I was reading about MIT’s SIMPLICITY project this morning and being that I am in the process of designing some software that I am trying to keep simple, I was was thoroughly entranced by the conclusions, or laws of simplicity, they are coming to about design and what makes good, simple design. John Maeda, one of the project’s heads, explains the first law of simplicity.

A complex system of many functions can be simplified by carefully grouping related functions.

He uses the various iterations of the ipod as an analogy of how to carefully group related functions and how when grouping functions, it is possible to oversimplify to the point that the functions lose their individual identities and threfore their individual functionality.

His insight is giving me a whole new direction in my efforts to not only decide what to include in this software, but also how to present the functionality in a way that my carefully selected features retain their individual identities and therefore, individual funtionality and benefit.

Categories: Software
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A firefox extension that identifies fonts. I would like it to identify fonts in both text and images, but even text only would be nice. It gets old having to track down a site’s css file just to see what font they are using.

Categories: Stuff I'd Like to See
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No video of the projected images yet. I’ll try and get some if I have time after my meeting before my flight. I re-read what I wrote last night and realized that I didn’t describe the tear-aways in the way I wanted to. Tear-aways are very common, but the application of using them in a subway is new to me. It is the perfect place to put them. The advertiser has a captive audience and provides a way for them to take action when , depending on what is being advertised, the person’s pain is greatest.

For example, if people are riding home from work and are sick of their job, the advertisements for colleges are catching potential students when their pain is the strongest. The specific application of tear-aways in a subway along with the types of companies advertised is what I found so intriguing.

Categories: Life in General
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I am in Cambridge right now for a meeting with a client tomorrow. I was riding the subway today and saw two fantastic twists on some established advertising methods. The first one is the picture below. On the bottom right corner of the poster is a tear-away for the company being advertised. I looked around the car and about 75 percent of the advertisements had these tear-aways on them. Very cool way to enable people to take action on an advertisement’s message.

The second twist I noticed was that there are screens or projectors or something like that built into the walls of tunnels and project an image onto the train windows. As the train goes by, the image is transferred from one projector to another, creating a standing image on the window of the train car. Very cool.

Both of these are great examples of advertising that really capitalizes on a captive audience. Of the subway systems I have used in the past little while (San Francisco, San Jose, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Washington DC) Boston is the only one I saw using these two methods.

By the way, I remember all four companies I saw that advertised on trains using these two methods, Minute Maid Orange Juice, Suffolk University, UMass, and Zip Cars.

Categories: Life in General
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I’ve added a new page, if you notice above, to the site call Stuff I’d like to see. I’ve decided to start listing all the different types of products, software, things, ideas, I’d like to see on this page. The hope is that it will keep them fresh in my mind. Also, I’m sure that many things I will list already exist, so it would be great if people guided me to the things that exist.

I am also going to post business ideas I have on the page in hopes that people will comment on them and let me know what they think. Even feel free to steal or build upon them for your own purposes. With any luck, I will get all sorts of feedback for things I list there. Each time I add something new, I will probably post an entry about it so everyone knows when it gets updated.

Categories: Stuff I'd Like to See
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A couple weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Russ at the last Utah Geek Dinner. Russ works for Politis, a Tech PR firm that had a client who exhibited at CES the previous week. He spent the whole week arranging meetings with the press and possible retailers and the week ended up being a success for them.

As we were talking about all the cool new stuff at the show, he mentioned that CES has an exhibitor turnover rate of something like 40-50 percent from year-to-year and that the reason was that companies pay tons of money to exhibit at these shows, but then just show up and sit around at their booth, waiting for customers to show up and make them rich. When their spaceship never comes, they write the show off as a waste of money and don’t come back the next year.

Fast forward a few weeks to the present. I work for a software company called WingateWeb that makes event management software and am currently sitting at the RSA Security conference in San Jose. Though I am here for work, I have had a bit of time to walk around the show floor and pop-in on a few of the sessions. (Though I missed Bill Gates’ keynote, but I saw the line to get in when I was arriving at the conference center and it wasn’t quite Steve Jobsian in nature) As I walked around the show floor, I saw exactly what Russ and I had been talking about in action. Tons of booths just had salesmen sitting around doing nothing at best and seemed much more interested in talking and laughing amongst themselves than they did in actually selling anything at worst . There were even a few booths that I stopped at and looked around in for a few minutes without having anyone even acknowledge my existence. Annoying to say the least.

Knowing how much money these exhibitors pay to be at these shows, I was amazed at how little they seemed to care about how much benefit they were getting. The main benefit of tradeshows/conferences is networking. Not networking in the abstraact sense, but literally finding as many people as you possibly can that will help your company make more money. They bring together thousands if not tens of thousands of people all interested in the same sort of things, yet many of the companies seemed to be there haphazardly. No plan, no goals, and no idea of what they were doing there other than to “get out and increase brand awareness.” Lame. Lame, lame, lame…. and lame.

To not specifically plan out who they are going to talk to, what they are going to accomplish with each person that comes by their booth, and not have specific goals that can be measured really makes tradeshows a gigantic waste of money. Especially considering that on top of the price of your exhibit space, you have the cost of the exhibit itself, travel expenses, and lost productivity. Tradeshows are way too expensive to not have specific goals and a plan to achieve them. How often do companies have such a captive audience of leads that they can easily and quickly qualify on the spot and in person. Also I would suspect that the conversion rate of leads met at tradeshows is much higher than leads in general. Afterall, the lead is there because they are interested in your industry and (hopefully) product.

In a more general sense, it is so important to take advantage of any face-to-face interaction. So much of our communication now is impersonal (email, conference calls, IM’ing, etc…) that we need to take advantage of the time we spend in front of others. This is specifically important for software companies and especially web-application companies since so much of our business can be done without personal contact. Not just in a sales perspective either, but in all aspects of life. Since I only see my family a few times a year, I really need to take advantage of the time I have in person with them.

We learn so much about people by being around them, even if it is in shorts stints. We can read faces, body language and any number of other intangibles that are lost in a world of impersonal communication. We can’t thin-slice as Malcolm Gladwell puts it. In person is the way people were meant to interact so let’s not waste the time we do have to interact like so many exhibit booth staffers seem to do. Those we interact with will notice the change. This applies to any part of our life, not just our professional part.

Categories: General
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I just started listening to the new Saint Etienne album, Tales from Turnpike House. It’s a concept album about an apartment complex. I haven’t listened to it a ton yet, but superficially it seems to flow well together and capture the urban apartment complex theme. I’m liking Milk Bottle Symphony and Lightning Strikes Twice right now. Also be sure to go to their official Web site, it’s a great example of a concept-based design. First person to name what the main page mimics gets a dollar.

Categories: Music
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