SensoryMetrics

It seems every city that has had a successful run of BarCamps / DemoCamps / *Camps has eventually slammed into a wall of controversy. Look at SM friend David Crow – he’s had more of his fair share of problems with the hugely popular Toronto Camps: stolen beer kegs, sexism, whinning about location, violent outbursts… Despite it all the camps continued.

Meant as “an unconference” – the camps are ad hoc showcases of startup technology. The format is simple and designed to encourage active participation. Dozens of camps are held every week around the world. The format even is being adopted my mainstream conference promoters. The latest incarnation was this year’s TechCrunch20 – hosted by Mizzter Arrington, and offering $50,000 in prizes.

Back in HICK-town Ottawa, the bickering continues over DemoCamp6 because it seems some startups are better at marketing themselves than others. If there’s ONE thing you need to know about Ottawa, it’s that MARKETING IS A CRIME. Punishable by bullying and disassociation.

We’ve been lucky so far. The organizing team headed by Ian and Peter have been dedicated and diligent. The Ottawa tech community is small and severely under-serviced by development agencies such as OCRI, so the need is there. By producing a regular platform for demoing, the camps have been able to partner with business groups at local universities. We have a local pub – The Clock Tower – that is very accomodating to hosting these and other tech events. Beyond the demos, the Camps offer terrific networking opportunities.

It seems Peter feels the Ottawa Camps are at a cross-roads, and he’s asking for help. If indeed, we’ve outgrown its usefulness, where do we go? It might be a good discussion – although I’m just looking forward to the next DemoCamp! I even promise not to complain if someone sneaks in a PowerPoint slide!

[tags]democamps, hellcamp, networking, startups, OCRI, whinning, David-Crow[/tags]

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Business, Events, Innovation, Pirates David-Crow, democamps, hellcamp, networking, OCRI, Startups, whinning

Speaking of ugly, this week mad scientists have decided to save the frog from dissection by making their skin transparent. That way you can see inside without cutting them open. Uh, yuck! Next they plan on fusing in some glow in the dark genes.

Imagine if people were see through;

Doctor: “Yes I can clearly see just by looking at your lungs, you’ve got cancer.”

Story brought to us from Pink Tentacle.

Last night the documentary “Life Running Out of Control” was on TV again. The documentary features Dr. Vandana Shiva who has successfully squashed granted seed patents. Yes, well known fact: there are US patents that get granted even though they should not have passed the patenting process. The patents wouldn’t hold up in court, but who’s going to bring a large corporation to court? Well, there are a few heroes that are successfully winning the fight against bad technology, and bad patents, but nevertheless real bio-engineered suicide-seed product is being made and distributed, polluting healthy crops as they go.

Watch the documentary and please feel free to contribute your opinion here

[tags]Genetically-Modified,see-through[/tags]

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Bones, Environment, Innovation, Patents, Pirates Genetically-Modified, see-through

Other than Big Macs, there’s nothing I detest more than CLOWNS!! They should be banned, or burned, or burried. We must rid the planet of the pests!! Surely there must must be a Halo type XBox game where you can pick them off?? Advertising Age brings us this print ad for McDonalds in India. It features “baby Ronald”… I’m having nightmares!!

[tags]clowns, McDonalds, Yasmin[/tags]

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Business, Pirates clowns, McDonalds, Yasmin

The readership that we have at SensoryMetrics is at times impressive. Usually it’s about 2 to 6 hundred people a day. However, our comments seem so low with only about 5 to 8 regular participants along with a few thousand spam comments which occasionally get past us. Of course, we probably also delete the occasional false positive. Whoops, sorry!

I once thought that the lifespan of a blog post would be about 45 minutes. For SM, posts that are 2 months or older gain the most traffic. It would seem that it takes time for us to reach our audience. It sometimes seems a little weird to be responding to comments to a post that is six months old.

Today we also added the WP-cache plug-in to SM which will hopefully keep our poor Bluehost web host providers from frying their computer chips and generating excess heat. The idea is to reduce the number of individual hits to the server it takes to generate a single SM page. At peak traffic times such as when someone Diggs your site, a popular page is reduced to a single cached version of the page instead of dozens or more calls to our mySQL database.

I’ve been wondering about the energy costs and environmental impact it is to run a web server. I’m guessing a few watts of energy running continuously adds up over time. Is the web server being cooled by an air conditioner?

Are there web host providers that run off clean sustainable energy? Seems it’d be worth a few extra dollars if it’s available. I’ll have to look into it.. Where’s the cleanest energy in the world? Probably Iceland with its geothermal heat systems. Woof! Woof!

[tags]clean-energy,web-host-providers,iceland-geothermal[/tags]

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Bones, Environment clean-energy, iceland-geothermal, web-host-providers

Shiny Shiny alerts us to PodDater , an interesting twist on the online dating / social network scene. It’s essentially an ordinary dating site except your profile is an actual podcast that can be downloaded to your ipod. The usefulness of this escapes me, unless of course you want to carry videos of all those people that rejected you (?) You’ll have to settle on just having MissBluePeach’s video in your pocket…

[tags]poddater, social-network, online-dating, pof, apple[/tags]

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Innovation, Mobility, User Experience Apple, online-dating, poddater, pof, Social-network

Industrial Designers have the strangest sense of humour! Here’s a concept by Tom Ballhatchet that was shown at last week’s Up All Night show in London. Solves all sorts of problems: identity theft, global warming, high utility bills…

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Environment, Gadgets, Innovation, User Experience

Some product switches frustrate their users by being difficult to use because they lack tactile feedback. Did you turn it on? If you have to look at the switch to see if it’s on or off, chances are it’s missing that important haptic component. Feedback through touch is an important component that seems to be increasingly factored out of new electronic design (the iPhone only has a smooth surface). The new paradigm is ‘touch plus see’ for feedback. For the visually impaired the smooth screen touch interface probably isn’t too bad if it at least supports ‘touch plus hear’ for feedback if not ‘touch plus feel’.

Imagine the requirements list for the iPod on/off button design:

• Must not be easily turned on/off when it’s in your pocket.
• Must be sleek and match the iPod’s design.
• Must not cost too much to make.
• Must be easy to use.
• Must clearly indicate when it’s on or off.

Their solution isn’t that bad. It does provide some tactile feedback, but it’s only by the slimmest of margins. I struggle to interact with it (lack of long nails). This product was clearly aimed at a young audience and not at anyone that has difficulty seeing the button or using their fingers to move it.

Tiny haptic feedback is the norm with Apple buttons. Take the on/off switch on the iMac, you push it, but you can hardly feel that you’ve done so. Same with the click on the wired mighty mouse, the difference between a click and not a click is barely noticeable via the sensation of touch.

[tags]haptic,tactile-feedback,Apple,switch[/tags]

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Usability Apple, haptic, switch, tactile-feedback

Yesterday was the launch day for Pixelmator a Mac OS X graphic application which meets my Photoshop needs. Yes, I really will be giving up on Adobe Photoshop for Pixelmator. In fact, I think Pixelmator surpasses Photoshop with its User Interface elegance. These are my initial impressions after using the application for a couple of hours. Perhaps under heavy continued usage I’ll have a different opinion (ask me again in 3 weeks). It’s scary to think that I might be giving up on my main digital graphics tool Adobe Photoshop which I’ve used since 1995. We’ve had such good times Photoshop! We’ll miss you now that we’re playing with our new friend.

Photo made with Pixelmator.

Incidentally, Pixelmator is $59 bucks US (about the same Canadian). Adobe PS, as you probably know, costs more.

[tags]pixelmator,photoshop-alternative,adobe,mac[/tags]

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Software, User Experience Adobe, Mac, photoshop-alternative, Pixelmator

Imagine being able to leave a message for a specific person when they call you but you’re not there to answer.

Call tagging was one of my voice mail service enhancements suggestions I had back in 1997. When one of your friends call you, they receive a personalized greeting from you welcoming them by name, plus an optional personal voice broadcast “Don’t forget about the softball game on Saturday” or “I can’t make it for coffee break later today.” It’s like voice mail but only in reverse. When someone calls you, they get the voice message. If they don’t call you, the voice message just gets dropped or sent on to their voice mail. These types of service ideas are emerging in the VoIP world.

I’m surprised Bell Canada has still not offered services such as call tagging as part of the voice mail service. “Hi Bob, I left you this tune to listen to while I make my way to the phone or press 1 to leave me a message..”

That patent and voice mail service idea got nixed at CDG. I don’t think I sold the service opportunity the right way. Somehow “call tagging” sounds too much like phone tag which has a negative connotation.

[tags]call-tagging, wacky-patent-ideas[/tags]

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Long Tail, Patents, User Experience call-tagging, wacky-patent-ideas

Back in 1988, many urban centers had newly installed digital switches from their regional telephone companies. One of the possible services was sending the telephone number of the calling party to the called party. There was a chicken and egg problem though. You needed a special device to display the number, and manufacturers were relunctant to develop new products if customers didn’t already exist. Small startup companies took up the challenge. By 1989, Cidco had become a dominant vendor of “caller ID boxes” – add ons to your phone. (yes that’s ciDco, long before ciSco!) At BNR/Nortel we braved the “bleeding edge” and manufacturered the first phone with integrated caller ID (pictured here – from my “phone museum”). It was branded Maestro – an impossible word to spell. Designed by IDer Alan Boykiw and UIer Lisa Fast it represented the dawn of interactive communications devices.

Customer demand for the phone and service was very high. There was one BIG problem we hadn’t anticipated. In Canada, new phone services are approved by a national agency. In the US, there’s a regulatory agency for each state! We never imagined resistance to such a convenient feature: it gave the called person the information to answer the phone or not. For some reason the Civil Libertarian Union in the US decided this violated personal privacy and lobbied hard to ban caller ID.

Pennsylvania ACLU Executive Director Barry Steinhardt said, “Caller ID is the bull in the privacy china shop.” The service would reveal unlisted phone numbers without the knowledge or consent of callers, he said.

State consumer advocate David Barasch said the service would more likely be used by businesses to create phone lists and other information banks.

Bell countered,

“Such a service would instantaneously solve the prank phone call problem and protect the person with a legitimate interest in privacy for whatever reason,”

It took years for the issue to get through the courts and get resolved. In Canada, there was little opposition. Given the acrimonious response of the ACLU back then, why have they had no similar issues with social net sites?? On the web there is no privacy. Is that a civil liberty?

[tags]Maestro, caller-id, ACLU, Social-networks, privacy[/tags]

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Business, Events, Innovation, Pirates, Usability, User Experience