Originally posted by Charlie Wollborg on the TEDxDetroit LinkedIn group. I just had to spread it. I attended the first Startup Weekend Detroit a few years ago and had a great time and met some amazing people. I would recommend the event to anyone!

We love to highlight the many cool startups springing to life in Detroit every year at TEDxDetroit. Here’s your chance to be part of one.

Startup Weekend is returning to Detroit February 17th. It’s a 54-hour celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit. 100 makers, thinkers and doers walk into a building Friday night and 10 new web-based companies emerge on Sunday. From forming teams to brainstorming to business plans to designing mockups to coding prototypes to making the big pitch to venture capitalists, it all happens in one crazy weekend. It’s an amazing experience.

If you’re an artist, technologist, designer, geek, illustrator, coder or entrepreneur, you need to be part of Startup Weekend Detroit.

This year’s event will be even more special as it’s being held at the spectacular Madison Building (the home of Detroit Venture Parters, Detroit Labs and several other budding tech companies). It’s hosted by a couple of Xs – Brandon Chestnutt and Henry Balanon (who presented at TEDxDetroit in 2010). Networking, innovation, inspiration and education will surround you. It’s the perfect environment in which to test crazy ideas and take the first step towards launching a company that becomes the next big thing.

You can learn more and register at: http://detroit.startupweekend.org but don’t delay, this event sells out every year.

Come fan that entrepreneurial flame that burns bright inside you. Who knows – we might be hearing all about your success story on stage at the next TEDxDetroit.

Keep Creating -

Charlie Wollborg
@CharlieCurve
curator, TEDxDetroit

On March 4th, 2012 I am going to take on Michigan’s tallest building (the Renaissance Center) all the way to the 70th floor by climbing 1,035 stairs. I am climbing in the American Lung Association’s Fight for Air Climb to help raise money for lung disease research, education and advocacy.

I am doing so because I am able. I can breathe freely and there are many people who are not as lucky. I am joining a team of likeminded Web designers and developers from Detroit on my journey, our team name is the “Quadzillas“.

I am writing this blog post because I would love your support

For the 2012 Fight for Air stair climb my team would like to raise a minimum of $1,035 dollars, or $1 for every step in the GM Renaissance Center.

We need your help! You can donate to one person, or spread it out among the members. You can donate $1 (one step) or $15 (one floor) or any amount you want! Either way you choose to donate is greatly appreciated! Or if you would like to join me I would be honored to climb with you!

Your donation to the American Lung Association will sustain their commitment to the prevention of all respiratory diseases including lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) and asthma.

Thank you for your support of my effort to raising money for this very important cause.

More Information | Donate

1. Write a book
2. Give an ignite talk
3. Publish something 6 days a week
4. Finish my office (floor, walls, desk, bookshelves)
5. Truly learn Ruby on Rails or Python
6. Beat my previous marathon time
7. Grow EDU Snippits to a 1000+ visitor per week website
8. Run a hackathon at Wayne State University
9. Take public transportation to work at least once
10. Be the best possible influence to Cecilia DeNardis

2011 Resolutions (3 success, 7 fail)

1. FAIL: Learn sign language
• Just basically no time. Taking this off my list
2. FAIL: Write a book
• Grad School totally got in the way of this one
3. SEMI SUCCESS: Be a motivator in and outside of work
• No concrete evidence but I feel like I have been a motivator
4. FAIL: Stick to a schedule of once every two weeks posting to .eduGuru
5. FAIL: Finish my office (Floor, Walls, Desk, Bookshelves)
6. FAIL: Truly learn Ruby on Rails or Python
7. SEMI SUCCESS: Contribute to an open source project
• Continue to actively develop PHPSimpl and started WP Twitter Profile List Widget
8. SEMI FAIL: No longer order meat
• Started out great for the first six months. I still eat meat, just not much at all
9. SUCCESS: Run a marathon
• Chicago marathon complete
10. FAIL: Take public transportation to work at least once
• No excuse why I didn’t get this one done

2010 Resolutions Post

2009 Resolutions Post

Interested in the #NewNewTwitter? I was totally bummed by their “rolling out the redesigned Twitter over the next few weeks” and realization that it could be weeks before I could play with the desktop version. I have been following their changes for some time. By chance I tried their trick of updating my mobile app and what do you know, within a few hours I got the #NewNewTwitter on my desktop.

Playing around with it a bit I found some things I really like and others that I’m not a fan of. I break them down below.

Timeline

Actually pretty clean and I love the inline conversation view. Not a fan of having to click three times to get photos to appear large though. It took me a minute to figure out that there is “Compose a new Tweet…” input on the left side right under my user information, I actually find this quicker.

@Connect

They did a great job taking the information overload of the “Activity” tab and bringing some sanity to it. I found that the “Activity” is now located in the #Discover area, not gone, just placed with the “not exactly related to me” stuff.

Conversations

Clicking on a tweet brings up the conversation inline. I like this because the three column sidebar before just wasn’t enough room, especially if you didn’t have a high resolution monitor. I wish it brought up the entire conversation though, not just the replied to and replied tweets.

Lists

Again the interface took another hit against lists. This time they tucked them away under the User icon -> Lists. At least this time you can get to them all on one page instead of only seeing half and having to click another link to get to the full list in the #NewTwitter interface.

List Timeline

I really like the list timeline because it acts like the regular timeline. But my biggest complaint is the lack of context around what you’re looking at. I feel like this page needs a header or breadcrumbs or something to identify the list. Maybe it’s just me but the top left of the page feels too much like a user profile.

Direct Messages

If you use DM’s at all you already know they took a huge UI hit in the mobile interface and now it is confirmed they are equally as hidden in the web interface. Hidden behind two clicks, Profile -> Direct Messages. As you can see from the shot below they don’t even get a full timeline view. It’s a shame.

DM Conversations

Clicking in to a DM conversation the window doesn’t expand and space is pretty limited. For me this just isn’t enough room, I would prefer if more of the conversation was in view or at least you could resize the window. The style of the conversation is very nice, just wish it wasn’t squeezed in a tiny window.

The Little Things

When focusing on the search box all your saves searches come up below. This is a nice change from the drop down menu in the older interface. It puts the search in the same context as the user’s action.

As you move through your timeline and click to view and open photos/videos/conversations the tweets start to space out. As soon as you open a tweet they offer a nice little “Close all open Tweets” button at the top of the page. Nice little big detail.

Final Thoughts

Don’t get me wrong, I really do like the direction Twitter is going with the increased emphasis on conversations but I just can’t get past their continued hate toward Lists and now Direct Messages. By trying to pull in new users to explore they are excluding the seasoned users, but I guess that is what the Tweetdeck redesign is for.

Do you have the #NewNewTwitter yet? If so, what do you think?

I have been meaning to write this post for some time but to be honest time has escaped me this last month. Little things like being the technical director for TEDxDetroit, running the Chicago Marathon, hiring a project manager, hiring a full time developer, and the birth of my first child have kept my attention. It has been a fun ride filled with a lot of unexpected surprises.

@foxydenardis

As a lot of you know, my dog Foxy has her own twitter account, it is a great way to extend her personality to the world. Twitter is a source for instant information, asking questions and giving feedback to others. Almost immediately upon creating Foxy’s Twitter account she was followed by a handful of other whippets and greyhounds. They have been a great resource of information; twitter connects her to a larger community that just isn’t available in our immediate area.

I wanted something similar for Cecilia. Thinking about the people who would be following her I knew a Twitter account would not work. Only a handful of our family have Twitter accounts and frankly the user experience of Twitter if you are not familiar with it is intimidating. Long term I want Cecilia to choose the social networks she would be interacting with. Who knows if Twitter will be around in 5-10 years and I didn’t want to put her social capital in to a service that could be gone at any moment.

ceciliadenardis.com

I’m a huge fan of owning yourname.com, no matter what it should always be a destination to give public insights about yourself. For me, yourname.com is your resume, it is how the world sees you. Buying ceciliadenardis.com is the least I could do to give her an identity beyond our household.

I was reminded about this while listening to a talk by Clay Hebert at LessConf. The point he makes is when your child is graduating high school with a 4.0 and involved in three sports what is going to make him/her stand out? There will be thirty or forty other students graduating with the same credentials. Having a website where they can develop their writing skills, post about projects they worked on, and be able to explain to the world that what they are doing matters. There is no better way to know someone than exploring someones strengths than to see a history of them.

Using a domain as a single destination give us/her flexibility to what goes on it. Right now I choose to use Tumblr since it requires basically zero setup and is perfect for posting photos, this is what we plan to use it for until she can type. The other great thing about Tumblr is it allows people to subscribe how they want, via the dashboard, RSS or email. A side benefit is each post gets emailed from my email address (looks like I sent it personally) which allows family to reply directly to me. This may seem insignificant but in the past few weeks I have talked to and learned more about distant friends/family members than ever before. Twitter is a great tool but for this audience they just don’t understand it, talk to them about websites and email though and they know exactly what to do.

If you have a child I think the single best thing you can give them is theirname.com. It is cheap and has the potential to significantly help them in the future.

What tools are you using to document your child/children’s lives? Anything public? I would love to hear about what is and is not working for you.

Follow Cecilia DeNardis at: http://ceciliadenardis.com/

I recently made a comment on an EDU Checkup episode about how the use of image maps was a negative aspect in the code of a website.

I promptly got the following comment:

I don’t get it. What’s wrong with image maps? Aren’t they still part of the HTML 5 working draft?

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/the-map-element.html#the-map-element

…doesn’t seem like they’re planning on phasing it out.

I wanted to take a minute to explain the difference between the official ability to use tags from the HTML spec and the appropriate use of those tags.

Yes, it is part of the standard

For me the issue with image maps isn’t their place in the standard, it’s their implementation. Tables are still part of the HTML5 standard but there are appropriate uses and uses that make the user experience far more difficult than necessary.

Let’s add some context

For example on the NEL site an image map is used to link to the social media sites. I can see the motivation behind using a single image for all the social icons to reduce HTTP requests. But that means the meta data behind the links basically is stating here is an image with some hotspots on it. It doesn’t give any insight into what is being linked on. Personally I think the better approach would be to list out each link in an unsorted list with an appropriate ID to label what the list is for. Then using CSS to display them next to each other, hide the text with a text-indent: -9999em and then use that same single social logo sprite to display the appropriate icons image for people can can actually view the site.

Image Map

Unordered List

This would allow the same visual result but add far deeper meaning to the HTML for machines and screen readers.

Just my two cents. I am interested in seeing examples of real appropraite uses of image maps, if you have any please feel free to comment.

Inspired by a video I stumbled upon years ago (can’t find the link anymore), I decided to bring everyone on a journey through an hour of my life every day. Detroit is a unique environment because the majority of people who work in the city live out in the suburbs. While talking to people that live in other major cities the idea is foreign to them. The city is suppose to be the place to be, why would you want to live outside and commute? In a city dominated by the auto industry, the idea of public transportation was looked at as a “poor man’s” way of getting around. I’m not sure where the idea came from but it was bread into every single person around the city. Secondly, city services are just not there for us.

My journey

Time lapse: From the suburbs to the city – Detroit from Nick DeNardis on Vimeo.

Above is a time lapse video I put together to bring you on my journey to and from work (Wayne State University) every day. I live 20 miles from campus and it takes me roughly 30 minutes each way. That’s a large chunk of time carved out of my day that I can’t get back. I hope you enjoy the ride and the tunes.

A few notes about the video. I actually did drive the speed limit although it looks like I’m flying down the road. It also looks as if I am getting pretty close the the vehicles in front of me, I blame it on the camera making it look like I’m closer than I really am. Just wanted to put that out there before I get too many comments.

Video production

I am a huge believer in using existing tools to do work, so I did just that. I didn’t use anything special to create the video above that I don’t already use to create EDU Checkup each week.

I now drive Andrea’s old car, a Ford Focus, to work to save on gas. I simply added a tripod between the drive and passenger seat, which fit nicely. Attached a Kodak Zi8 to the top and I was ready to rock and roll. I cracked the windows open a little bit to get the ambient noise. I also had to make sure it didn’t touch anything in the center of the car because it shakes the camera a lot.

Once the drive to and from work were recorded I downloaded the video to iMovie and started playing around with the speed settings. Thanks to Mallory Wood for making me aware the setting was even there. I found that 800% seemed to be a happy medium. Slower was just too slow and anything faster you can’t really make out the small details passing by.

I added some title slides and contemplated putting a few lower thirds to point out landmarks but I scrapped the idea for now. I might replace it if people ask me a lot of questions about the environment. I added two songs to overlay the sound of the engine, Lupe Fiasco’s Daydreamin’ and Streets Of Tomorrow by Carla Vallet.

Wrapped it all up with a thank you slide then sat and watched it render. I don’t know why I did this all on my Mac Mini but I did and it took far longer to encode than I imagined. But in the end it all worked out.

Learn something from everything

Initially I thought this would be a cool project and I didn’t really think about how to get this done before hand. I think everyone should at least once per month have a project they just jump into and figure out, something completely different than their every day work. Although the work on this video only took a few hours to put together it took a far different part of my brain than I typically work with on a daily basis.

In the age of free music, movies and book at your internet fingertips is there any room for the honor system? What motivates people to pay for anything if there is a way to get it for free? I have been thinking a lot about service the last few weeks, inspired by a book I am reading, The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. The book makes a distinction between bad and good profits based on the customer experience. Bad profits come from customers who have negative experiences with your business. The book makes the argument that the most important thing for any business to focus on is increasing the likelihood for a customer to recommend it to a friend or family member.

This weekend I was in Biggby Coffee, a local (regional) Michigan based coffee shop (side note, I would recommend Biggby to everyone). At the end of the counter I noticed something interesting. A box for “line jumpers” who just need to get their coffee and get on their way. The clear box says:

“skip the line, help yourself to your favorite brewed coffee”

It states the prices for each size below it and has a slot for money.

I think this is an awesome idea for various reasons. But I also think it makes a bold statement about Biggby itself. They aren’t just churning out coffee all day to make the most profit possible but they actually pay attention to their customers needs. I’m not someone who gets a coffee from a shop each morning but I know a lot of people who do. They get the same thing each day and their coffee shop is just doing a simple transaction. There is no need to try and “up sell” them because convenience is the ultimate driver in their decision.

So does it work?

I asked the barista if it gets used often and she said a few people (regulars) have used it but it wasn’t wide spread. The ones that use it typically overpaid by a little, she assumed it was because it was easier to just put in two dollars, or it was a little bit of a tip as a thank you for making the service available. She didn’t have any examples of people short changing the system, although they don’t keep a close eye on it at all times.

Obviously this reliance on the honor system wouldn’t work everywhere and for everyone. But for me, just seeing trust like this gives me hope for the business world and humanity.

I am not a beer snob or anything but I am always on the lookout for something new. Luckily my local Meijer has a pretty decent selection of craft beer. Previously I wasn’t aware how hard it is for a small brewery to get regional or even national distribution until my friend Rob Vrabel, home brewer, schooled me about it.

If you know me, you know I have a thing for great packaging. I am always on the look out for attention to detail, even in the beer isle.

This week, Redhook Long Hammer IPA totally took my attention. I have never seen it at the store but it’s package design stopped me in my tracks. So of course I had to buy it.

Recently Re-aligned

Rob alerted me of Redhook’s recent re-branding and re-alignment of their packaging. Beervana did a great job dissecting the new look. It really shows they have insight not only in to themselves but also their current and potential audience.

My Thoughts

Simple Colors - The package isn’t overly designed, simple, straight to the point. With a wall of images on other packages in the isles, the solid green, white and red stand out to the scanning eye. I just had to know what this beer was that decided they needed to make a statement.

Bold Graphness – IPA’s come in all different tastes. In the top left of the package on both the front and sides there is a graph that shows where this particular one sits, Bold. But it doesn’t just state it is bold it also gives you where it sits in the realm of beers. “Refreshing, Smooth, Bold, and Dark”, you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.

Microcopy – On various areas of the package there are some great examples of a copy writer who understands how to connect to their audience. Some examples are “Long Hammer IPA is a big fan of dry hopping, which sounds much dirtier than it is.”, “30 years of cheer”, “well built brew”, and “Redhook would always enjoy himself responsibly. Do the same.” Just to name a few. Check out the bottom which tells a great story too.

I’m turning 30. Let’s have some brews

Who knows what led you to read the bottom of my six-pack. Maybe it fell and landed upside down. Maybe you’re recycling. Maybe you’ve completely run out of decent reading material. But you know what? The why doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we’re having a little chat. Call me sentimental, but turning 30 has made me appreciate the times we habe out together all the more. So crack open a beer and let’s have some time.

Cheers, Redhook.

P.S. If you’re ever in Woodinville, WA or Portsmith, NH, be sure to swing by one of my pubs. Let’s have a beer and I’ll show you around the brewery.

Redhook himself - Inspecting the packaging a little bit more you will notice a little guy starting at the bottom of the mountain. Turning to the side as I took it off the shelf I notice he made it half way up, I thought that was pretty cool. Only when I took a beer out did I notice he made it to the top. Success! Just like me. This progressive climb matched my progressive experience with the product. After this I was totally impressed!

Taste

After all of this the beer could have tasted horrible and I would still have been impressed. But as suspected it tasted as good as the amount of detail paid put in to the package design. Probably one of my favorite IPA’s. Great job Redhook, all the way around! Trust me, if I find myself in Woodinville, WA or Portsmith, NH I’ll be sure to stop in.

Overall Grade

In the end I am giving Redhook an “A” for their entire package experience, taste and for the ability to gain an advocate with their attention to detail.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and Foundation is by far one of my favorite, it is produced by Kevin Rose. In the recent episode Kevin interviewed Jesse Jacobs, founder of Samovar Tea Lounge. The episode centered around his journey opening a brink and mortar store but one section, about nine minutes in, really got me thinking. I encourage you to watch it if you haven’t.

“We have time, we just waste it.

Say there is two tea cups, one empty and the other half full.

The half full cup can only be filled half more. The empty tea cup is full of limitless potential. You can put anything in it.

Instead of living life always half full, always static, buzzing, full of todo lists, emails and everything else. How then instead can we live life to get as empty as possible to allow for that limitless potential.”

~ Jesse Jacobs

Foundation Podcast

http://tinyletter.com/foundation
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