So in January I wrote a blog entitled The E-Race to the Whitehouse. In that blog I outlined the interactive marketing tactics that Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain were using at the on-start of their campaigns. Since then, I’ve received 50+ emails, all personally addressed to me, from the Senators, their friends, their family, and their staff. I’ve also seen webcasts, blogs, and accounts on Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace. But, what caused me to write this update 4 months later? This:

In this YouTube video, Senator Clinton talks about a recent campaign where she requested that users help pick her campaign song. The unique thing about this new video is that it’s funny! After watching it, I thought, “Wow, maybe social networking really can both help a candidate’s (or company’s) image AND help them reach a younger audience!”

I just finished reading The Google Story, which I recommend to anyone interested in learning the history of this amazing success story (and for those of you that know where my office is, you’re more than welcome to borrow my copy).

At the end of the book the authors provide some very cool Google search tips and I thought I’d share a few of them:

• Phone book - type a person’s name or address in the search box and Google will deliver phone and address listings. Or if you only have a phone number, type that in to the search box and you’ll (usually) get the person’s information that it belongs to
• Calculator - type in a math problem and sure enough, you’ll get the answer
• Dictionary - type in “define” followed by any English word and you’ll get the definition
• Book learnings - go to print.google.com and you’ll be able to search actual books that Google has scanned and indexed
• The new stuff - to keep up with all the cool stuff Google is doing, check out their Google Labs page

And my personal favorite, Google has a text message service that is very impressive. Get any number of things (such as directions, airport delays, movie times, etc) by texting to 46645 (or GOOGL on most phones). Check the link above to find out all the possibilities with this one.

It has always been the ideal setting for magic. Teleporting is magical (with or without the use of Floo powder), chairs can be summoned on a whim (who would know it’s coming from your inventory?), and any all-knowing wizard can easily find the hottest spots in town (crystal map anyone?). But now, this interactive medium has brought magic to a whole new level. Yes, it’s true; Harry Potter has come to Second Life!

The excitement was palpable in the Spunlogic office when we landed in Hogwarts castle. In front of us was a sorting hat with instructions on how to take the sorting quiz and find out which house you belong in (Hufflepuff!). Anticipation grew as we roamed through the classrooms (where you can sign up for classes) to discover self stirring cauldrons, spell books, potions and lots more.

The oohing and aahing was at an all time high when we discovered Diagon Alley. The point of arrival at Diagon Alley is a fairly innocuous looking marketplace. Wander in a little closer, past the Leaky Cauldron and you’ll stumble onto a whole other world. Imagine a scene taken from the pages of any Harry Potter books – students in cloaks with floating tags above their heads, identifying them as being from the house of Hufflepuff, Slytherin, Gryffindor, or Ravenclaw, milling around outside of the Scarborough Emporium (makers and sellers of broomsticks), chatting and trying out spells. It was surreal.

Of course, we had to check out the wand shop, because every good wizard must have a wand. Gleefully, we examined scepters, wands and spells of various shapes, sizes and function. My purchase and experience can be summed up by the following:

Wand: $L150
Spell: $L150
Feeling the unbelievable wonder when a Phoenix shot out from my brand new wand: Priceless

Can you tell I’m a Harry Potter fan?

We wandered around the sim a little longer and discovered that one of the many ways to interact with others was to become part of the Harry Potter role playing game. With enough time on your hands, one can easily become a Hogwarts student, enroll in classes, learn to cast spells and become an integral part of the community.

The experience that this sim offers, for those HP fans out there, is not to be missed. Seeing this world come alive, and to be able to interact and experience it in a way that the books, movies and websites cannot provide is, well, the stuff of dreams. All made possible by Second Life.

From the non-developer’s perspective, the developer’s job is one that cannot be understood; it involves communicating in acronyms (XML, ASP .Net, MVC, etc.) and staring blankly at a computer screen decorated with bizarre combinations of words that mean nothing. Working in this manner to build a functioning application that anyone can use and understand (e.g. Google or Word) lends a certain amount of mystique to the work we do. However, strip away the layers of jargon and all of that messy code and you’ll find that a developer is nothing more than a puzzle-solver. Our puzzles are complicated, though, and to solve them we must learn a slew of technologies and special languages (both literally and metaphorically).

Regardless, the developer is not one who merely excels at writing inscrutable combinations of letters and phrases which we call “code” and non-developers call “confusing and nonsensical.” We have to be able to understand a variety of problems as they exist in the real world. We must be able to identify deficiencies in how these problems are defined and we must be able to invent solutions to these problems; only then can we perform the labor of writing code to implement the solution.To some degree, as developers we must also become bankers, doctors, house painters, etc. If we don’t understand the nature of the work that we are developing for, then we can’t understand what we are required to do. Being a doctor, banker, house painter, etc. is the most challenging aspect of being a developer.

We have to understand every aspect of what we call the “problem domain” in order to ensure that we produce the most reasonable solution. Thus, we must be very detail-oriented people, always requiring more information than we are initially given and asking a bunch of questions that tend to perplex some unfortunate project manager. Eventually, we will get all of those evasive details and through the powers of what I call “dev-magic,” we’ll produce a fully functioning (mostly) and bug-free (rarely) software application that will make everyone happy (never).

Let’s consider an example:

You’re a developer working in the “dev shop.” A frantic project manager approaches you and says “We need to figure out how quickly three people can paint a house… GO!”

…

“Well…”

“I have a few questions…”

“How big is the house? Who’s painting this house? Will they be painting more than one house? Do I need to accommodate the fact that they’ll be painting houses of different sizes? Do they paint at the same rate? Do we need to take weather into account? How do you want the total time displayed? How will the total time be entered?”

At this point, some poor soul (perhaps the developer) will have to contact the client and rattle off these questions. The two parties will then come to some mutual agreement about what is required (let’s call it “a moment of clarity”) and then the developer will embark on his or her dev-magical journey into the realm of a solution.

Here is what you find out:

All the houses are exactly the same (they just built a new sub-division in Canton), so we don’t care about differently-sized houses. Weather will impact the speed that each painter paints, but we don’t yet know how much (the client will provide the details later). Time will be entered and displayed as hours. Three people will be painting each house: Sally, Jimmy, and Sandy. They each paint at different rates. On days when weather does not interfere, Sally can paint a house in 3 hours, Jimmy can paint a house in 4 hours, and Sandy can paint a house in 5 hours.

You now have everything you need; you can finally begin to practice your dev-sorcery. First, you must restate the problem using only the most fundamental information required:

Sally can paint a house in 3 hours, Jimmy can paint a house in 4 hours, and Sandy can paint a house in 5 hours. If the three of them work together, how long will it take for them to paint the house?

A good ol’ fashioned word-problem clears things up for you. Now, you get out a little notepad and a pen from your pocket-protector (not really) and work out the math:

Every hour, Sally paints 1/3rd of the house, Jimmy paints 1/4th of the house, and Sandy paints 1/5th of the house. Let the number 1 represent a house that has been fully painted and let x represent the total number of hours required for every painter working together to finish the house.

x(1/3) + x(1/4) + x(1/5) = 1

The hard part is now over; you’ve gotten all the information you need, you’ve wracked your brain (and your little notepad) to come up with a basic algorithm (you developers love that word) that you can use to solve the problem.

The easiest part of the job is writing the code:

public decimal GetTotalPaintTimeFor3Painters(decimal sally_hours, decimal jimmy_hours, decimal sandy_hours)
{

//the following equation is derived from x(1/sally_ hours) + x(1/jimmy_ hours) + x(1/sandy_ hours) = 1

decimal total_time = (sally_hours * jimmy_hours * sandy_hours) / ((sally_hours + jimmy_hours) * sandy_hours + (sally_hours * jimmy_hours));

return total_time;

}

The above function will get used in your application like so:

decimal time = GetTotalPaintTimeFor3Painters(3, 4, 5);

You find that on an average day, these three painters can paint a house in 1.28 hours, or about an hour and seventeen minutes. When the client eventually tells you out how much longer it takes each painter to complete a house under adverse weather conditions, you can use this same function to find the correct answer.

The problem given in this example is far simpler than most of the problems we have to solve on a day-to-day basis. The problems we work on typically involve many different (sometimes competing) requirements that must be reconciled to produce the right solution. Additionally, we often have to leverage different development theories and technologies to produce an expected result. How we use these tools takes us into the realm of dev-magic, but there is certainly nothing magical or mysterious about the nature of our jobs. All we require is a clear understanding of the problem we’re asked to solve and a lot of Diet Coke (i.e. Spunlogic programmer fuel).

For as long as I can remember, “creative” has been one of the top 2 or 3 most important criteria for companies when selecting an agency. All the studies that Jupiter and Forrester put out on the topic of what companies look for in an agency talk about the importance of their “creative”. And rightfully so. Hard work and dedication are great, but without the creative thought behind it the work will be average at best.

I’ve been trying to determine what exactly breeds creativity in an agency. You’d think I’d know considering that Spunlogic as a whole is one of the most creative groups in the interactive playing field. Our work speaks for itself (shameless plug for our recently launched Crunk!!! Energy Drink site), but I’m constantly reminded of the creative power that the company has overall. By the way I should note that I have no problem whatsoever bragging about the capabilities of our team, since I can’t do a lick of what they do. In fact the last “actual” production work I did was some programming in 2000 on one of our earliest websites - Simmons Manufacturing. Please, hold your applause.

For example, Stephanie mentioned in a recent post our involvement with Junior Achievement and the fund raising we’re doing on behalf of the organization. One of the teams had a bake sale and Stephanie made cookies that looked exactly like our Creative Director, Wade. Check these bad boys out:

If you know Wade, you know these things look just like him. They don’t, however, work like a voodoo doll as advertised, though not for a lack of trying. But I digress.

The point I’m trying to make is that creativity comes from a culture that you can’t force or even for the most part plan. We’ve been very stringent on our hiring philosophy to make sure we bring in people that are the best fit for the culture we’ve created over time, and creativity is a huge component of the hiring criteria. And that’s across the board, from Client Services, to User Experience, to Development, etc.

Maybe the best known example of a truly creative group is Apple, but I prefer to point out what Google is doing. The Google Guys have been immensely successful hiring the best of the best in both technology and creativity. And you see that by the products they launch seemingly weekly. Take for example Google Moon. It’s the freaking moon. They’re even creative with their logo, an entity that usually only stifles creative thought because of its “hands off” and corporate guideline requirements. I mean, how often can you work with a client and say, “We’d like to take your logo and play around with it a little.” Right.

And yes, there are steps you can take and processes you can implement and purple cows you can strive for, but in my opinion it all starts and ends with a culture that breeds creativity.

As much as I hoped to hear those words spoken while on my trip to Los Angeles, I never did.  I did, however, have a wonderful time in a great city. 

Thanks to my fabulous co-workers at Spunlogic, I had the honor of being named Spunlogic’s Employee of the Year for 2006.  Along with that honor came an all-expense paid trip for two anywhere in the US.  I opted to go to Los Angeles, as its always been a dream of mine to be on The Price Is Right.  With Bob Barker’s retirement quickly approaching - the timing was perfect.  I invited my mother to join me for a little mother-daughter bonding.  I figured after all the family vacations we’ve taken it’d be nice to return the favor.  

Although I didn’t see as many celebrities as I would have liked, my trip was complete after spending the afternoon with Bob Barker at a taping of The Price Is Right.  The short version of the story is that we didn’t make it into the Tuesday taping that we had tickets for.  Instead, we spent Tuesday night in line, sitting on plastic chairs along Fairfax Avenue (in 40 degree weather with 15 mph wind) with the hopes of somehow obtaining tickets for the Wednesday taping.  We were in line at 9:30 pm until 5:55 am before we received tickets from a very kind group in front of us.  They had group members that decided against coming to the taping, and just so happened to have two spare tickets that they handed over to us.  It was one of the happiest moments of my life – only because I knew my mother would have killed me if she spent the night on the street (without sleep) for no reason!

I was number 101 in line, which means there were one hundred other crazy people in front of me – all excited about seeing Bob Barker.  After eight more hours of waiting, we made it into the 2:30 pm taping.  Having had no sleep the night before, I’m still amazed at the enthusiasm many people in the audience exerted.  When Bob stated his famous line from Happy Gilmore during one of the commercial breaks, the audience went berserk.  Looking back now, I still feel that it was worth a night of insanity to mark off one of the items on my “to-do-before-I-expire” list.  If only I could have been on stage!  One of the guys I met while in line actually did.  In the video (see link or click image of Bob Barker above) you’ll see Keith get called down to the stage, make a bid, and make it to the stage.  If you look closely to the left of the video as he’s running up to meet Bob, you’ll see two people standing up: one in orange (me!) and one in black (my mother).  It’s the closest I’ll ever get to Bob, but I’m okay with that!

We stayed at the InterContinental – Century City, which I must recommend if you’re ever in Los Angeles.  It was close to everything and the staff members were extremely friendly.  While staying there we passed former American Idol contestant Chris Sligh in the lobby.

While in Los Angeles, we also went to Staples Center to see the Lakers play the Golden State Warriors (the Lakers won).  To the surprise of the arena, Boyz II Men sang the national anthem.  I thought these guys were finished years ago, but apparently they’re attempting a comeback.  They also performed during half-time, singing some of their new songs, as well as some of their old songs “Motownphilly” and “End of the Road.” 

Along with the video above, I’ve uploaded all of my photographs from the trip into an album on Facebook, feel free to take a peek. 

Thanks again to the Spunlogic crew for granting me with an amazing honor and the chance to take such a great trip!

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