Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard.

Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.

Intelligence

Intelligence is genetic; thank your parents. Intelligence allows one to be intuitive, calculate, deduct and apply common sense. It is often thought of as the most important attribute of these four. That is not true, but it does provide a way for one to think his/her way through problems without the knowledge and experience needed with less intelligence.

Knowledge

Knowledge is learned information. Some call it book smarts. Intelligence facilitates efficiency in learning, but perseverance can almost overcome lack of intelligence. “Study hard and you can get the same grades as a smart kid,” my parents told me. Intelligence and knowledge can get you a long way towards success, but as every employer knows, dues still need to be paid to earn accomplishment and credibility.

Experience

“Nothing beats experience” is certainly a cliché and arguably true, but knowledge gained from experience alone can be limiting. An example is someone who only knows their job function. They may know it well, but cannot adapt to new challenges. However, knowledge gained from experience combined with intelligence and powered by perseverance is the ideal recipe for success. This Holy Grail of attributes can almost overcome any obstacle.

Perseverance

Without perseverance nothing else matters. It is the engine that drives success. Too many times we have seen the smart guy that doesn’t meet expectations, the senior person that always just skims by, or the know-it-all that can’t make it happen. Guided by goal setting, perseverance is most important and over time can overcome deficiencies in the other three attributes. The tortoise wins the race…I think I can…Try, try again… You get the picture.

The next time you face a challenge evaluate your cache of each of these attributes, then apply the most effort to the ones you have a deficit. This assures the best balance and arms you to achieve success.

HILLMAN from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.

60 Minutes had an interesting segment on the Khan Academy. One novel concept was “flipping the classroom”. This means students get assignments to watch the lecture, then go to class to do their homework and interact with the teacher. This way teachers can teach rather than lecture. Students can achieve at their own pace  and customize their learning experience. This is revolutionary and just might be what is needed to make school effective again.

One thing Khan has right is focusing on content not technology. Too often developers are the ones trying to find the next big Internet thing and fail because they focus on technology.

I made the move for upside potential in knowledge and responsibility. I get to interact with a wider variety of people in more complex business situations and I am looking forward to becoming a better business person because of it.

This marks the start of another chapter in my career and I am grateful for the opportunities that have been presented to me in the past and the ones yet to be realized in the future. Thanks to everyone I have worked with and those helping me transition.

I signed a contract with a fixed price and other specific project specifications. This is much like we do with clients at our agency. I paid a down payment. Again, this parallels our process.

Here’s where the differences begin.

The fence company places a lien on my property in case I don’t pay us for my fence and when I pay in full they sign a release. Can you imagine an agency telling an client something like that?

The fence company tells me they will call to schedule the work. I have little say in this, other than if there is a conflict on a given day. They’ll get to me when they have time. Our clients pay little attention to schedules we provide. We’re on their timetable and they call the shots like they own us and we have no other work to do.

When the day comes to erect the fence, we have a discrepancy in what was planned and what can be built so we discuss and agree to a solution. This is typical in our agency projects, but the fence company requires a change order before they will do any more work and this change order affects the price. I sign. They continue. Agencies have become so scared of rejection from their clients that a simple, formal process like this is often ignored. “We can’t ‘pressure’ our relationship with that confrontation,” we say.

The fence is up. I pay. They release the lien. The dog is in the yard. All is good.

Why can a fence company with tons of competition, no market advantage and a simple commodity be so presumptuous to follow sound business processes while an agency that provides greater value to their clients often cannot?

Two reasons: expectations and presumptions

If other agencies don’t do business that way, then how can we? Inconsistent business practices in a given field create mixed expectations and if all players don’t play by the same rules, there are no rules and the ones who follow rules loose.

Agency people think they cannot control the relationship because they never have done so. This is false. Done in an honest, up-front manner, most clients are not put-off by sound business practices. Even though the agency’s immature perspective makes them think signatures are confrontational, clients do this all the time for other services. It’s not that big of a deal.

It’s time agencies (and all companies that don’t believe in standard processes) learn from the fence guy and take a smarter approach to how to deal with their clientele.

~Penelope Trunk

Here’s an interesting observation about how many companies view web content: they’ll spend countless hours poring over copy in a brochure only a few hundred or thousand people will ever read, but will publish almost anything online for millions of people around the world to access. That doesn’t make much sense to me. I suspect this relaxed attitude toward the web is because the website can be easily updated and print is forever, but companies fail to look back and often do not revise content as planned.

Making matters worse are content management systems that power many of today’s sites. These applications allow almost anyone within an organization to publish web content without review or restraint. Many companies think providing subject matter experts the power to publish is a good thing, but it can be a recipe for disaster. Without proper guidance, business strategies and goals can quickly become overrun by special interests and poor writing. Following the steps below will keep your website well-managed, fresh and frequently visited with less effort.

10 Steps for a Successful Content Strategy

1. Content must support defined business objectives. These objectives drive the strategies used to satisfy business needs.
2. Content is organized to fit into an overarching, hierarchical structure.
3. Copy is written in a standardized format and style. Create a style guide for reference.
4. Content is created for a specific intended audience. Define personas that represent different types of people that will consume your content and create content that addresses their needs.
5. Establish publishing workflows that allow only select properly-trained individuals to publish content. This is essential for maintaining quality over time.
6. Create a schedule to review and update content keeping it current, relevant and always improving.
7. Coordinate and share content across multiple media channels. Example: write an article for a brochure; use it on the website; edit and post on blog; edit further and post on a social network.
8. Design video and graphical elements for a consistent look, style and quality. Inconsistent visual elements degrade message clarity.
9. Keep search engine optimization in mind. Make sure copy has proper keywords and all visuals have adequate text descriptions accompanying them.
10. Work with an information architect and business analyst to create a strong strategy.

I didn’t notice this as much a few years ago, but it has become REALLY ANNOYING. Just when I think I can scroll down the page I can’t. It freezes, jumps or simply does not respond until I have waited for an ad, I have no interest in, to load.

Come on ad networks. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. Us web developers know how critical speed is. You should too. Besides, if you can create a network that is faster than your competition’s, you might get more business.

GEEEZ.

Think about this for a minute: a company, for the first time in history, has instant access to communicate to one of millions of people, at little cost, in a timely manner, with the click of a mouse. The digital soapbox works both ways. Not only can a negative comment be directly addressed, but millions of others may also witness the response, simultaneously, at no additional cost or effort.

It doesn’t make sense to spend big money to broadcast a marketing, advertising or PR message without spending money on communicating with those using the digital soapbox. If traditional marketing is planting seeds and plants grow better in fertile soil, then the word-of-mouth buzz dictates how fertile the soil is.

Let’s take it a step further. Rather than playing Whack-a-Mole trying to address bad comments found online because of customer service issues, improving customer service reduces the bad buzz and thus makes your marketing, advertising and PR more powerful. Good customer service is fertilizer.

Zappos.com, CEO, Tony Hsieh says they had an advertising budget as they built their company and brand, but did not spend the money on advertising. They spend it on improving customer service. And Tony will assert it was much more effective. Their rapid growth is a testament to that.

I work for an advertising agency and we want our clients to have big ad budgets and make lots of noise about their company, so we have lots of work, but we also want the results to be successful. Afterall, that’s how we’re judged. So as good partners to our clients why don’t we ask them to spend part of their ad budget on things that will improve customer service, reduce bad word-of-mouth, and help improve the success of our creative work. We do ask they respond to those using the digital soapbox for the same reasons and help them to do so, but that’s just part of the equation.

Brand = (Customer Service – Negative Word-of-Mouth) * Marketing, Advertising & PR Effectiveness

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Determine YOUR Needs

What information do you need to capture? How will it be used in your process? Who is your audience(s)? What types of documents do you need? These questions will give you distinct needs to address.
Document Examples

• A Project Charter may be needed for initiation and to describe the project to upper management. It may need to include business strategies or information on ROI.
• A Statement of Work might outline what resources are required
• Functional Requirements describe the project in detail.
• A Work Breakdown Structure or detailed Task List may be useful for estimating cost and time budgets
• A Timeline is used to chart progress against a baseline schedule.
• Status Reports keep everyone informed.
• Work Orders are effective for distributing work to team members.
• Change Control Forms create standard operating procedures.
• Lessons Learned prove to be valuable for saving information for future projects.
• A Project Plan probably consists of a number of the above documents and acts as the “bible” for your project.

Please note: there are numerous variations on all these documents.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There are a multitude of resources available that have outlines, templates, forms and practices others have used to get you started – no need to start from scratch. Look online; project management web sites have resources, often for free. You can get templates and forms from PMI or other PM organizations. Ask your peers for help. They’ll gladly give you samples of what they have found that works well.

After you find something that looks appealing modify it to suit your needs. Don’t be afraid to change it as you use it. Constant improvement is part of any management process.

Make Sure it’s Easy to Create and Edit

I’ve seen too many templates where you spend almost as much time formatting and fighting the template as writing specifications. Documents should be helping the project, not hindering it. Make sure your template is easy to use when writing and quick to edit. Efficiency is a big part of making the documentation process effective and worthwhile.

Make Sure it’s Easy to Read

The whole point of writing documentation is to communicate. Make your message as easy to understand as possible and is well designed:

• Formatting – use type styles and sizes to create a visual hierarchy. Have consistent headers, subheads, lists, tables, footnotes, and other text elements.
• Organization – partition the document into logical sections where one section is dependent on its predecessor. The document should flow.

Keep Redundancy to a Minimum

An effective set of project documents do not repeat information. Each one has its job and together creates a whole set. Having information repeated in several documents creates big problems with revisions that affect the redundant information. Write so revisions will be isolated as much as possible and use inheritance.

Inheritance is when a document is a child of another document and information presented in the parent document is carried over to the child. Inheritance can eliminate the need for redundant information. As part of the child document, include a section that tells the reader what information is inherited and where it can be found. Do not copy things down.

Only Write What is Sufficient

Perhaps this is the biggest contributor to creating effective documentation. Only create the necessary documents that are needed for that project and only write them to the necessary level of detail. Just because you have the same templates available for each project, each project shouldn’t have the same documents. Templates are there to save time and provide standardization, but should also be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of circumstances. Consider only what is required to memorialize the project in print:

• What the team needs to complete their work
• What stakeholders need before, during and after the project
• Any compliance issues for regulatory organizations

Creating useful documentation is part of any project, but it should not be such a burden that the means does not justify the end. After a few competed documents and revisions, the process should be second nature. If it isn’t, take a look at problem areas and fix them. Don’t carry bad practices forward and don’t be afraid to innovate. Kaizen!

Today, two of my dilemmas are LCD vs. plasma and iPhone vs. Droid. Sooner or later one is going by the wayside. At this point LCD seems more prevalent, but plasma is the benchmark. iPhone has market share, but Droid is a better phone on a better network (or so they say).

We can take this assertion online. There’s Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Linked In, and a plethora of other social networks. Each has its own personality, unique features and shares a common goal of social networking, but still, the user needs to decide which is best for them not knowing what the future holds in store.

Why do I have to keep repeating the same thing, like entering profile info, uploading photos and sharing stuff in these segmented web communities just to have them fall out of favor in a few short years? Surely there should be a way to connect them all. I just joined Brazen Careerist. It seems to be part Facebook and part Linked In. It allows syndication of my blog posts, and links to other profiles, but it won’t search my Linked In connections for new contacts in this new “world.” I guess Facebook Connect is the olive branch for Zuckerman & Co allowing the web into Facebook’s world, but that still takes implementation on behalf of web masters. Come on web leaders. It’s share, share, share or mine, mine, mine. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

To be an early adopter is risky. Too many choices are put on the shoulders of people that usually don’t have the expertise to make the best decisions. Price or availability shouldn’t decide a winner. I want the best. I wish there was a way for consolidation of new competing technologies to occur faster minimizing the risk of consumers (me) making bad choices.

The hot topic, at least for us and our clients, this year was “How do we effectively use social media?” There has been a lot written about this subject over the past several months with a wide range of perspectives, but there seems to be consensus from the qualified experts on a few key points:

Look before you leap

It makes no sense to start a blog, begin Tweeting or set-up a Facebook page without first doing your homework. Learn what others are doing, what people are saying about you and your business sector and how they are saying it. Analyze the benefits to see if it makes sense for your business to spend time and money participating in social media. It isn’t for everyone.

It’s no silver bullet

Just like any other media, one needs a well planned strategy and well executed tactics to be successful. Sure the initial cost is low compare to broadcast media, but participating in social media in time intensive. It does not happen overnight and needs a consistent, honest approach.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Social media will not save your business. Marketing should have many fronts and social media be a small part. I have read in several places only about 10% of your online marketing budget should be spent on social media. Obviously, this will vary depending on the type of business.

Beware of guarantees

Social media is the wild, wild, west of the Internet. The experts are learning new way to improving the conversation every day, but there are no guarantees. Anyone promising large numbers of visitors, or clicks, or viral content should be suspect.  There are ways to get short terms boosts in certain statistics, but how does this affect long-term goals? Long term goals are what matters. This goes back to strategy.

Social media initiatives can be successful. We’ve all read about some very effective things companies have done, but the important thing is how it can help your business. Due diligence, strategy, perseverance and the proper expectations go a long way in defining success.

 Very cool. Thanks Field Notes folks ~”a DDC / CP joint.”

I find myself using fishing analogies as I explain business concepts to clients and co-workers. Maybe I’m thinking about fishing too much, but I’ve found some sound correlations between successful fishing and successful business.

Fish where there’s a good fish population.

Time is precious so spend your time fishing the most productive water you can find. Too many people spend a great deal of effort fishing lakes and rivers with poor fish populations. Your catch will be a sampling of the overall fish population of a body of water. Use that fact to your advantage.

The same applies in business. If you are selling products or services, make sure you are doing business in an area where the probability of success is the highest. This area can be geographic, demographic or whatever other qualifier makes the difference.

Keep your lure in the strike zone.

This is about increasing productivity. If most of the active fish are close to shore work your lure close to shore. If they are deeper, concentrate on that water. Most anglers cast from shallow to deep all the time. It doesn’t make sense to spend half the time fishing water where the fish aren’t active.

In business, this relates to face time or touch points. The more time you spend top-of-mind with a prospect, the higher the probability of her/him taking the bait. Also it’s important to be communicating with people that are actually interested in your offering at the time their interest is peaking.

Try several techniques until a pattern emerges, then fine tune your presentation.

Junk fishing is a term to describe using multiple lures and presentations to find out what they’re biting on. It’s a good way to learn what your prey is interested in, at that particular time. Once you catch a few fish a pattern emerges, then slight changes in presentation, like color, size or speed of a lure can improve the outcome.

People identify and related to different things. As you develop a relationship with a potential client, you may need to try discussing different aspects of your products or services until something resonates with them. At that point it’s all about the details to further solidify your understanding of their needs.

It’s all a numbers game.

More time spent on prime water making productive casts with a high-probability presentation equals more fish.

More time spent selling to interested consumers and communicating to them repeatedly while they are receptive equals more sales.

Be the ball.

In order to effectively fish a lure, one must visualize what the lure is doing beneath the surface: how it’s moving; what it’s bouncing off of; why it stopped all create awareness and increase sensitivity. Pay attention.

The same can be said for listening to what consumers are saying about your brand. Make sure you are acutely aware and are sensitive to the perception of your constituents towards your business.

Use good equipment.

On the water problems are often attributed to using improper or faulty equipment. Poorly maintained boat motors break down; old fishing line snaps and dull hooks miss fish. High-tech electronics give us insight into the fish’s world and professional-grade tools increase productivity.

Well-designed facilities, hardware, software and other tools make doing business faster, safer and more dependable, and can give one an edge over the competition.

Talk to other fishermen and share information.

I always talk to the anglers at the boat ramp and every fisherman I pass while fishing. I volunteer information and empathize with the ones having no luck.

Ask questions. People like to be experts. Let them. You’ll learn more, faster, by asking than figuring it out yourself.

Always be ready for the big one.

Catching a monster bass doesn’t happen very often, maybe only once in a lifetime, so always expect it to happen and be ready. This is the single most motivating factor most people fish for bass. A photo of a prized catch is always better than a sad story about the one that got away.

Owners work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to build a business. One never knows where or when the big break will come, so as with fishing, readiness to seize the moment is what separates the winners from the losers.

The more you do it, the better you become.

This is true with anything. Experience matters. It increases the quality and quantity of your work.

Become a specialist, but be verastile.

The best anglers usually excel at 2 or 3 fishing techniques. They have taken the time to master those methods and use those as their confidence techniques, but when the conditions aren’t working out they are still proficient at other more favorable approaches to be affective in a variety of situations.

Most businesses and business people have core competencies. They should be experts at them, but at times other services or skills may be required to get the job done or close the deal and the good ones rise to the occasion for success.

A few weeks ago I pulled up a Twitter visualization site for the An Event Apart Chicago Conference and was able to witness, in real-time, people’s tweets about the presentations. It was amazing how much I was able to comprehend by simply doing this. People were tweeting because they knew people were monitoring the #aea hashtag. A lot of presenters post their presentations on SlideShare so you can see them. I was just watching videos recorded at the Web 2.0 Expo a week ago that were good quality and listened to podcasts from that event as well. Journalists at these events often do interviews and they always post them online. Facebook groups are also a good way to get information.

If you’re interested in attending a conference, but can’t. Look on their web site. There are often sites listed that will be broadcasting from the event and sharing the material. You can also check out the presenter’s web sites. They often publish their talks when they have time afterwards.

The information is out there if you look. Take part in any way can. It’s never been easier.

I have successfully published the exact same text on 2 other WordPress blogs at this hosting company, but I cannot get it to work on this blog. ( Maybe someone is trying to tell me my post sucks and don’t let the world read it.) I thought it may have something to do with the length, but no. I published a really long latin text post fine. I have inserted it in pieces with success, but when I get to E-mail section, it breaks. I have never seen anything like this.

 Here is the text in question:

E-mail (mid 1980s)
E-mail is certainly fast. Type, send, and within a few seconds someone on the other side of the world can read your message - quite awesome. Several people can receive the message at the same time – this is huge – and a conversation can occur between several people – very useful. The problems with e-mail are with managing the conversation:

There’s a lot of overhead with e-mail and replies. Each reply is a new email message not a continuance of the original. Unnecessary noise is created by not being able to control who sees specific replies. Just look how full one’s Inbox becomes. One also has to create a completely new e-mail to communicate with a subset of the recipients and this new email is not related with the original.

It can be difficult to follow the conversation just by reading the message body, even though by default replies are basically in chronological order bottom to top, but sometimes people will put comments in line by the original text, messing this ordering up.

Why can I put it here, but the original post won’t publish until I remove it?

 Here is the entire original post.

Evolution of the Digital Message

As we look at the evolution of the digital message, let’s examine three distinct trends:

• Ease

• Managing chronology

• Access

These three concepts are drive technology.

E-mail (mid 1980s)
E-mail is certainly fast. Type, send, and within a few seconds someone on the other side of the world can read your message - quite awesome. Several people can receive the message at the same time – this is huge – and a conversation can occur between several people – very useful. The problems with e-mail are with managing the conversation:

There’s a lot of overhead with e-mail and replies. Each reply is a new email message not a continuance of the original.

Unnecessary noise is created by not being able to control who sees specific replies. Just look how full one’s Inbox becomes. One also has to create a completely new e-mail to communicate with a subset of the recipients and this new email is not related with the original.

It can be difficult to follow the conversation just by reading the message body, even though by default replies are basically in chronological order bottom to top, but sometimes people will put comments in line by the original text, messing this ordering up.

Instant Messaging (IM) (mid 1980s)
IM has some advantages here. It’s super fast, with low overhead and addresses the ease factor, but the messages aren’t easily saved. Replies are always in reserve chronological order - even though the intent was not to be that way; it may be how they happened to be submitted. If the message is saved, it is much more difficult to read because it wasn’t witnessed in real-time - little context. Like e-mail several people can be sent an IM message simultaneously.

Short Message Service (SMS) (mid 1990s)
Short Message Service (SMS) is a lot like e-mail, only for mobile phones and  it’s limited to super-short messages. It’s one-on-one and not really meant to be saved, or at least, easily retrieved; best used for spontaneous communication or brief notices. Unlike an actual phone call, it does not need to be answered when received, in this respect it’s e-mail-like.

Blogging (mid 1990s)
Blogging is used as a method of communicating to a vast audience simultaneously. The length of the message isn’t restricted. It’s easily saved and affords conversation with commenting functionality, but comment lists don’t allow much flexibility with how comments to other comments are displayed. All comments are displayed as if to be to the original post.

Forums, Message Boards, News Groups (mid 1990s)
Forums have been successful in providing a very flexible platform for communication. The biggest advantage is one can reply or comment on the original message (thread) or a subsequent comment and it is displayed in a manner where the visitor can easily tell what has happened. It’s not a necessarily a chronological list of blog comments; comments can be related to comments. Also messages (threads) that have recent comments are bubbled up to the top of the list so one can see what is new. All forums aren’t the same, but the idea is - keep the active part of the conversation easy to find and interact with, while archiving the rest in an organized manner.

Micro-Blogging (mid 2000s)
Micro-Blogging has characteristics evolved from IM, SMS and blogging. Like a blog, it can be read by millions of people simultaneously, but has lower overhead, greater ease and speed than a writing blog post. This technology addresses some of the limitations of the above technologies but has limitations with other aspects like chronology, persistence and context.

The Wall (2004)
The Facebook Wall is a forum evolved. There is no single topic. You are the thread. The messages are not necessarily displayed in reverse chronology, but seemingly complex algorithms keep things top-of-page. There’s rating, recommending, sharing, adding. Access is controlled by relationships. It’s fast and easy and can be used on mobile devices increasing speed, accessibility and ease.

Google Wave
Although each of these technologies are pretty good at addressing different parts of the digital message conundrum, not one does it all; enter Google Wave. Wave is still in alpha testing, but it has tried to address speed, chronology, access and more. It combines an e-mail message with forum-type threading and reply mechanisms similar to The Wall. Messages or waves can be replayed, as they were written, like watching it unfold as a spectator, providing context. Recipients see messages typed on their screens in real-time. They can edit any part of the message and changes are noted and tracked. It is truly revolutionary.

The Future
The future is now. With mobile devices quickly becoming rich broadband applications and the user interface of choice, digital messaging will surely progress to include a real-time stream of communication that will have speed, accessibility, context, persistence and defy chronological limitations we see with today’s systems - one giant mash-up on steroids. Uses will be created we haven’t even needed yet. It will be empowering for those who embrace it and it’s all pretty mind blowing.

How I can include it in this post, but it won’t publish by itself? What charecter sequence could be the issue? What is going on? If any of you WordPress or other experts have any ideas, I’d love to hear from you.