midomi.
Midomi essentially let’s you find songs when you don’t know the name or even the artist. You can hold it to the radio and it will tell you the artist, the song title, the album and even provide links to YouTube videos and the ability to purchase the song on iTunes. But even more impressive, you can hum or sing a bit of the song and Midomi will find it for you… usually.
I didn’t really get the appeal of Midomi when the guy in the Apple store described it, so it wasn’t until a week ago that I downloaded it and gave it a try. The verdict? Midomi is FUN!
This week when I was driving to Dulles airport, I had the radio tuned to a classic rock station, and heard a song that I wanted to add to my personal library. I fired up Midomi,
Midomi records about 10-15 seconds of the song, sends it to their server and returns a list of matches. In my experience, grabbing songs from a radio was extremely accurate.
To purchase via iTunes, you must be connected via wifi. Since I was on the road, I just added a bookmark so I could return later and purchase the song.
Now for the real fun…
Midomi is useful, but the real fun begins when you try singing or humming a song. Lynn and I were cracking up as we tested the accuracy of Midomi (and our singing talent). Here’s how to play:
Get a few friends together. In round robin fashion, you challenge your friends to “match” a song from the band or artist of your choice. They choose the song, and sing or hum into Midomi. Who ever gets a match (or the highest match, if you’ve got a group) can decide the next challenge.
Let the laughter ensue.
Google Chrome: After One Week
September 8, 2008 By View Comments
Last week, Google launched their own web browser: Google Chrome. It’s lean and very fast, and it’s now my default browser at home. When I first heard about Chrome, I was curious, but not expecting much. A browser is a browser, right?
After using it for a week now, I can say I’m sold. It’s got some great features for users of all types. Best of all, it’s simple, clean and uncluttered. It mostly stays out the way and lets you make the most of your browsing experience.
I won’t go into the details, since you can get a great overview from Google’s Chrome site, but I was surprised to see Chrome take off at BigBlueBall, where today’s stats show that over 4% of the visitors to the site used Chrome. Pretty amazing for a browser that’s still in beta and barely a week old.
Currently Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista, but word is that every day Sergey asks the Chrome team when the OS X version will be ready.
What is Office 2.0?
September 1, 2008 By View Comments
This week, I’ll be attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Most of my colleagues and friends gave me quizzical looks when I told them about the conference, wondering why on earth I’d want to go to a conference about Microsoft Office. Office 2.0 may be about a lot of things, but it’s most certainly not about a certain well-known suite of programs from a company in Redmond.
So what is Office 2.0?
For starters, it’s the name of the conference described on the web site as “…a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.”
Wikipedia describes Office 2.0 as “…a marketing neologism representing the concepts of office productivity applications as published applications rather than stand-alone programs. The term leverages the Web 2.0 concept to conjure imagery of collaborative, community based and centralised effort rather than the more traditional application running on a platform locally.”
So just as Web 2.0 embraces the community and user-generated content, Office 2.0 explores new ways of working in a primarily online, collaborative environment.
I’ve seen firsthand success with collaborative online communities, particularly with the online, community-centric approach Fluor has taken with knowledge management. Distributed ownership, administration and accountability, coupled with a culture that encourages every voice to be heard has proven to be not only extremely effective, but essential to success.
In the spirit of “eating your own dogfood” the conference is paperless. Instead, each participant is given an HP 2133 Mini-Note running Linux, with wireless access to all of the tools necessary during the conference: Google Apps for email and calendaring; ClearSpace for discussions, blogging and publishing; Zoho for presentations and so on. On Wednesday, we will split into teams and respond to a simulated enterprise crisis in which we’ll put all these tools to work to solve the problem.
I’m looking forward to meeting others who are applying these concepts to support their business strategy, and learning innovative ways to stimulate similar success throughout the enterprise.
The Challenge
Probably the largest challenge to Office 2.0 is breaking down the barriers put up by IT Czars and establishing trusted, reliable ways to work outside the firewall and in the cloud. Most enterprises are leery, and rightly so, of putting their eggs in someone else’s basket. It will be interesting to see how other companies are tackling this issue.
Check back here and via Twitter, and I will keep you posted throughout the week from Office 2.0.
