When April 3 comes around everyone at BTG (which we are renaming to Base22 soon) will have their hands on what we think will be a transformative device.  We made this decision for several reasons. First, it became increasingly clear from office chatter – including from our CEO – that everyone in our company was planning to buy one anyway and several said they would buy two and give one to their mother. As technology consultants we all have both individual, and collective reputations as early adopters. When clients ask about new technology and how it will impact their business we need to have an answer based on more than second hand experience.

From my own perspective, the transition to a multi-touch web is as big as the transition from text to html. Most people don’t know this but the web prior to 1994 the web looked like this:

When I became a webmaster of a popular site in 1995 I had lots of users writing me to remember to check the site in browsers like Lnyx. But these guys were fighting a losing battle. Within a year of its launch the graphic based browser completely replaced the text only version for everyone but the contrarians. Another way to look at it was in 1994 the mouse replaced the keyboard as the main way to navigate the web. In the 2000’s the mobile phone gave the text based browser a small bump but for the most part – the text only web died in 94.

Now the mouse is about to have its own competition. In the next few years, as the prices of multi-touch devices like the iPhone and iPad and their many imitators fall, it will become as unusual for a computer to not respond to touch as it is today for one not to have a mouse. Try to use your computer with out a mouse. It can be done. I promise. But it’s hard and most people today can’t do it (just like most people don’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission).

In a couple of years it will be just as hard to only use a mouse. People will try to swipe, pinch, and flick and be perplexed when nothing happens. Devices like the iPad will be the gift people give to their techno-phobic parents and grandparents. Many people that don’t want, or can’t drive “a standard” anymore (in quotes because its hardly standard any more for a car to be manual transmission).

One of my first jobs was teaching computer skills to FDA meat inspectors. Most of these guys were older men, former vets and doctors. The FDA was moving from a paper based system to computer based and Texas A&M hosted classes to do the training. They each came to class and sat a computer – many for the first time in their lives – and had to be taught everything. The very first thing we asked them to do was take the mouse and point at the start button. Half the class would always pick up the mouse and point it, literally at the screen. No one would laugh. They just looked up for the next instruction. So we back up and say, “no no, put it down, just move it around and watch the screen – you see that little moving arrow…” and work from there.

We encouraged them to play solitaire. It was a great way to learn how to use the mouse because you use the mouse like you do your fingers – clicking a card picked it up, and you move it and let it go. It taught them the symbolic but abstract relationship between the thing on the screen and the thing in their hand. Now that abstraction is no longer needed. The computer will become much more intuitive and easy to use because of it.

My mother in law now has an iPhone. With the iPhone a whole new world of functionality opened to her. Now she sends SMS messages, takes photos, looks up addresses on google maps, enters contact information in the address book. All these feature were on her old phone – buried under text based menus – but she never used them. Now she does.

What I’m trying to say is that we didn’t buy the iPads for everyone just to make them happy, just to build moral and team spirit. We did it for the same reason we would need to buy them a mouse in 1994 – we have too. The web is going to change – fast.

But that doesn’t stop us from all being very very excited about our new toys. Including me.

I’m very proud that my company is both able (we have had a good year) and willing – all of us on the board understand the importance of staying ahead of the tide.

Why can’t we celebrate exceptional educators with a nationwide platform to let them reach as many students as possible? Pay them the mega-salary and give them the rockstar treatment. Why can’t the guy in first class sitting next to Vanna White be Mr. Smith – celebrity Algebra 2 teacher one his way to his next Opera appearance?

Just wondering…

A lot of people may question the placement I gave to Social Media, which I just called “Status Updates”. Social Networks are the current darlings of the internet and a lot people rave about the information they learn from the random utterances of their social network. Be that as it may, the information is mainly in the form of links to one of the above sources, so it can’t be higher in chain since it requires the others to exist so I place it just further down and to the right (more popular). The placement of spam above political speeches was done for one reason – by the time a political speech contains a piece of information, not only does everyone already know it (a politician will only say something he thinks you already know and agree with), but by the time he says it, there has been spam about it for a long, long time.

Let me know if I left out any major categories or if you think I should swap the order of anything in the comments.

The way I see it, a name like “Base 22” lends itself to these possible directions:

• Mathematics  – Base 2 is binary, Base 10 in the our most common counting system, Base 22 is a math system with 22 symbols and where “22” is the new “10”
• Building – Base – as foundation or a building block
• Science – Base – in science – the opposite of an Acid
• Teamwork – Base as a home for a team – military base, army base, moon base
• Home – Base as home – as in baseball – first base, second base
• 22 – atomic number of titanium
• “Base 22” as a set of letters to play with

Most of the designers have only focused on the last of those and made variations of Big 2, Big B, ect. So I wanted to explore what they could do with the other options.

Base as a Building

A base is a fort, castle, headquarters, home, launch pad, or team living space. So there are a ton of ideas there.

Base as a foundation or building block

B’s and 2’s

   If your just going to play with the name, don’t just play with the “2”
    

Then there are logos that have nothing to do with the name that would still be awesome.

I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.

If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.

Was pushing 90% and had already bought the extra 10 GB Google sells. Wow, now I’m not even at 10% even though I have uploaded all my old email to Gmail (15 years worth) a while back and have over 20,000 messages.

It’s nice to get free upgrades every once in a while.

UPDATE: about 30 seconds after I posted this, I got an email from Google that says the 80GB is for the $20 I already pay for Extra storage (it was only 10GB before). Still nice.

Eventually scientists say our own sun will expand to encompass the earth’s orbit. That is unimaginably big. But the stars shown in this great info-graphic video, are really is amazing. I can’t comprehend how these massive stars even exist. Their boiling atmospheres extending well beyond Mars or even Saturn if they replaced our star.

A remember, as big as they are, these are insignificant specs of light in a galaxy of 100 billion stars, and a universe of a 100 billion galaxies.

Youtube is full of these videos. Most with different music but here is a similar animation of stars sizes.

I can’t close this post without a link to this article that started my thinking today:

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/06/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/

This bug affects every content management system using FCKeditior.
Please pass on to everyone writing content on the web

If your using Firefox and Skype (almost everyone is), then most likely you have a Firefox extension that was installed with Skype that messes up content in the portal (and all other content management systems you post to).

If you look around the web there are currently 22,000 calls for help on this issue. It looks like this in your content:

<!–Session Data–>

If you’ve seen this and wondered where it came from, its because you inadvertently have been adding it.

Please stop!

Here is how:

1) open Firefox

2) in the top menu (files, edit…) click Tools then Add-ons

3) in the add-ons window click Extensions

4) Find "The Browser Highlighter" and uninstall it

This will also make firefox faster (according to this guy – http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/871907.aspx)

What is it:
its a piece of unwelcome, poorly implemented software that ebay built and released with skype. It does things like look for Skype numbers on the web page and highlight them. You wont miss it I promise.

If you want to connect to a webdav server (such as Confluence wiki) so you can drag and drop files, do this:

The Solution:

1) Download and install: http://www.independentsoft.com/independentdav/index.html

2) Once you have it installed (note you may need .net but it comes with vista)

Open it and past the url into the main bar: http://serverdomain.com/wiki/plugins/servlet/webdav (for confluence – use what ever your path is)

3) enter user name and password from wiki (leave domain blank)

Viola – enjoy dragging and dropping files into confluence.

If I can get my computer to run faster, and save 10 mins per hour (1 hours per day or 30 per month) that’s worth big bucks to me. So when I saw an advertisement offering 4gb of ram for only $50, I had to check it out. Of course the ad did not mention that the 4gb consists of two 2GB dims…which I already have. I thought I was going to get 8GB of ram…

Here is my current long term plan:

• 8GB of RAM. Still too expensive to invest in. I could buy an additional cheap laptop instead. When prices fall (maybe by the fall) I’ll pick some up. Research leads me to think I can achieve this in a T61p but I’m going to have to change OS to do it. I currently run Vista Ultimate and that wont cut it. So I have to install a different OS…
• Widows 7 (maybe). I’m still unsure if the better OS might be Vista 64, XP 64, or maybe Widows Server 2003 or even some Linux version and run other stuff in VM. That’s a lot of options so I could use the advice of anyone with experience.
• 128GB (or bigger) SSD (solid state drive – basically a hard drive with no moving parts that is supposed to be really, really fast). There are a lot of manufactures making these and I have a feeling prices are going to tumble. But which one? The fastest SSD? The cheapest SSD?
• What about Turbo Cache?
• What about the PCMI Expresscard slot. Can’t you put a SSD of some other performance booster in there?
• What about settings?
• What about BIOS versions?
• What about other software to manage all this tech better?

As you can see, my dream still requires more research, since I don’t even know what I want yet. But I will update this post with my findings as they develop. What have you done to improve the performance of your laptop? Got any advice?

Google is trying to reinvent email and online communications with a new development platform. Uses iphone like auto-spell check, real-time, back and forth, inline commenting, and character by character transmission (you see what they are typing as they type it), playback to see how the conversation evolved. Basically it combines the best of skype and gmail with some really nice new features. Everything is really fast!

Can’t wait for this to be integrated into gmail.

Study this email. I don’t recommend you copy his style (which is reminiscent of overindulgent catalog king J. Peterman on “Seinfeld”) but rather think about how honest-to-goodness thankfulness, and transparency can be incorporated into your business, regardless of its size.

Hello there Ben Shoemate

Just wanted to let you know that I sent your bag out just a little bit ago. Your tracking number is listed below along with a link to the shipping company so you can track your leather piece every couple of hours.  To care for your leather piece and read about the photo contest please see the Questions page on the website. I have all sorts of tips to keep your leather in top shape.

Oh, and by the way, I didn’t want to tell you this before you joined, but 10% of the gross amount that you gave to Saddleback went directly to one of those aid organizations on the Dave’s Links page.  If you spent $500 + $20 for shipping then $52 went out to love people.  Basically, you just contributed to drilling a well for an entire village or partially sponsored a 5 year old street kid in Rwanda to get into a loving orphanage and go to one of the best schools in the country. This is the main reason Saddleback Leather exists. Just wanted to let you know… between friends. Thanks for helping.

The way I see it, out of the thousands and thousands of companies in the world, on the Internet or down on the corner selling leather goods, you chose mine and I really do feel honored.  You are very much appreciated.. Welcome to the family.

Thank you and have a great week.

Warm regards,

Dave Munson
Presidente
Saddleback Leather Co

Your order number is SBL-*********.

The tracking numbers are:
******************************
You can track your package by visiting the links below:
http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&InquiryNumber1=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The following items have been shipped to you:
line items
———————————————————————–
Small Wallet Light Tobacco Brown (WA-SM-LTB)
quantity: 1
total price: $28.00
———————————————————————–
subtotal:                        $28.00
sales tax:                        $2.28
standard shipping: *             $12.98
*shipping total includes handling and insurance fees
=======================================================================
grand total:                     $43.26
———————————————————————–

This order will be billed to:

Ben Shoemate
************
———————————————————————–

Orders for merchandise ship UPS and will receive a confirmation email and tracking number when your UPS order has shipped.
Orders for gift cards only ship via USPS mail with Delivery Confirmation and usually arrive in 3 to 5 business days.
—

This is an automatically generated email

Even down to letting you know this email was generated automatically – the message is honest and personal. Well done Dave.

Researchers call words that persist relatively untouched across the ages ‘cognates,’ which means that the words have a systematic sound correspondence that proves their common ancestry. For example, cognates meaning “water” exist in English (water), German (wasser), Swedish (vaten) and Gothic (wato) – read them again and you can discern the ‘aht’ sound common to all. The most resilient cognates, the numerals, have not changed significantly in their entire history.

What’s more words like ‘squeeze’, ‘guts’, ‘stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. Until recently they believed they would not be able to track words back in time for more than 5,000 years, however their new IBM supercomputer has enabled them to go back almost 30,000 years, and finally provide the answers. 

“50% of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. If a time-traveler came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble” explained Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.

ThamesBlue is ACET’s IBM BladeCenter cluster and is one of the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world. It is made up of a majority of IBM JS21 and some JS20 Blade servers with 60TB of storage connected via a Myrinet 2G network. The cluster runs the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system with IBM’s C and Fortran compilers and batch jobs are managed with Torque.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26806.wss

#1 The periodic table

I would love to be able to memorize this song, but even I’m not that big of a geek.

#2 The Pi Song

This could have been horrible if it was not sung so well. This is another song I have little interest in actually learning but its always fun to know PI to at least 10 places…just incase.  

#3 The Universe Song – Monty Python

I really love this song and sing it all time to remember how big the universe really is. This version is sang by Clint Black (I am from Texas you know, plus the original lacks such quality visuals).

#4 The Universe…Again

A catchy tune and inspiring version, but since it lacks the numeric information of the Monty Python version it will always live in its shadow.

#5 The Nations of the World

This is one of my favorites. I have the first 2 sections memorized, but I loose it when he gets to Africa. Unfortunately, like most of these songs the information is increasingly out of date. 

#6 I am the very model of a modern major-general

While not necessarily conveying a lot of scientific or practical information (that’s kind of the point of the joke), this famous scene for the play the “Pirates of Penzance” does have a lot of historical perspective on what he nerds of the 19th century where talking about. From a time when things like “beings animalcules” (microscopic organisms) were first discovered. The late great science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this song where he identified the meaning behind every strange and forgotten word. If you’re into retro steam punk, you’ll enjoy this vocabulary lesson.

It does this with millions of tiny balls, black on one side, white on the other. These rotate independently. The screen is more readable, like a newspaper, uses real light to show the screen, and use a lot less battery.

I think the ultimate devise would be to put a page of epaper on the lid of a thin laptop – like the Macbookair. I mocked it up in Photoshop below. Close the lid – read a book. Open it, use the laptop. Perfect.

If you have not heard of Twitter, heard of but never tried it, tried it but didn’t “get it”, or seen the value but weren’t sure how to extract it, then this article is written for you.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a website and service that let’s people “text” each other short messages. Unlike almost every other social network on the internet, Twitter is focused completely on this one feature. Each “Tweet” has a limit of 140 characters and looks like this on the website:

Let’s look at this tweet. First, Al Gore has an objective with this Tweet, he has taken a position and he wants as many people as possible to be aware of it. He is promoting his point of view. He used 136 characters in that tweet which probably meant he spent some time carefully choosing his words to make sure it fit.

When he pressed “send” some of the 26,000+ people that “follow” him saw it on their twitter page, got it on their phone, or on some other device. Some of them then ReTweeted (RT) the message or replied to it. This in return exposed the message to their audiences. As the message was repeated the number of people exposed was multiplied. Even if they did not repeat it, but just replied to it their followers saw the response and may have clicked to see the original post.

Twitter is also a social network, but for ideas…not people.

Each user has a very simple profile, consisting of a single photo, a one sentence description, a single link, and their location. But people follow each other because of what they say, not who they are.

Of coarse you can follow your friends or influencers but unlike other social networks, you don’t need their permission to listen to what they tweet (there is an option to keep your tweets private but most people don’t). If your like me, you quickly realize that you don’t really care about following your friends on Twitter, you already know what they think and have other ways of communicating with them. You use twitter to find the things you don’t know anything about and to do that you need a diverse network. 

Who is on Twitter?

Besides Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Karl Rove, Shaquille O’Neil, Lance Armstrong, everyone in Silicon Valley, almost every journalist, journalism professor, public relations professional, and executive of a internet company is on twitter. As well as lots of authors, comedians, TV personalities, thousands of web consultants (like myself @benshoemate), “gurus” , self promoters, bloggers, and million and millions of young people.

Will they actually reply to you?

Yes, if you say something worth replying to and not just “OMG I’m your biggest fan”. It’s like at a party, if you say something intelligent, they react. In fact, if I were trying to get on the Today show, or Oprah, I think I’d start on Twitter by reaching out to their people or even the stars themselves.

Why are these people on Twitter?

Same reason you need to be. Here they are:

• 140 char limit gives you an excuse for brevity. That which would be rude in an email or face to face is required by Twitter. I think busy people find this  liberating. I *wish* email had a character limit. I would love to put a filter on an email server that you could turn on that would only allow people 100 words per email. Because then they would have to think about what they are sending. They would have to get to the point. And no attachments. That would be a good experiment, no attachment friday’s. Use the wiki instead… #productidea
• 140 char limit makes twitter scanable. When you are following 50 conversations at once this is very important.
• Some smart interesting people are on twitter, if I lived in ancient Greece, I would be following Aristotle around, hanging on his every word (as long as it didn’t interfere with my job) because pearls of wisdom fall from his mouth every time he speaks. If I could, I would follow every interesting person on the planet (I made a list at the bottom to get you started)
• Influential people are on twitter
• Your customers are on twitter and you have an unprecedented opportunity to listen to them and learn about them (more about this later)
• and the number one reason – People are talking about you, your company, your industry, your products and services, your future, and your brand on Twitter.

Listen to your customers

Twitter is a way to listen to what other people are saying about you, your company, your products and services, your industry,  your brand.

What are the people saying about your company right now? Most big companies spend lots of money conducting focus groups, surveys, and interviews to understand what people think about their products and services. This is great and necessary. But their is also something to be said for listening to the word on the street. The unsolicited feedback  that arises spontaneously. In a world where these opinions are broadcast to 100s or 1000s or people and sometimes more, bad news travels faster than ever and good news is still just as slow.

Getting Started – Search and listen first

The best way to get started with Twitter is with search. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ 

Here are some samples:

Search term: UPS

This is unsolicited feedback. No matter how big or small your company is, you can’t afford to not listen to your customers.

Search term: I love UPS

I had to be careful selecting these tweets – some may get some UPS drivers in trouble…

Search term: I wish UPS

If you are looking for product ideas, listen to your customers.

Search term: UPS help me

Of coarse UPS is a big company with over 300,000 people working for them so there are already people providing help.  The great thing about this is when they do, they are overheard doing it by others. This increases UPS’s reputation as a company that cares.  But is anyone doing it for your company?

Be overheard at your best

When you help a customer through phone or email you help exactly 1 person. When you do it on the web you create a piece of knowledge that can help many. When you do it on Twitter, you also build a reputation of being helpful in realtime, one on one personal way that is overheard by others. This makes your brand instantly more personal, more responsive, and builds loyalty. Companies spend the 20th century creating unresponsive industrial giants that customers tolerated but openly despised. They jumped to the first viable competition that didn’t treat them like a number. The 21st century will be about using technology to return to our person to person roots.

Be selective of who you follow

It is tempting to follow everyone, but look for people you enjoy talking to and don’t be afraid to thin the herd if you get people who post a lot of non-sense.

Some tools you need

Twitscoop.com – See what is buzzing. When something happens in the world, it shows up in twitter first. As it is tweeted, retweeted, and discussed, that term used a lot. Below is a live feed from TwitScope. The larger a term is, the more it appears in recent tweets. The website itself is better because it shows those actual tweets when you hover over it. 

Tweetchat.com – On Monday nights at 7-10pm CST if your watching Twitscoop you’ll see word #journchat get really big. This is a  weekly conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR folks (http://journchat.info/about/) Twitter users use #topic to tag conversations that are all related. They do this for 2 reasons. First, they know lots of people have open searches for that word #topic. Second, other services like tweetchat create chat rooms out of these. I strongly suggest you try tweetchat during the Monday, 7-10pm CST time. Other #topics – #gaza, #haiku, and if there is any conference, concert or other large public event like #inaug09 then there will be a # for it. This is a great way to see the real power of twitter.

Tweetdeck.com – A tool that lets you keep several searches open at once as well as twitscoop. If your only going to spend a small amount of time in Twitter each day, install Tweetdeck, open some searches, and join in the conversation. @tweetdeck