Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Once again Barack Obama is showing signs of change. This one I can definitely get on board with. Fireside chats, something that every president does once a week since FDR, and have since been put on the radio, has said that he will put his firesides on YouTube.

What a great idea! Informing and leading the general public from a medium that most Americans have access to. I always wondered why previous presidents didn’t put their weekly address, on the television. I’m not talking about press conferences. I’m talking about some sort of weekly address that speaks honestly to the nation.

Maybe they have previously done this on tv. But I haven’t noticed it. YouTube is such a brilliant idea. I’m not sure how it’s comment feature for such showings will go. I can only imagine the comment battles that will go on. Maybe you’ll be limited or maybe they’ll close the comments.

Either way, it’s great to see government coming into the new age. Maybe he can spread the thoughts to other forms of government and we can stop wasting so much money…

I’m always a fan when a company comes out with a new idea rather than creating a commodity out of a design that’s already out there. Or maybe that’s what these guys are doing?

Either way, I stumbled across this new company in a small article in wired magazine that combined t-shirts, social networking and you cell phone. Although the idea is still growing on me and I can’t see it getting much more than a cult following, the concept is great! Take something that’s been around forever, the t-shirt, and make the message it delivers fluid.

I’m not talking about creating a digital screen print on a t-shirt that changes. I’m talking about a new company called W-41. It’s a new company out of the Netherlands that’s decided to take your t-shirt to the next level.

W-41 places a design on the back of their designer t-shirts. The design looks like a futuristic barcode. Then while you’re out at a club, the supermarket, or walking your dog, anyone with a phone and their free application can snap a photo of your barcode and up pops what you’d like. A message, your website, your facebook info, your myspace, or anything you choose.

While the idea in this application seems a little hard to get widespread popularity (unless of course it becomes standard on every t-shirt design) the concept is great. I’ve heard of applications for cell phones that have barcode readers and pop up info of products right in stores but this goes even further. It marries the photo recognition software with useful applications, right on your cell phone.

Think of all the possibilities: A cell phone app that takes pictures of products or barcodes and up pops Google Shopping Search to tell you how cheap you can get it online, or amazon reviews to tell you how bad the product is.

Portable apps are tying together every aspect of our life and if you can get even a small cult following, you’re doing something right.

Some of you familiar with Microsoft Office Applications know of the flow chart and process mapping program called Microsoft Visio. It’s a great program that has a lot of standards, templates, and useability options that make it useful in a lot of situations.

I use it in my biotech position to map engineering processes and actual fluid flow. I’ve heard of others who use Visio in “mind mapping” and brainstorming processes to build ideas into projects and product development cycles.

The only problem is that Visio costs a bit of money. For those of you addicted to free web applications, forking over the money to buy a Microsoft product probably isn’t on your top priority. You need other solutions.

Well I did a little hunting around and found two free web applications for just those purposes, flow charts and brain storming.

The first one is called Gliffy and I really hope this application gets picked up by Google in the near future. It’d be a great addition to the Google Free Web Apps. (Although I really hope Google builds more connectivity into their apps and allows users to cut and paste their favorite portions from each app) Anyway, Gliffy is just like Visio and has a lot of built in capabilities to help you diagram flow processes. Try it out.

The next web app that I think you should try out is Bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming web application, also free that gives users another interactive ability to create brainstorming on the fly, also would be a nice tool to add to Google and allow collaboration through Google Talk to have easy web conferences. Although I haven’t tried the sharing action in Bubbl.us I’m not sure it has real-time sharing like Google Documents does.

Either of these applications can be a big help to those of you who are visual planners and need to see the way things connect together to get a real sense for how they work. These two web applications should be in your toolbox if you’re making the switch to all online medium of communication.

I was tipped off to an interesting article over at Forbes about the concept of Google and Apple joining forces to form a super power of tech goodness. Talk about monopoly!
It seemed cracked out at first, would the world let this happen? Would Microsoft let this happen? If everyone under the sun has been suing Microsoft due to bad business practices which include bundling software wouldn’t they naturally do the same with Google and Apple?

But then I got to thinking, the nice thing about Google is that most of it’s services are given away for free and are open source or semi-open source. Who the heck would anyone sue?

What if Google actually did team up with Apple? Could they then give away the iPhone infinity, a super powered iPod, iTV, Browser, life organizer phone. It would be in the spirit of Google and with the tech sexiness of Apple, all funded by you and I buying music from GooTunes and spreading the advertising love around the world.

What a utopia!

If the iPhone Infinity were to actually exist I would like to be a bunch of things.

Be Apple Sexy
Have a regular sweet scratch resistant screen
Paper thin fold out screen
Option bluetooth wireless mouse
Solar and Motion rechargeable (Think of those watches)
Phone
iPod
Projector
Browser Based Desktop with all the “office like” capabilities
Automatic 411 with GPS
And just be sexy!

Please?

Picture came from Forbes and a dude named Dave Klug who I think is this guy.

Everyone and their mother seems to have at least one iPod. I admit, between my fiance and I we have 4 iPod’s. There cool, hip, with it. I dig the wheel, the screen, the clicking, the earbuds. It’s all great, but it isn’t the part of the iPod that I’ve been hooked on for the past 3 months.

It’s the case!

I know, call me wierd, call me nerdy, but the newest case for the iPod nano is sweet. They finally did away with the huge box that the iPod’s used to come in and have gone to a sleek plastic see through case. Which one has less of an environmental impact I’m not sure. The cardboard box was large but I do know that creating plastic beads, melting plastic beads, and molding plastic beads takes a lot of energy (oil).

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. The case is pretty, but it’s the iPod nano holder that I think is sweet. This thing…

Sorry for the images, our camera had a rough new years and we’re in the process of upgrading. But this is the invention that has stuck in my mind. The plastic holder cups the iPod nano at the ends like so….

This is the coolest part. To remove it, you don’t need to use a scissors, or a knife, or teeth, or anything like that. All you have to do is place your thumb on one end, your middle finger on the other and press with your pointer finger on the middle. It bends and it’ll pop out!

Isn’t that cool! It has stuck with me for the longest time and I had to spread the love about it.