2 of 22 wireframe pages for the Reservation Management application

It seems appropriate to sum up the last year with what I can only call the Understatement Of The Year: We sure have learned a lot. Which, admittedly, is a euphemism for: Holy crapola, we have encountered more obstacles and challenges than we ever imagined.

There was the location dance that cost us several months. There were the numerous gotchas as we did demolition in our space that is actually the epicenter of 5 old buildings. There were new city regulations, and periodic construction glitches. And of course there continue to be funding issues.

But perhaps our biggest challenge, has been bringing to life software of a whole new breed — something that could handle our unique reservations needs and our café side requirements. Not only that, but we wanted the solution to be gorgeous and seamless and … okay, call us over ambitious … joyful.

We hit some big walls — sometimes we joke that we’ve actually created a new kind of hardware — as in difficult-ware. Not for lack of brilliance on the inside. We employed a very mature design process. We developed personas, created use case scenarios and mapped out user flows. Tori Breitling and Marie Hwang created some of the most stunning, detailed wireframes I’ve ever seen. More than one development team has been blown away by their user interface documents, commenting that they’ve never had the opportunity to start out with such well though-out design documents.

But finding the right team that knows how to make all that work right — well, it’s been a long road, more than a little frustrating. And then, sigh of relief, enter the geniuses at Integral Concepts. We asked them to buy into this complex new model and they signed on eagerly. They totally get what we’re aiming for — not just technically but Big Picture-wise. They know how to integrate a high-touch design into all the backend functionality and they dig the concept. And right now, as you’re reading this, they’re working on something we can expand and evolve as we grow.

Oh, and did we mention they’re most excellent communicators? They check in daily, offer suggestions for improvements, and are totally, constantly on top of the game. So a big shout out to our Integral Concepts team: Scott Riggins, Chuck Guo, Sebastian Leks, and Harry Teunissen — I actually met Scott back in the 90s at Go Media when we hosted WebEdge, a Mac web developers conference. Fun to be working with him again. We can’t wait for the big launch :)

For example:
Yet there was a time when the White House was a veritable house of the future. The sitting president enjoyed running water and central heat long before most Americans. Telegraph machines were introduced in 1866 by President Andrew Johnson (a year before his impeachment on technical — not technological — grounds), and electricity has been coursing through presidential wires since 1891.

Also noted in the article: Harry Truman got the honor of being the first president to broadcast over TV (in 1947). And Jimmy Carter installed solar panels in the ’70s. (Less forward-thinking Ronald Reagan had these ripped out when it was his turn to sit in the head honcho seat).

A website dedicated to the history of the White House offers some other notable improvements in the lives of presidents throughout history.

1801 — Thomas Jefferson does away with the outhouses and installs two indoor water closets. These did not feature running water, though.

1809 — James Madison puts in a heating system — “the gravity-based Pettibone furnace.”

1833 — Running water is installed. Initially this was to supply drinking water and protect against fire (the White House was torched by the Brits in 1814 and then rebuilt so the precaution had a catalyst). Flowing H2O soon inspired another change:

“Very soon, a ‘bathing room’ was established in the east wing to take advantage of the fine water supply. The room featured a cold bath, a shower, and a hot bath heated by coal fires under large copper boilers.”

1860s — “a new spring-bell system enabled Lincoln to signal the reception room and his secretaries without leaving his desk.”

1879 — Rutherford B. Hayes installs the first telephone. However, since hardly anyone has a phone, hardly anyone calls. And — this is great — his phone number was: 1. Yes, that’s it. Just 1.

1880 — The White House gets its first typewriter.

1881 — The first air conditioner of sorts is installed to bring comfort to the dying Garfield. “The device forced air through a box with screens that were kept wet with cold ice water and cooled the president.”

1881 — First elevator!

1891 — Electricity. “President and Mrs. Harrison refused to operate the switches because they feared being shocked and left the operation of the electric lights to the domestic staff.”

1912 — Now we’re talking — culinary improvements thanks to Mrs. Taft: A ‘Forty-quart Peerless Ice Cream Freezer,’ with a direct current motor and a twelve-foot long Imperial French Coal Range were added to the large kitchen.”

1920s — Vacuum cleaners and radio make the neighbors jealous.

Plenty more happened in the ninety years since, and it’s all compiled in splendid detail at the White House History site.

One last surprising answer: Q Who automated the White House with computers? A Same president who went for solar panels — Mr. Peanut, Jimmy Carter.

Tangent time: A long, long time ago, I was part of Austin’s poetry slam scene. And it used to chap me when people would get up and perform pieces about slam poetry. What do you call that when you write about what you write about? (And yes, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of the same — in fact, did I not just write here about how I used to write poetry? Guilty!)

Anyway, I mention that because maybe it’s just some recent case of heightened awareness on my part, but I feel like I have read about nine hundred articles in the past week about the Internet. And yes, I read them on the Internet. But the difference between reading about the net on the net and hearing poetry about poetry is that I actually find the former fascinating.

Some examples are below. Granted I don’t think any of these are brand brand new, cutting edge uses of the Internet. But they are moving from the margins to the center, catching on to the point that New York Times is reporting on them. In fact, of the following, all but one came to my attention via NYT online and, though it’s the paper of note and all that, most anyone will tell you by the time they get their hands on a story, it’s probably been covered before in smaller media outlets. That is, Times coverage is often proof of arrival in the mainstream.

Transforming Art Into a More Lucrative Career Choice
This story highlights how artists, including a 14 year-old custom guitar maker, are using marketing tools — yes, a lot of Web 2.0 stuff — to actually make a living with their art.

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
Exciting, scary excerpt from that story: Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize. But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Grandpa’s On the Computer Screen
A whole generation of kids is now growing up with cyber grandparents — that is, they’re communicating with tools like Skype and webcams to share virtual playtime with grandparents who, in an earlier era would have to either visit in person or totally miss out.

In Lean Times, Online Coupons are Catching On
Tips on how to get the very best deals and discounts by tracking down coupon codes for online shopping sites.

Cyber Monday Crashes an Online-Shopping Tradition
Apparently there’s an online answer to Black Friday, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year. According to this post, online retailers slash prices on the Monday after Thanksgiving so folks returning to work resentfully after four days off will have something to do in their cubicles. But there’s a downside — crashing retailer sites galore.

Citizen Journalists Provide Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks
This is an example — Hurricane Ike coverage was another recent one — of how regular people caught in crisis situations are informing the official media with instant updates. It also shows how Twitter has gone from being sort of silly to capable of being a really powerful tool in an emergency.

A Penny for My Thoughts?
Maureen Dowd’s recent column about how some editor in Pasadena fired his hometown staff and is now outsourcing local news reporting to journalists (some not trained as such) in India willing to write for an nth of a percentage of what their predecessors were paid.

I could go on. There’s the story of how Turkey has banned YouTube and how Google (owner of YouTube) has to decide what to post and what to prohibit. There’s the story about how books, most of them anyway, are going away but how this might not be the most awful thing in the world for writers. (I liked that piece, of course.) And the recently settled case of the woman who used MySpace to torture her daughter’s classmate, which, it was alleged, drove the classmate to suicide.

It is, for me, so cool to be witnessing such rapid growth — some of it obviously painful and deviant but so much more of it productive — of this technology over such a short period of time. Like watching a time-lapse image of a blooming flower back in fifth grade science class.

At the risk of sounding like an old biddy, I remember when technological advances were marked by the invention of a telephone cord that could reach all the way across the room so you could simultaneously talk on the phone and cross over to the eight-track player to turn it down. Now this Internet thing? By comparison? Crazy, crazy horse of a different color.

Tacos & Internet photo by dro!d

That’s right, welcome to doggie social networking.

There’s a new radio frequency identification tag that dog owners can place on their four legged best friends for both monitoring and friend-making purposes. Each SNIF tag gives off a unique signal. If your dog is wearing one and comes upon another dog also wearing one, each dog’s tag captures and stores information from the other dog’s tag. Later, the owners can upload the info and find out about each other to decide if they’d like to get in touch.

The tag also allows humans to keep track of their homebound pets while they (the humans that is) are away at work, checking to see if the pup is active, if the dog walker came by, and even sizing up how their dog’s life compares to other SNIF-wearing dogs in the vicinity.

The starter kit sets owners back about $300 and another $90 per year to continue services. Now if we could just get a version of the iPhone that was dewclaw friendly…

Voice recognition is nothing new. Call 411 and odds are high you have to deal with some dumbass computer chick who embodies (or, actually disembodies) artificial unintelligence. She asks what you want, you tell her, and she either gets it wrong or doesn’t get it at all, leading to One moment please, one moment please… while you’re redirected to a human, which is what your original goal was anyway. For some reason, this just does not tickle our funny bones the same way well-intentioned, poorly executed Google voice searches do.

On the other hand, the humor is akin to Alta Vista’s BabelFish, the language translator. For that program, you type something in your native language and translate to any number of other languages. If you don’t happen to be bilingual, you won’t be able to catch the errors. But if you take the translation, feed it back in, and request that it be switched back to English, it can get pretty wacky.

For example type in:
Excuse me, is that a cow you’re wearing on your head? Will you please pass the butter?

Now translate to Spanish:
Excúseme, es que una vaca you’ ¿el re usar en su cabeza? ¿Usted pasará por favor la mantequilla?

And now back to English:
Excúseme, is that one is vacant you’ re to use in its head? You will pass butter please?

Similarly, the Google App, while surprisingly successful in many instances, does offer up its fair share of gaffes and misunderstandings. So, while I said, Olivia Newton John and immediately received the official ONJ website as my first hit, when Michael tried Bangladesh, the search returned results for plenty of fish.

I think if you speak into the mic as if talking to a very old, stone deaf relative who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you might have better results. And, neat side feature, during the search the screen displays a visual of your audio — that is you can see a graph of your tones going up and down. Speak too softly and you get a sort of flat line effect.

Julie’s played with it the most, and here are some of her results:

I
I’m thinking there’s a game waiting to be invented in all this. Remember the “Magic iPod Game” invented in honor of those old Magic Eight Balls? The gist of it was, you ask a question out loud in front of friends. Then you hit shuffle on the iPod and a song comes up which reveals your answer. So maybe you ask, Should I break up with my boyfriend? and you get, Hit the Road Jack, and, voila, you show your boyfriend the door. (And later, when he finds out how you came to your decision, he takes a hammer to your iPod.)

So what game can we come up with here with this new app?

In the past few days alone, a number of pieces in the New York Times have scrutinized everything from where the kids might attend school to how much smaller, tighter, and more impenetrable Obama’s security bubble has become. His Chicago home is now a fortress, barricaded three blocks out. He and his wife take thirty Secret Service agents to dinner with them.

And then there’s the tech side of the new President’s life, a side that affects both the personal and the political. Twittering, texting, and YouTubing were all instrumental in the making of the President 2.0. Via these platforms record-breaking funds were raised, the message of hope went viral and, on the private side, Obama could stay in touch with his closest friends easily while on the road for two years.

Looks like most of that is about to change. As reported by Jeff Zeleny odds are very high that Obama is soon going to have to part ways with his Blackberry, a device of which he is more than a little fond. Why? Zeleny writes:

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

On the other hand, maybe Obama’s Twitter account — reportedly down to a trickle of tweets since the election — might come back to life, provided the messages are innocuous and posted by an aide. And all is not totally eLost: Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that the “fireside chat” — long a presidential communication staple beamed out over the radio waves — will be videotaped and aired on YouTube. Could be interesting to watch the video comments these regular postings inspire.

Meanwhile, poor Obama — could you imagine giving up texting and emailing after being so wired for so long?

Now let’s look at technology. Again, I wasn’t one of those people in the basement, co-inventing the Internet with the likes of Al Gore back in 1929. But when I got my first Mac in 1995, and hopped on the web, and began a sort of prototypical blog, I was still out in front of most of my peers. How rad I was with my AOL account (username HenMom)!

A recent New York Times article suggests that, unwittingly, once again I am ahead of my fellow Americans. How did I get to the edge this time? Easy: I ditched my landline back in 2005. Which makes me one of only 12% of phone users in the no-landline-only-cell-phone category.

There was a time when I had a house line, an office/fax line and a cell phone. And my kid had a cell phone. We had more numbers than we knew what to do with. I had a friend or two that streamlined down to one line only — cell — and I thought, Whoa, no way could I ever do that. A cross between fear of something I can no longer recall (maybe it was not being able to find my cell phone when some burglar broke in?) and reluctance to give up phone numbers I felt oddly attached to kept me hanging on to my landline as long as I did.

When I bought a house in 2005, I ditched my regular phone line, but did have a landline via Time Warner, a digital phone which, if electricity went out during a power outage or if I forgot to pay my bill (often the case) would be useless. Then, finally, fed up with the crappy digital phone, I said screw it and dropped down to one number, which I maintained as a cell phone only line.

Though being part of just 12% seems like a sort of exclusivity to me, this number, and the fact that it is growing, is sad news for what is known as “fixed voice service providers.” They’re freaking out because another 12% are projected to jump landline ship in the coming year. Could it be only a matter of time before the majority of US households give up landlines entirely? Don’t scoff — I’m sure some people thought the telegraph would never go away.

I also like that most of my cell-phone-only peers are 18 – 34 years old, which means some are easily young enough to be my spawn. Add to the equation that I also drive a Scion — originally targeted at 18 year-old boys — and I am feeling mighty hip and youthful over here.

I wonder what next will turn up to be labeled a trend, something I’ve been doing for years, not seeking trendsetter status, just living the way I want to. Some possibilities: housecleaning is deemed totally passé; sleeping with at least four dogs nightly is de rigueur; knitting is the new texting. Hey, an oldie-but-trendy can dream, right?

How about you? Are you cell phone only yet? Thinking about it?

Obama '08 iPhone app main screen

A couple of weeks ago, Raven Zachary, my friend, open source guru, and iPhone maven out in Portland, gave me a most excellent opportunity. Raven is one of ten volunteer developers working with the Obama campaign to release a free app to iPhone users looking to help make a change. The team needed beta testers that met the following criteria: must have an iPhone, must be able to keep secrets, must be rabid Obama supporter. Sign me up!

I’m thrilled to announce the Obama ‘08 app has just been released. If you have an iPhone, you can pick it up for free at the iTunes App Store. Here’s a direct link to the app.

One of the coolest things about this app is that it sorts your phone contacts geographically so you can call your friends living in battleground states and, if they’re undecided (or, gasp, decided on McCain) you can call and work to get them on board with Obama.

Here’s what I love about this function — I really want to help Obama win in November. I want to be part of the solution in this country. I give money to the campaign, but I want to do more.

On the other hand, the idea of cold calling people or knocking on doors really is not at all up my alley. So now I can do “warm” calls, and I can specifically target personal contacts in states that are undecided. I learned that I actually have quite a few friends in battleground states. Some of them are people I haven’t talked to in ages. What better reason to reconnect?

Beyond the geo-sorting, the Obama ’08 iPhone app has a lot of other functionality. You can keep track of whom you called and how they responded. You can choose menu options that include: Get Involved, Receive Updates, News, Local Events, Media, and Issues. Click on one and drill down to a more detailed menu. For example, if you click on Issues, you can then choose from a dozen options, among them: Civil Rights, Defense, Education, Ethics, etc. Each then leads to an Obama quote and details regarding that topic.

You can also sign up to receive campaign updates, find out how and where to get involved in real time, check out recent media updates, read news, and find local events. This is a total, handheld clearinghouse for everything Obama. It’s one little app, but it’s the kind of thing that gets people jazzed at a grassroots level.

For my part, being invited to help test it has been a real honor. A couple of late evenings spent in a Campfire chatroom talking bugs & politics was truly good for my state of mind — a nice contrast to the dismal news and ugly political maneuvering going on everywhere.

I’d like to send a big shout out and a huge thanks to all the developers of the Obama ’08 iPhone app: Raven Zachary, Jason Grigsby, John Keith, Lyza Gardner, Aileen Jeffries, Jonathan Wight, Dom Sagolla, Mike Lee, Louie Mantia,Tristan O’Tierney.

Thanks to all of you for your hard work, and for the opportunity to participate :)

I also mentioned, in a recent blog post, that Warren, who works for a Big Company in an office 40 hours a week, regularly quizzes me about this coworking thing. He was demanding to know more about collaboration potential and challenged me to come up with examples of success cases. Which, of course, I did, no problem. (And which, of course, I did by collaborating with other coworkers.)

So now I discover a web site so targeted to Warren and his ilk, I wish I could wrap it up and hide it and give it to him for his birthday. Many-Eyes allows users to upload data sets and then create a variety of visual graphic representations of that data. Not only that, but other users are encouraged to take a look at your goods and offer their input, the idea being that this collaboration might lead you to still better graphics.

There’s a whole story about Many-Eyes in the New York Times, with examples of charts and graphs, one of which is bursting with colors and looks suspiciously like a spreadsheet I created not long ago. That was to help keep track of information in a book Warren and I are collaborating on. His take on my graph? He pronounced it a Rubik’s cube and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a judgment worthy of the High Praise category. So I like a lot of colors in my graphics — sue me.

According to the Times story, Many-Eyes “was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.”

Downside? Well, for now the site seems to be extremely touchy and fragile. So far my attempts to upload data have been fruitless. Perhaps, once I do get in, I’ll do a test run by entering information like: number of times I attempted to access the site; number of times I failed; number of times I succeeded; number of emotions I went through in the process.

I hope my online collaborators will help me come up with a resultant graphic that is sassy, smart, and, okay, maybe even a little bit sexy, at least in the eyes of geeks.

Visualization of LaunchPad Coworking executive summary done using Wordle, which is now part of Many-Eyes.

Coffeemaker manufacturer Nespresso, in addition to having an auto-play, vaguely porno soundtrack on their home page, came up with a gimmick for the recent IFA 2008 conference. (There should be a sentence here telling you what IFA is, but for the life of me I can’t find the acronym defined on their site anywhere — if you know, please leave a comment.)

Offering attendees a chance to set complimentary coffee down upon an interactive table, the company demonstrated just how goofy high tech can get. Coffee cups, rigged with bottom pads that could be read by cameras mounted under the table, triggered pop-up info panels that appear right there on the table which doubles as a screen. These revealed facts about the product. But riddle us this — if you haven’t finished the cup of coffee that’s bringing up the data, are you really awake to follow the message?

Update: Mystery solved: IFA stands for the International Franchise Association. Thanks to @axonmetrix via Twitter. (@bookeriv says it’s the Independent Frycooks Army. I’m skeptical.)