Co-Working and Innovation

One of the things that I try to do, every month or so, is work at a co-working site.  My current favorite is  Bull City Co-Working.  The reason I like co-working sites, is that you feel a vibe in the space, of people doing great things.  People who come to co-working sites, realize that while we can all work at home nowadays, being around other people is important.  Yes you can use Twitter, or instant messaging, or Facebook to “socialize” while you work, but those activities, are still “removed” from actual people.  When I look around the room, and see other people hunched over the computer (well, hunched is probably the wrong word…), and hear the background hum of people using a conference room… I am at work.

You may ask, well, why not just go to a traditional office?  I do have one, but that is a  cube farm.  Cube Farms, do NOT inspire me to be creative or innovative… they are actually the antithesis of inspiring.  Cube farms, make me feel like a drone, I feel I should be wearing a green visor and sleeve garters, with a gigantic in box full of forms…”Oh, we loath, the old one… Oh, we loath, the old one…”  bring out the flying monkeys my pretty!!!

I feel like I come up with Innovative ideas, when I can talk to and work with people who have no idea what I am talking about.  Or when I can talk with people who have different reference points, but some level of common vision.  Co-Working sites, put you in a space with other people who are working on very different things than I am.

I am sure I will post more about co-working, but I’ve been meaning to post something for a while.  Is there a co-working site that you go to?

App development and promotion

One of the big things I keep trying to figure out is why so many of the popular apps tend to be developed on the west coast of the US. I don’t mean the Angry Birds of the world (which are built and grow so popular due to their first in class status), but I mean the popular utilities, camera apps, and other various social apps,

Years ago, when I was working on my MBA, a classmate of mine created a site called EZ2FindMe. It was a social network for business and college students to keep up with each other. It was built right before Facebook was being built at another college. Why didn’t it catch on?

I believe it has a lot to do with the network effect. And given that the West Coast is also the global media capital of the world – thank you Hollywood, the network economy is strong. This means that people are used to self promotion. That self promotion mind set is how you make it in Hollywood.

Those of us who are working on mobile apps need to realize that you can’t just right the best app. You have to work hard to code, but you have to work even harder to promote your app. For many this is not our natural tendency, we like the instant feedback if the compiler. The code we’ve
been working on has magically transformed into a tangible app and we can play with it. In promotion, we spend time tweeting, blogging, going to events, and talking about our app – or our vision if the app, and we have to wait for the network to take hold.

Yes it’s hard, but you have to do it. Go out there and talk to people about what you are doing. Show off your hard work. It can be fun…and the more people who see and get your app, the more opportunity you will have to get back to writing the code.

Books I am reading now

I tend to buy a lot of technical books, and I read many of them. Very free of them are just used as reference, Right now I am take a break on the technical books and am re-reading the Hobbit in time for the upcoming movie.

So what books am currently in progress on? Two of them… One is a book on AppleScript Automator for Mac OSX 10.6 – by Ben Waldie. I’ve had this book for a couple of years, since seeing Ben at Macworld Expo in 2010. I’ve decided that I am doing too many repetitive activities, and figured it’s time to learn how to automate them. Ben’s session was very informative, and his teaching style is very hands on. At the time I didn’t have anything to actually use it on, so the book has become more of a refresher to the course I took.

The second book I am reading is iPhone programming the big nerd ranch way. I recently was struggling with some coding on my iPhone game, and went to the Big Nerd Ranch’s objective C book to help me straighten it back out. Their books and examples are well structured, provide you with the information you need, and provide meaningful challenges to expand your skills beyond the material.

I find that both of these books are examples of the right way to reach technical topics. Definitely looking forward to many more books to read and learn from.

Can Mobile Save your local Newspaper?

I’ve been thinking about Newsweek’s announcement last month – “Newsweek goes all digital” and the implications to newsprint, which has been struggling for many years. The New York Times has been providing both Digital and Printed material for some time, and has erected a paywall around much of their digital content. It seems that their paywall has been effective, even though I don’t have any insights on how profitable it may be.

We’ve had multiple examples of all digital content that has stumbled but I am not sure if that will be the same with local papers. There are two challenges that local papers are facing:

  1. Ad revenue – yup popular wisdom is that Craigslist has killed the local ad revenue – and I don’t have anything to disprove it.. Yard sales and swap meets no longer use the local paper. This has caused many local papers to be purchased by national media outlets. Those national companies can bring in national ad campaigns, thereby allowing local beat reporters to focus on local stories. And national stories from the national news bureaus. The challenge I see with this is that you get local reporters telling stories on national events. They don’t get the visibility and reach, to gain experience and move up in the media.
  2. Declining readership – more and more people are getting their news from social media and the Internet. We are all working longer days, due to global reach of businesses, and the time to sit in the morning, with a cup of coffee, reading the paper before work has basically disappeared for many. If we work in a traditional office, we may spend 20-45 minutes in a car rising to work, but reading a paper during the drive is dangerous at best (when I lived in Atlanta, I did see people doing it!!!).

So how do you fix this? Mobile apps! Apps that can stream audio of local stories, and with modern accessibility features in mobile phones, even read stories to us. While multitasking we can listen to the local news, and local reporters can be discovered via social media to share storeis which have a reach beyond the area code they were written in.

At a recent mobile developer meet up, I met a local developer whose company has developed a platform used by one of the local tv stations to provide their news feed via mobile devices. I have dug thru my notes and can’t find the name of the company, nor the local tv station, but as soon as I do, I will do a deeper review and see if it can be used for the local papers too. Perhaps they can help us save the local paper.

Windows Phone 8 Launch

After a week of work overload and ending up getting sick on top of it, I finally had a chance to watch the video stream of Monday’s Windows Phone 8 announcement – Thank you TWiT specials for hosting a stream I could watch after the fact.  I got to see Joe Belfiore  present via the stream, and I have to say he did a great job of presenting a very compelling vision of what Windows Phone 8 is all about.

(Hope that TWiT doesn’t mind that I grabbed my screen shots from the – they get all the credit for that – and I highly recommend you go watch them for the full feed).

The slogan that he used throughout the  presentation was “We didn’t make one Phone for all of us,  we made one for EACH of us.”  I thought that was a great way to differentiate the Windows Phone 8 experience from what Apple and Android are doing with their phones.

Let me start with my reaction to the lock screen – a great feature of Windows Phone 8 is that the tiles can show realtime information from your social feeds, like Twitter, Facebook, etc. ; however, the demo showed some of this personal data on the lock screen.  I hope this is VERY optional, as it could be a security issue for anyone who has ever lost their phone.

Joe did a great job of talking to the Apps that will ship with Windows Phone 8, he made multiple references to 46 of the current top 50 apps would be available for the platform.  That is a great statement, and I believe will allow the average consumer to feel confident that they can get good (or at least popular) apps for the device at launch. The larger question will be how many app developers will develop apps for the platform organically.  Nokia, Samsung, and HTC all were announced as having Windows Phone 8 devices at launch, which means that there will be a huge push for adoption, and hopefully allow for enough traction for developers to get new customers.

I did like that they announced a year of free Pandora when it comes out, however I was surprised that it was NOT available at launch.  It will be made available “early” in 2013.  I am wondering what is causing this delay?  Pandora is already available as a webbased app, and on most platforms (heck, my BluRay player from Samsung has a Pandora app on it).

A few interesting capabilities that should encourage uptake were DataSense, (when the carrier is enabled – and currently they only mentioned Verizon), will allow the phone to optimize your data usage thru compression, automatic adjustment of bandwidth consumption, and smart WiFi locating.  I would like to understand as a developer how to take advantage of this, and what the implications may be for my app. (Perhaps this is the delay of Pandora?).  Kids Corner was another feature that was gone thru in detail, where you can build a customized start screen for your kids.  I was amazed to see Joe bring kids on stage to demo (always risky… but was great to see it happen).  The funny part was that since he didn’t lock his device, the little girl by-passed the kids corner.

The other aspects that deserve mention is the integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft does seem to have the cloud done right.  Would be interesting to see if DropBox, Box, and other services are available on the device when they come out.  If you are like me, you have multiple different cloud based services that you use.

Overall this was a great presentation, and if you believe analysts, Microsoft may be able to make a major push with Windows Phone 8, providing both Android and Apple with a much needed additional competitor.  I just hope that they have not waited too long.

Yesterday’s windows phone launch event

Well…it has happened, Microsoft has launched windows phone 8(?). Unfortunately I missed the event, and have been a bit overloaded with my day job. I plan on trying to do as much reading Ho in the news this week, and try to distill it for the blog here. (Now I just need a few more hours in the day, and days in the week).

Microsoft’s Surface RT

Well today I had a bit of time to watch the Microsoft Surface announcement from New York, and I have to say, I was impressed by what I saw.  I’ve been hoping that someone would help push Apple on the tablet side.  The team did a great job of building excitement during the presentation, and the features were pretty compelling.

Integration with the xBox ecosystem, a keyboard (I need to get my hands on demo of this – I believe a Microsoft store is opening in South Point tomorrow), Microsoft Office, Skype video (with one touch record), multiple apps on screen at the same time, and more all made me think, “Yeah, maybe I do need another tablet”.

The big proof will be when we see how many apps they have, and the quality of those apps.  There was a post from TechCrunch – that stated they will have more apps at launch than any other apps store.  They do point out, rightfully so, that this is a bit of a misleading statement.  How many of these apps are Windows apps that won’t run on a Windows RT device?  I am hoping that the Microsoft developers out there get it going and provide a compelling set of applications that sell a whole bunch of these. Why you may ask? Am I not an Apple Fan?  – Well yes, but I am also a Developer, and the more potential customers, the better for all of us!

Hopefully we are now seeing the entrance of a valid third platform, and we can all start creating even more cool apps!

Samsung – Galaxy Note II

Well today is supposed to be the day that you can finally get the Galaxy Note II in the US. I’ve been looking and have not seen any big announcements, other than a great review by PC Mag.

I don’t use T-Mobile for my carrier so, I don’t have any way of confirming how well the device works, but I hope I can get to a store and actually play with one today.  The screen looks awesome and the Quad-Core processor sounds impressive.  I am concerned about real battery usage at run time, and how fast it really is (given the number of Android apps that run in the background).

But from what I have read, it certainly seems like an impressive device, and would make a great addition to anyone’s mobile toys, especially if you like Android.

Blocks

Template Blocks

This is a sample of paragraph text created with a text block. You can use the editor to emphasize words, bold a word or phrase, link to another page or website, or style a quote.

“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”

— Paul Rand

 

Video Block

 

Social Block

Form Block

Name *
Name

 

Image blocks

Caption Overlay
Caption Overlay
Caption Overlay on Hover
Caption Overlay on Hover
Caption Below
Caption Below

1st Announcement of this week

Well, Apple has done it again… They have messed with my upgrade cycle.  I had decided that I would be on a 1 year cycle for iPad upgrades, and they put out a new 4th Gen iPad before the year is up. The new A6x chip and the Lightning adapter are the things that will make me want to do the upgrade.  I currently have the 64gb AT&T LTE version, and it has been amazing for me.  I have no desire to upgrade to the iPad mini.  I had an iPad 2 and the retina display on my current iPad is too good to go back to 1024×768.  Had I never had the iPad 3, then perhaps it would be worthwhile, but I can’t go back.

iPad Mini

I do believe that the size and design of the mini will be attractive to a lot of people.  The new back design matches the design of the new iPhone 5, and that does look really cool.

But this isn’t the only announcement Apple made today.  The new iMac looks really sexy! Deceptively slim at the edges.  Not to happy that Apple continues to get rid of the DVD drive, but understand their approach and reasoning.iMac

As far at the specs, they are a nice refresh from the development machine I picked up last year, and the addition of the hybrid (AKA Fusion) drive, and the great way that Mountain Lion will automatically manage your apps for the best performance is a great addition.  If this would be your development machine, I can see it improving compile times dramatically.

The new 13″ MacBook Pro is a great upgrade for many and the Mac Mini, was refreshed nicely.

Was nice that Apple live-streamed the entire event.  Guess I will have to order a new iPad soon.

Quick update.. Apple has posted the video already for those who would like to watch the announcement.