It somehow feels wrong to promote Microsoft in general, but lately I’ve been wowed by some of their innovative products and software. I expect this out of Apple or Google, but when I saw previews online of Microsoft Surface from CES 2008 earlier in the year, I was wowed.  It also got me wondering if this might ever become commonplace in our lives.

If you’ve never seen Microsoft Surface check out the video below.

AT&T has already started to roll these units out at some of their wireless stores, so it’s well worth a visit to check it out; and while you’re there, give yourself another reason to play with the iPhone.

When I began writing this post, my intent was to just share a cool new toy with everyone, but what really dawned on me was how fast things were changing, and how as an agency we’d be at the forefront designing these new types of experiences for consumers.

Ten years ago as a start-up agency, my universe was fairly limited to websites, emails, and the very sexy work of corporate extranets. Now we are diving into Second life, Facebook apps, mobile apps, and hopefully (with the blessing of a nice client) Microsoft Surface experiences. Digital experiences are becoming increasingly important. As an agency, the way we create strategies and design and develop them to their full potential needs to change and adapt all the time.

It’s fair to say that agencies sometimes dive into unknown territories - were no case studies exist, no proven numbers. It’s always a risk for both the client and the agency to dive into uncharted waters, but rewards are high when you nail it. The point I’m trying to make is that we, with our smart people and unbelievable clients, could in the near future have an opportunity to work on a project the involves Microsoft Surface or any other progressive digital experience. I guess this is why we all love working for an agency like Engauge, it’s the chance to work on something others might only read about.

If you want to get wowed by another Microsoft product check out Photosynth, it will blow you away.

As April came to a close, the month could be summarized by a saying attributed to one of our country’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who said “but in the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”

On April 15th, we (those of us who are US citizens) “celebrated” Tax Day – a day when we file our annual tax returns. While I could go off on a rant about how privileged we are to pay to file our taxes electronically in this day and age, I’ll save that for another time.

Secondarily, I ran across an article on how blogging may kill you in the New York Times. The article references the sudden deaths of two well known bloggers and the near death experience of a third blogger (he survived a recent heart attack). The article speaks to the unhealthy lifestyle that these bloggers adopted. However, it does clarify that death by blogging has not reached an epidemic level. (Phew – I was starting to get worried!)

In all seriousness, reading the NYT article does raise an important life lesson: too much of anything is bad for you. While that clearly applies to standard activities such as eating, drinking, etc., it can also apply to software development work - since coding at an extreme pace for extended periods of time will earn you a fatigued, non-productive development team.

You see, software development is often equated to a runner’s sprint, where energy is expanded at the instant that the runner leaves the block (IOW, development project starts) and peaks until the runner crosses the finish line (IOW, the site/application launches). And while runners recognize that once the race is done they need to maintain movement, albeit at a slower pace, organizations/development leaders often struggle with letting the team slow down since there’s more work to be done. Right, there are new projects to complete, clients to serve and a business to run?!

While some developers are known to furiously code for days and nights and then just vanish off the radar, others have found that they can take a break by doing R&D work. Why R&D work? Well, the one common motivator in developers is that they have an insatiable appetite for learning and problem solving. It’s the developer mind-set (and some may say it is in the developer’s DNA). So assigning developers formal R&D time after a project enables them to take a crack at a new technique that they’ve read about but never had time to get it working. This is also a tenent of Agile software development, which we follow at Enguage and find helpful in getting projects done on time. So when developers seek a break, I’m thrilled that they focus on R&D work because it is development.

While this works for us, I’m wondering what else have you tried to give your mind a rest in between projects that still allows the company run like a business?

Ok, so maybe that title is a little dramatic, but I still feel like I’ve seen something that today is so foreign to most everyone but in 5 years will be completely commonplace.

For my recent birthday my mother, who I thought I had taught never to buy me any electronics for fear of reliving the “Mapping Software incident of 2003”, on her own judgment went and bought me the new Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle, if you aren’t up to speed on it, is Amazon’s answer to the digital book. Instead of buying paper books, you download them to your Kindle and read them on the device. It uses a new “inking” technology that basically makes the pages look as if they were printed in a book. Here’s a quick CNET video on it (or you can read a great Newsweek article on the Kindle):

I was pretty skeptical about it at first but having used this for a few days, it really is very easy to read on the device. I subscribed to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution as well as the Wall Street Journal and both arrive on the Kindle before I wake up, and when I read them I don’t get that ink all over my hands like you would with a newspaper. Plus I can highlight sections on it, look up the definition of words (for the WSJ, I’m not sure the AJC knows any big words) and save content for later. It’s been a blast using it so far.

So why do I think this is something that will be commonplace in a few years? Think about going to the beach for a week and having to pack 2 or 3 books. Think about kids in school having to carry big backpacks with all their books in them. If there was a device that was easy to read on and easy to download books, why wouldn’t we all shift over to this?

But the real reason I think this is the future is because of the greenness of it. Think of all the trees that would be saved if we didn’t have to print millions of books each year. Once Al Gore gets behind this thing, it’ll be as popular as when he invented the Internet.

Full Disclosure - I’m not sure if you’ll believe me, but I started this blog BEFORE Stan Rapp and Rick Milenthal each gave separate presentations on the future of the Collaborative Model, of Engauage, to us here at Engauge Digital (formerly Spunlogic).

I’m certainly not anything special. And certainly not as visionary as the leaders of this new Engauge agency model. In retrospect, what I think happened is that in the past three months that I have been here, I have observed how Spunlogic sets itself apart by its level of effective collaboration. AND, that is exactly why Stan, Rick and the other leaders of Engauge thought we were such a great fit to this new agency model. It was synchronicity!

Wiki, Basecamp, Video Conference, GoTo Meeting, Sosius, Joyent, etc. are tools that help us collaborate. But, can tools make collaboration successful in and of themselves? Absolutely not.

Effective collaboration is impossible without the existence of important human factors. Teams made of members, equal in their contribution, all offering a unique skill set and points of view, come together to form an effective and efficient organism. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, sometimes. Stan Rapp made a great point by saying that true collaboration occurs when “specialists voluntarily join together to provide amazing results.”

That’s the power of collaboration. While tools can facilitate the communication and organization of the team, there is no substitute for true passion, skill, and camaraderie.

One of the wonderful things about Wiki is that everyone can contribute. It provides equalization of information, democracy in action, freedom of speech. This is what everyone finds so liberating about these tools. But we all know what speech can be like if collaboration breaks down. Silence, probably the best option, or worse, hurtful, discriminating and demoralizing speech impacting the entire group. What the best tools can do is to aid in the access and ease of information and knowledge sharing. What we humans have to do is the hard part.

So what makes human collaboration effective?

+ Atmosphere of trust & respect
+ Creativity
+ Open, regular and organized communication
+ Understanding everyone’s roles & responsibilities
+ Highlighting everyone’s strengths
+ Have fun: laugh and play
+ Learning from each other
+ Everyone feels empowered to make decisions
+ Everyone is after a common goal

When does collaboration breakdown?

+ CYA: paranoia amongst team members
+ Process for the sake of process
+ No fun! It’s all work, work, work
+ Meeting for the sake of meeting
+ Silos of communication
+ Decisions can only be made top-down
+ Everyone has their own goals they are trying to achieve through the group

No tools can prevent or promote these things. This has to come from us. If we don’t protect these things then the door is wide open for breakdown to creep in.

So the next time you are meeting with a colleague, thinking about how to solve a problem, constructing a project plan, remember the power of effective collaboration and amazing results will ensue!

(Bridging the online and offline worlds. Get it?)

As digital technologists, we work to identify simple solutions to (sometimes) complex business problems. And one of the most challenging business problems is connecting the web to the offline world.

In our daily job, we follow a straight forward (and rather scientific) process to solve these kinds of problems:

• Identify the problem
• Propose potential solutions (hopefully there’s more than one!)
• Identify ways of measuring the impact of solution
• Implement a solution
• Track the effect of the solution for a set period of time
• Review the effect and refine (as necessary)

As you can see, the process is obviously simple which is great! But there’s the unfortunate hurdle of testing our solution. You see, we need a controlled environment to make sense of the results. And when it comes to the online/offline problem, the environment is NOT controlled and this makes our experiment rather complex.

How is that so?

Let’s take the idea of trying to improve the user experience on eCommerce websites (NOTE: this scenario was actually a topic of conversation at the latest AiMA event). If we wanted to measure the impact of changes to our shopping cart, we would deal with the following scenarios:

• The user may need to temporarily leave the site. In this scenario, a user that’s looking to purchase a high definition (HD) television from Best Buy may start at the website but then swing over to an advice site such as Engadget to review the latest offerings before returning to the Best Buy website. In this scenario, we could determine that the user left our site but the Engadget destination would be invisible.
• The user may use an offline environment to complete the task. In this scenario, a user may come to BestBuy.com to look up the price of the HD television but, because of security concerns, physically go to the store to complete purchase.

In the two scenarios above, we could measure user paths, entries and exits but we would only get a partial view into the complete picture (IOW, maybe the user is not quite ready to make that purchasing decision). Clearly, we need a way to bridge the online environment with the offline world. But how are we going to accomplish this?

Well, there are several (semi-elegant) ways to connect these two environments but you’ll have to wait to Part II for these solutions.

Happy thinking!

I have been using Subversion for my source code management (SCM) for several years now. It has followed me from Georgia Tech, through several personal projects, and two jobs. It is a well supported, well documented, and well understood product with thousands if not millions of users. Being a good developer, however, I find myself asking “what next?”

One answer, which has been implemented by Sun for their Java, OpenSolaris, and Netbeans projects as well as by Linus Torvalds for the Linux project is a decentralized, distributed SCM. In these systems, instead of having one single trunk, every interested party has their own trunk which people check out from. These changes are kept locally until it is pushed to or checked out from a remote tree.

In these systems a single maintainer is considered to be keeping the “golden” version. He is responsible for making sure that all checked-in code passes tests, conforms to code standards, etc. This is the version of the project which is considered stable. End users check out from him. He checks out from the Quality Assurance team when they report that their code has been checked for new bugs and problems. QA, in turn, checks out from developers and creative when they announce that they have finished work.

Linus Torvalds presented the Linux SCM system, Git, at Google and his speech can be found on YouTube.

For people who are interested, the solution from Sun is called Mercurial. Both are Free software.

It is getting a little old hearing the techie community continue to gripe over and over again about the terms Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. If you are privy to such discussions or complaints, just about every argument that makes sense boils down to one thing: “Why is everyone calling it Web 2.0? There isn’t any such thing as a new version of the web. The underlying technology hasn’t changed for years. We can do the same things we could always do. Why is everyone being so naive and calling this ‘new wave’ of technology that has been around for many years something like Web 2.0, making it sound new and shiny? They [the marketing people and business community that coined Web 2.0 and use it daily] are so [insert nerdy insult here]!” - I can say things like ‘nerdy insult’, because I myself am a nerd, and embrace that fact with zeal.

To be honest, this position isn’t completely unfounded, because the facts are correct. Nothing has truly changed in the way the web actually works. I won’t waste time explaining why this is true, the explanation would put even some of the loyalist Trekkies to sleep.

The irony is that the argument itself presents a position as naive as the use of a term like Web 2.0. What makes this term, and others like it so necessary, is that by a generally widely accepted rule, those who make and understand technology can rarely explain that same technology to someone who isn’t technology inclined, and it is even more rare that they can actually sell it.

Techies are into details, and they have a terrible time selling ideas in terms that make business sense. To that end, techies are their own worst enemy. Generally a sarcastic and critical crowd, techies are doomed to look arrogantly down upon any jargon that doesn’t state exactly what they think is the true meaning of an idea, while ironically creating the need for such jargon by their own inability (and sometimes proud refusal) to communicate with a different vocabulary.

When O’Reilly Media introduced the term to the world in 2004, it gave some shape (vague as it was) to the ideas that were the genius of the dot-bombs and the future of business investment online. It abstracted a bunch of existing (and in some cases ancient) applications of web technology to a high enough level that decision makers could finally get on board. It’s a lot like the references to human generations we have created. We’ve had the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y… We are all still human with the same DNA, but they have figured out characteristics that can be generalized about each generation. Web 2.0 encapsulated conceptual use of technology towards social networking, collaboration, richer UI interactions, etc.

In conclusion, Web 2.0 exists because it sells. Screaming from the top of a building that the web has been, still is, and will be for a long time nothing more than simple data transmitted by packet switching enabled by HTTP over TCP/IP only puts people to sleep. Web 3.0 exists and will continue to exist because Web 2.0 sold, and the model seems to have legs at this point. And every techie that complains about it is more than likely complaining about a term that probably directly or indirectly saved or created their job.

You may or may not have noticed the recent buzz about Adobe releasing their first non-Beta version of their latest product Adobe Air. The interesting thing is that (in my opinion) Adobe doesn’t do a great job giving any business benefits that the new product brings to the table. And they use way too many buzzwords without any tangible application.

From the product home page:

Business Benefits
Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

Haven’t we heard this before in various forms? Many times? And they don’t seem to do a much better job on the next page with their expanded explanation.

Adobe Air seems to be a natural evolution of Flash. Flash has served to solve two primary problems with the web (each ultimately associated with cost):

1. The browser wars can make creating Rich Internet Applications very expensive. Basically because you have to test the application and possibly make adjustments/fixes for every browser type and version that you want to support. So, if you want to support IE6 and IE7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista, you need to test the entire application or website 4 times if you want to be sure everything works and looks perfect. This can be very expensive. Flash solved this problem by delivering content through a plug-in, that allowed all Flash applications to look and act the same, regardless of browser, without the need of extra work per browser.
2. The existing standards for HTML/CSS/Javascript make creating and maintaining applications that have the interactivity and experience that you see in today’s best Flash websites and applications very expensive. Flash solved this problem by providing creative and development resources that were previously unavailable.

However, the Flash product is currently tailored to work in a web browser, with all of the assumptions and limitations that would come with that delivery mechanism. One primary limitation is that it is very hard to store very much data on a computer, creating a need to stay connected to the Internet to retrieve and store data.

This is where Adobe Air fits in. It is positioned to solve this last problem, by leveraging the existing technology that solved the first two. The other benefits that Adobe Air is, positioned to carry are, in my opinion, overstated since they are already addressed by many other technologies.

Ironically, Summers Pittman presented a fantastic business case for a product like Adobe Air in a recent blog post (before the Adobe Air press release hit the web, so Adobe Air wasn’t mentioned in the post). In short, he presented a real life (and very common) situation where he finds himself away from Internet connectivity with the need to work with Google documents and spreadsheets. The problem with this is that you can’t currently make changes to and create new Google documents without an Internet connection. And this is the same problem with 99% of all web applications. This is the problem that Adobe Air is positioned to solve.

An example of a Google Docs application using Adobe Air would allow Summers to create new and edit existing Google documents locally on his computer, without an Internet connection. Then, the next time he connects to the Internet, the application will sync his local documents with his documents stored on Google servers. This would reduce any need Summers would have for any other document creation and editing tool that worked offline, like Microsoft Office.

I am a fan of biking, just ask any of my coworkers who have had the pleasure of seeing me haul into the office after a nice jaunt. I am also a application developer and web addict. Given the ubiquity of cheap wi-fi, the pleasure of not having to park or follow most traffic laws, and an investment in a laptop which weighs 3 pounds and has a 5 hour battery life, I tend to do a lot of work on the trail.

This has lead to an interesting problem. Most of my job is creating web applications which fail when you do not have any internet access. Now not being able to check my email when I am on the side of Stone Mountain may not be a problem, but not being able to update my spreadsheets, compose mail, or save my changes to the next great American novel is.

Many sites do not see the need for dealing with intermittent connectivity and instead take an all or nothing approach. Things are changing, needs are changing, and this attitude should change. Over the past few years there have been several technologies developed and proposed which mitigate these issues.

One that I have worked with is the Dojo Storage API. This API is a part of the Dojo project, an open source Javascript library. It provides wrappers for Adobe Flash’s shared object functionality which means that I can write Javascript code which will call Flash and save data to the user’s machine even if I am not online.

There are a few downsides to using the Dojo Storage API. First, a user must have Flash installed and must not have disabled shared objects. This is not a very large concern because of the large userbase of flash, however; Apple’s iPhone does not have a version of Flash and is not capable of using this API. Secondly, this API is part of the Dojo Offline SDK which has not had a stable release.

Of course this is still a far cry from an official, supported, implemented standard such as ones being proposed by the W3C (and subsequently ignored by Microsoft, Apple, Opera, Mozilla or bascially whoever DIDN’T propose the standard), but it offers a general step in the right direction.

The Internet has already captured a majority of the wealth of human knowledge. Big ideas (both emerging and established) can be accessed and processed via an increasingly wide array of electronic devices. Still, this huge ocean of data is often only visible from the portals of our desktop or laptop screens. We are approaching a unique watershed moment where we will soon breach the Fourth Wall separating us from this information.

Imagine walking into a bookstore to find a title that focuses on a particular area of professional interest. You’re browsing through the “Software” section of the store because you’re interested in learning more about software development. You pick out a book that looks interesting and you snap a picture of it with your cell phone camera. Your phone will display a synopsis of the book, an average reader-rating score with further access to user reviews, and recommendations for further reading. You decide from this information that the book you’re holding in your hand is not the one you’re looking for, but given the recommendations you’ve just received, the book on the shelf above it will give you what you want.

This type of instant access to Internet intelligence is already possible and will one day be de rigueur.

Here is one of the necessary ingredients:

A two-dimensional barcode (also known as a QR Code) can store over two megabytes of data, more than enough storage capacity to hold things like book synopses and other detailed product information. A mobile phone user simply snaps a picture of the QR Code and the phone will extract the data (provided the phone has QR Code-reading software installed on it). The barcode can also transfer a URL to the phone, thus providing a bridge between the Internet and the physical world.

These QR Codes can be placed anywhere: billboards, magazine ads, TV ads, websites, etc. Accordingly, this technology will have a huge impact on marketing. My colleague Amy Griswold recently blogged about the dearth of website links displayed during Super Bowl ads. Part of the problem with displaying a URL during a TV spot is that unless the viewer is actively typing the link into a web-browser (granted, TiVo would make this easier), this information is effectively lost on them. However, snapping a picture of an on-screen QR Code is immediate and has the added benefit of storing the link into the cell phone for future retrieval.

This technology is poised to have a profound impact on the way we acquire information from the world around us. The combined data of a “QR-encoded” physical entity and the personalized information that can be stored on a cell phone provides vast potential for directed marketing opportunities. Major US mobile service providers are already advancing their own QR Code initiatives and we’ll soon start noticing more of these codes around us, providing avenues to a further digitally enhanced life.