Theo Jansen - Artist, Engineer, Genius
Theo Jansen (born March 17, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”
[ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen]
Read MoreCause a Reaction People!
I love original marketing concepts. The team at Reactee has done an incredible job of merging custom t-shirts, text messaging and social networking.
Reactee is a company that enables you to create a t-shirt with a call to action that sends a text message to get more information about a given subject. This subject is any custom message you want to place on that t-shirt. When people text a word of your choosing, they get an auto-response to their phone of up to 120 characters from you. Anything you want.
You’ve got to build your own Reactee T-Shirt! This is NOT a paid endorsement by the way, I ordered my shirts today.
Read MoreGoodbye Atlanta. Hello San Francisco.
Some of you may have heard by now that our family’s life is about to change dramatically. Over the last few months I have been able to consolidate our business life to focus solely on the launch of our new company, Storybook Anytime and a new full-time dream job…
Several weeks ago I accepted an offer from the San Francisco based company, Millions of Us, to become their full-time technical director. I will be working on 2D and 3D virtual worlds as well as marketing systems for major brands inside video games and social networks. It’s going to be fun, challenging and ground breaking.
This will of course mean that we will be relocating to the San Francisco Bay area in January. We are currently in the process of house hunting in Marin County and are excited about the opportunities that Silicon Valley brings to both Storybook Anytime, my career and our overall quality of life.
We suspect that we will miss Atlanta greatly but are excited about this new adventurous chapter in our life. My website, http://www.mikejsolutions.com, will be updated soon to reflect all the new happenings and will be a great place to keep up with our progress. There you will find access to our Flickr! photos, Blog and daily Twitter updates in a single location.
Great things are on the horizon!
Read MoreProfit from your products - Ship them for free!
Make Prices readily available and easy to find
Many people are using the web for price comparison and research. This means that, unless you have a single unique product, your customers are going to judge you as much on price as anything else at your store. In today’s world people hit a web page and make a decision on where and what to click next within 4-15 seconds. Do you want the conversion?
Case in point: The worse usability idea ever was seen during the Christmas shopping season last year. The day after Thanksgiving (the single busiest shopping day in the US) Circuit City decided to force all visitors to add items to their shopping cart prior to seeing the “deal” price. This meant you had to register before you could find out how much an XBOX costs. It took almost 5-8 clicks to actually see a price. By the time you completed this asinine process you were to tired to buy.
Read MorePHP vs RoR - 2 Years Later
I have never been convinced that there were compelling reasons to use any specific language over another. Specifically Ruby on Rails over PHP. RoR provides many great advantages relative to data-basing and prototyping that make it attractive to those looking to increase productivity. Would not becoming an expert in any language increase productivity? For the most part I believe that programmers should code in the language that they enjoy. This by default helps them become experts.
My belief has always been predicated on the theory that the grass is not always greener on the other side. Your customers require expertise and knowledge about how to apply technology to their business problems. Global knowledge of all programming options available to solve these problems is a good thing relative to knowing the technology landscape strategically. It is insignificance however when actually solving the problem if you don’t understand the ramifications of your decisions. Expert knowledge on a subject will always trump speed when it comes to productivity. In most cases, speed is a direct result of expertise.
Derek Sivers has written an excellent article on this topic called “7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails“. The reality of any programming language is that you the programmer, regardless of language, must be able to accomplish something real, tangible and profitable with it. The ability to do this is directly related to your fundamental knowledge of a language and its ability to interact with a database structure. After all, any application (web or otherwise), is comprised of presentation, interaction, and database layers respectively. Read his article now and make your own assessment.
Cartoon from http://www.bokardo.com - Home of Joshua Porter, Social Design Engineer.
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