Category: Technology

The Lost Generation – Monday Morning Inspiration

This video speaks for itself, stick with it it’s worth the ending:

Socialising with Customers

I’ve spoken to a few people about social networking, and many of them really struggle to understand the “business value” of the types of interactions that social networking technology allows. The following video has some interesting insights for the changing interaction between organisations and customers.Swans, swans, swans

Probably the most interesting quote comes from Scott Monty of  Ford:

“We’re not interested in advertising on social networks. It’s about getting in there and interacting with people. Now, more than ever, people can self publish, put up their own content and be there own publishing houses, they have a voice and they expect to be heard. And when a large organisation pays attention to them and starts conversing with them it really lifts the lights for a lot of people”

That’s quite a powerful statement about customer’s changing expectations. The part that struck me, though, was to think about all of the customers that we all have.

I work for an IT service organisation and we are definitely seeing this shift in expectations. It’s no longer acceptable to have a service desk that people phone into, people want to take the relationship much further than that.

Extreme Sheep LED Art

Something to make you smile on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Some people think I have strange pass times.

Hat tip to Bill Seaver

Why play is vital — no matter your age

I love the TED talks, they are great way of hearing thought provoking ideas presented in a way that is always engaging.

This morning I listened to Stuart Brown talking about why play is vital – no matter your age.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Speaking as a British person, we have a strange relationship with play.

We have invented some of the worlds most popular sports and continue to create new ones, but business is a serious business. And yet, there’s still a lot of business getting done on the golf course.

We all grown when someone asks us to do an “ice breaker”, but I’ve seen people turn into children as they do.

I quite like the concept of the wearable meeting – you’ll need to watch to find out.

There are also interesting thought here for people who work from home and only interact with people on the phone.

What I tend to do is put the TED videos onto my iPod and listen to it in the gym. The audio is often enough, but you also get to sense when there is something interesting to see and can go and have a look.

Rebuilding reputation – search and connections

I’m about the shut down my old blog address and move exclusively to this one, so I thought I would write a little about my experiences.

Walla CragI’ve not been updating the other one for a while now, the traffic has mostly moved over because of the joy of RSS and Twitter.

What hasn’t moved over are a few search terms where I was quite prominent. These were relating to my posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary, Windows Server Single Instance Storage and most significantly all of the thinking about Brain Strength.

The posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary are largely obsolete, and the information on Single Instance Storage in Windows is very old now.

There are still a bucket load of internal links to fix, but I’ll get around to that in time.

It’s certainly not a seamless exercise, but it’s quite nice to go through it and know that my data is mostly portable.

Today I want this cloud thingy

Loving Geek and Poke today.

There are a few people around here who should read this and take note.

Please make me one of these: Universal profile

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0I have identities all over the Internet, and internally; blog, flickr, linkedin, facebook, etc. each one of them have some form of a personal profile where I get to talk about who I am and what I do.

There are lots of very clever people working on the problem of how I get to these things without having to authenticate everywhere. But I want more than that, I want to be able to have a single place where I have my profile information.

Why should I need to tell each of these systems the same information? If I change my job it should be updated within the relevant systems.

The emerging identity federation model probably has a lot to tell us in this area. People started from the premise that identities should be stored in one place and every other system should trust that one place. This didn’t work, because there wasn’t trust between all of the systems. The same will be true for profiles. I don’t want everyone to see all of the profile, I only want the people to see the parts of my profile that are relevant to the access that they have and the system that they are using.

Technologies like Facebook Connect go someway towards resolving this problem, but I’m not sure that they have really learnt the lessons from the identity people.

I want to be in control of what goes where, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same stuff everywhere.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a problem, and as the famous quote goes: “"The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed." – William Gibson. So I’m also sure that I have missed some form of amazing development in this area that has the potential to make my winging sound like the ramblings of an idiot.

Anyone else think that this is a problem we need to get resolved?

Reflections on a Face-to-Face Technical Conference

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0It’s a long-long-time since I’ve been to a face-to-face open technical presentation. By that I mean the type of thing where people book a conference room and invite people along to see presentations on a technical subject.

I’ve done lots of small presentations with customers, I also watch a lot of online presentations on technical subjects.

One of the challenges with small customer sessions is that the questions aren’t very insightful because the focus is very narrow and with online presentations you often don’t get the questions. There are also advantages to these scenarios; in a small session the focus is just on your challenges (hopefully) and in online presentation you can skip over the bits you aren’t interested in.

Today I decided to give a physical face-to-face half day technical conference a go.

I’m not dealing here with the technical content, I’m talking about the experience.

In many respects I have to say that this was a positive experience.

The venue was The Lowry in Manchester which I love, so that helped (sorry, oops, “in Salford” – people from Salford get very upset with being lumped in with Manchester).

The conference was technical so the audience was the usual mix of male misfits, scruff-bags, business casual and suits. There was also requisite number of women for these things – two.

There didn’t seem to be many young people, we mostly seemed to be IT dinosaurs like myself. Perhaps that was telling of the topic, or perhaps it was more to do with the way that young people learn these days.

I struggled with attention, something I’m starting to become worried about. My tool for the day was my Filofax for note taking; but I also made the mistake of taking my BlackBerry with me. Part way though there was a bit that I wasn’t interested in so let the BlackBerry grab my attention. It took me a little while to come back to the things happening around me. There were plenty of others struggling with the same thing I noticed.

In this instance the questions weren’t of any really value to me, either too technical or too esoteric, but they still brought out points that would have been missed by the presenter. If there had been less presenting and more questioning it might have been different.

The pace of the session was quite good, but there were definitely times that had I been watching online I would have used my fast-forward key and not really missed anything. What these times allowed me to do, though, was to think about how some of the other things would apply to my customer, and also to write down some actions so I didn’t forget them.

Was it worth the 4 hours out of the office? That’s really the $64,000 question.

In this case the jury is out, it’s a slow burn subject for my customers. It did give me some more ideas on how to accelerate the burn, ideas that I wouldn’t have picked up if I hadn’t gone to the session.

I can definitely see why face-to-face sessions are under threat but sometimes there just isn’t anything quite like them. I think that they are going to change over time to being less like “presentations” and more like “workshops” or “Q&A” sessions. Less PowerPoint and more demo and whiteboard. Or perhaps I’m just being a dinosaur?

Returning to work: Needing more context

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEvery time I return from a break I think about writing this post – and then forget.

Returning from a break can be a very frustrating experience for IT users and one of the main reasons for that is that all of those so-called scheduled tasks have been queuing up in the infrastructure waiting for you to plug-in or turn on.

There can be quite a number of them: system updates, password expiry, anti-virus updates, password expiry, application updates, browser updates, etc.

The main challenge here is that the activities aren’t really “scheduled”, they are just set by a simple daily, weekly, monthly elapsed agenda without any context. Any break in the system being online means that the activities are just queued up waiting to happen.

Personally, the ones that I find most frustrating are the password expiry ones. You always have a lot to think about when you return from a break, thinking about new passwords is one that you shouldn’t really be burdened with. What I find worse are the passwords that expired just before I went on holiday.

It can’t beyond us to do this in a less intrusive way. We only have to understand the context a bit better and schedule appropriately.

Top 10 – 2008 Posts

A Trip to Hadrian's WallThis is my second, and last Top 10 for a little while, I promise.

I had a few minutes so thought I would put this together:

  1. My Tools: Mindjet MindManager Pro – clearly a very interesting tool for people. Personally, I’m seeing mind-maps all over the place.
  2. Lotus Notes Tabs – My Usability Problem – I’ve since had a template update and it’s a lot better
  3. “Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy” – this one gets a lot of attention, people are clearly starting to become concerned about it as an issue
  4. My Tools: Twitter & Twhirl – twitter had to get in the top 10 somewhere
  5. The Cost and the Value of Virtual Meetings – I’m starting to evolve my thinking on this, we need to think more holistically about the end-user experience of collaboration.
  6. My Tools: BlackBerry 8800 – mobile technology is getting hotter and hotter.
  7. I need a new bag – and still do. Other things have taken priority on the Chastney family finances.
  8. More iTunes bloat – I think that they started to listen in 2008, but it’s still not great.
  9. The Power of the List – a list with a reference to lists.
  10. iTunes Update – Interesting Selection of Font – it looks like I wrote a lot about iTunes, I didn’t really.
  11. I don’t blog enough! Do you? – yes I know that this is number 11, but it has the same number of visits as number 10.

This isn’t my all-time list, just my Top 10 for the 2008 posts.

Antivirus Gamer Edition: Why only for gamers?

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallThe latest version of Symantec Norton Anti-Virus comes in a Gamer Edition.

Yes that’s right an edition designed specifically for gamers?!?!

Is this just clever marketing or are there some technology differences here?

Norton AntiVirus Gamer Edition

So what makes it a Gamer Edition:

Gamer Mode

  • No alerts + no notifications = no interruptions
  • Optional settings to temporarily suspend updates, behavioural scanning and intrusion prevention
  • Enabled automatically when your PC is in full screen mode
  • Activate manually with a quick click on the Norton system tray icon

Lightning Fast*

  • Rapid Pulse Updates every 5 to 15 minutes
  • Installs in less than a minute
  • Adds less than 1 second to boot time

Light as a Feather*

  • Uses less than 6MB memory even without the Gamer Mode performance boost
  • Needs less than 50MB hard disk space on installation
  • Runs only 2 processes at a time
  • Performance graphs display CPU and memory usage and how little Norton is using

Respects your needs

  • Smart Scheduler holds resource intensive actions for when you are not using your PC
  • Resource usage table shows you the what, when and how long for background actions taken by Norton AntiVirus
  • Delivers consistently strong protection – that’s why Norton AntiVirus has won more consecutive Virus Bulletin 100 awards than any other AV software

So what is it that makes Gamers special why wouldn’t everyone want these capabilities? I’ve been of the opinion for some time that, in many ways, antivirus software is a medicine that is worse than the illness it’s trying to cure. And I’m not the only one to think so:

“It can be awful to have your Windows computer infected with malicious software, but it is almost as bad suffering the daily burdens imposed by the security software designed to protect you.

Too often, security programs significantly slow down the computer, causing lags in booting up the machine, launching programs and receiving email. Not only that, they can be incredibly annoying, popping up frequent messages or asking questions in techie lingo.”

Walt Mossberg – Wall Street Journal

The problems that are being resolved here are exactly the complaints that I hear from my corporate customers. People only have antivirus software because they have to, it’s not something they really want so every time they see it it’s a problem. If it gives them a pop-up it’s a problem. If it slows their machine down it’s a problem. If it takes longer for their machine to start it’s a problem.

But again, it’s another human psychology problem. I don’t what interruptions, but the interruptions do actually tell me something.

The video is fun though.

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Wii Breakfast

Sometimes I wonder whether we are really making progress.

Wii Breakfast
http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=47304908,t=1,mt=video