Not So Obvious

When I say, "Presentation matters", you might scoff, believing this to be so obvious, it doesn't bear mentioning. But, in fact, it does.

As design professionals we grow accustomed to developing ideas and reviewing work in progress. We “see” the comp or the rough idea in our mind’s eye for the finished work it will become. And at times we mistakenly project our comfort level onto others, assuming they can also see through the reality of work in progress to envision the finished product as we “see” it.

The truth is, no matter how carefully you position the work as “not finished”, “in-progress”, etc., people form opinions based on what you show them; not what you tell them it will be.

Presentation matters.

This is not to say that everything we share must be work complete or for that matter that good design and elaborate presentations will elevate bad ideas. Neither are true. I am suggesting, however, that we must consider the sophistication of the audience and that a hasty or ill-prepared presentation can absolutely hurt a good idea, obscure real talent and undermine credibility.

A Case In Point

One of the most vivid examples of this principle came about while I was leading a team designing a set-top box application. The lead developer had just completed some core functionality and was pretty excited to share it with the rest of the team. He called us all together for an ad hoc demo at his workstation. The application interface consisted of what we affectionately refer to as “programmer art”, a euphemism for stand-in graphics which rarely resemble “art”.

The demo went smoothly and it definitely represented technical progress, but it was clear to me the developer was disappointed with the understated response he received. After the team dispersed, I asked the developer if we could drop in the UI assets the graphics team had been designing. He shared that he thought it was a bit early, so but could easily do so if I insisted. I did.

The next morning, we all gathered around the developer's workstation once again and he walked us through the same demo from the day before, but this time with the ready-for-prime-time user interface assets.

After the demo the team was literally squealing with delight. “Awesome, dude! You rock!” High fives all around. When everyone got back to work, my lead developer seemed even more befuddled than he was the day before.

When I enquired, he said, “I don’t get it. This is the exact same demo I shared yesterday to a lukewarm response.” I smiled and said, “Actually, it’s not.”

Challenged by my comment, he raised his voice a bit, saying, "Yes, it is. All I changed were the graphics.”

To which I responded. "And, that’s why it was a different demo."

In other words, Presentation matters.

_________________________________________________________________

Steve Lomas is a digital media and marketing consultant specializing in developing new products and services from concept to launch.

For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me

A Three Legged Race

This is a little different post for me. It started with a personal encounter that peaked my curiosity and caused me to do some digging and pondering... 

I don’t know if you have noticed, but over the past 24 months, competition has been heating up among some major players hoping to own your mobile in-box. To date, those players include Dropbox, a relative newcomer to the email client business, and arch rivals, Google and Microsoft. More about their motives and what prompted me to write this article after a brief history of the race being run.

Dropbox

First out of the blocks was Dropbox, in February of 2013, with their innovative email client, Mailbox. The promise of Mailbox was to help users quickly manage email in order to attain empty in-box nirvana via swipe-based email sorting and filtering:

• a quick swipe to the right and the email is archived
• a full swipe to the left and you can file the email
• a half swipe to the left and you are presented options for snoozing the email, such as later today, tomorrow, next week, etc.

This UI innovation, truly allows users to burn through vast quantities of email quickly and efficiently, clearing their inbox in minutes.

Unfortunately, Mailbox only works with Google mail, so if you are an Exchange user, you are out of luck.

Google

In October of 2014, Google responded with Inbox. Google was careful to state that Inbox is not a replacement for Gmail or the Gmail mobile app; just an alternative. Much like they had done with the roll-out of Gmail in 2004, the Inbox app was introduced by invitation only, and that is still the case as of this writing. The invitation also grants you access to a desktop version of Inbox accessible at inbox.google.com.

There are many things to like about Google’s Inbox app. Inbox is colorful and modern, leveraging user avatars and attachment previews to really bring your inbox to life. It incorporates the best of Mailbox such as swipe-based email sorting and filtering, but it leap-frogs Mailbox by adding some new concepts like reminders, collections and pins. Not surprisingly, its search capabilities are excellent.

As an avid Mailbox user, I quickly adapted to Inbox and it soon became my default email browser -- for Google mail. That’s right; just like Mailbox, Inbox only supports Gmail. ;-(

Microsoft

The most recent contender to join the race is Microsoft, releasing its Outlook for iOS and Android this past January. This is a surprisingly good app, providing a robust bundle of useful features. The new Outlook app integrates, email, file management, contacts and calendaring into a single app.

It goes without saying that a mobile version of Outlook better provide robust support for exchange users -- and this app doesn’t disappoint. What you may not expect, which this app also provides, is robust support for other email platforms including Google.

One of the most useful mobile features in the Outlook app, is the ability to attach files from multiple cloud sources including OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.net, as well as local files. Its the only app of the three that can do that.

Outlook for iOS and Android also incorporates a version swipe-based email sorting and filtering, although it doesn’t seem to be quite as responsive as the competition.

Microsoft has clearly thrown down the gauntlet by offering cross platform functionality that surpasses both Dropbox and Google; but don't count either company down and out just yet. I suspect we will see updated functionality from both in the future.

Corporate Motivation

So all of this this begs the question: why are these companies competing rigorously to provide the best FREE email client?

Premise: Perhaps it has something to do with advertising dollars? Ya think? ;-)

A Personal Anecdote...

Consider this personal story recounting my wife’s experience last week.

We have an 18 month granddaughter; cute as a bug. Our daughter emailed my wife a picture of her little girl sporting some new OshKosh overalls. All our kids wore Oshkosh when they were little, so my daughter’s message was something like, “Does this outfit bring back memories?”

Within an hour of receiving that email, which did not mention Oshkosh by name, only a photograph of a little girl wearing Oshkosh and a vague mention of her outfit, my wife started seeing Oshkosh ads in her Gmail!

She brought this to my attention, saying, “Certainly this must have been a coincidence, right?” Not necessarily. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise.

The Digging...

We know that Google has been data-mining Gmail for years in order to present user-targeted advertising in Gmail. In fact they have a patent for the technology (Read: The Natural History of Gmail Data Mining and Google does scan all emails...).

Given the computational horsepower of the Google data centers and Google’s cutting edge advancements in AI and its purchase of Deep Mind, it is easy to believe that Google is data mining our images for information. A bit unnerving, but plausible and highly likely. In fact, there is an annual global image recognition competition called ImageNet, which Google won in 2014. We are seeing similar technology being used by Facebook to identify our friends by face recognition, why not branded overalls?

Dropbox is reported to have a “Deep Learning” team which is another way of saying “Data mining” team. I can only presume that Microsoft has or is developing similar technologies.

The Pondering...

The aggregated user data and anonymous matchmaking between advertisers and users made possible by mining our email in-boxes is clearly valuable to advertisers, and thus potentially lucrative to the company that corners the “free email app” market.

The only way to do that is to provide the best user experience. So good for users on one level, but at what cost? If you don’t like the concept of Big Brother holding hands with Big Data, you can always choose to stop using these email apps, but that isn't a very attractive option for most of us.

In the case of Google, the company at least provides users the opportunity to monitor and manage personal Google privacy settings via Google Dashboard.

I am not aware of anything similar to this dashboard from Dropbox or Microsoft. If I am mistaken, please correct me. Of course all these companies have asked for and received our permission to do these things -- when we hastily click accept when presented with their verbose policy and privacy agreements.

To my mind, at some level, agreeing to allow these companies to mine our data in exchange for free and ever improving tools and services is somewhat analogous to concept of commercial television -- it's the cost of admission -- but potentially far more consequential than having to sit through the soap ads.

What do you think? Does any of this bother you or is it simply the cost of our digital society?

Share your thoughts.

Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
Product Design & Development Consultant
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me

Recap

In Part Two of this series, I outlined five, broad categories that pretty much sum up all the project management tools required by a professional services group:

1. Collaboration Tools
2. Artifact Creation Tools
3. Resource Management Tools
4. IT Management Tools
5. Accounting Tools

Supplementing Google

While Agilix Professional Services was established as a Google Apps for Work shop, we needed to supplement the Google suite with other tools or various purposed. Using the above list as a structural construct, let’s discuss how we supplemented Google Apps.

1) Collaboration Tools

Meeting Software

Our primary meeting tool at Agilix is Citrix GoToMeeting (GTM). From my experience, GTM is by far, the most stable and reliable of all the major meeting tools, including WebX, Adobe Connect, Bluejeans, Skype and Google Hangouts. This is especially true of long meetings. We have frequently kept a bridge open throughout the day and sometimes into the evening -- jamming to meet a deadline or resolve a production issue -- six, eight even ten hours without any degradation of audio or video clarity!

As good as GTM is, it may not be the right choice for certain certain corporate IT environments, due to GTM’s requirement for frequent automated updates. Many corporate users do not have local admin rights and therefore, cannot approve the installation of software updates, leaving them frustrated and locked out of the interactive aspects of the meeting.

For this reason, we also maintain a few shared licenses to WebX, in support of certain customers that can not use GoToMeeting. WebX does not share this quirk and therefore seems to play better in the corporate IT world, but its VOIP quality is not as good as GoToMeeting.

Internally, team members also use Skype, Google Hangouts and Google Chat for ad hoc collaboration between two or three peers.

Phone Communication

In this day and age, telephone communication doesn’t necessarily mean a phone is involved and your telephone number doesn’t have to relate to your location. I use skype for my desktop telephone calls. Both Skype and Google Voice offer virtual telephone numbers for VOIP communication.

2) Artifact Creation Tools

Areas where we typically supplement Google Apps for artifact creation include:

Document Interoperability

MS Office
There's no getting around it, you have to be prepared to read, write and add comments to the MS Office docs. This is especially true of contracts where the use of track changes is universally accepted as S.O.P.

As I mentioned in the last installment of this series, Google does a pretty good job reading and converting MS Office documents as well as publishing in the MS Office formats.

Adobe Acrobat - PDF Format
PDF has long since become the publish standard format for business world-wide. Acrobat, Adobe's PDF authoring and reader application is such an important tool and yet seemingly underrated and often overlooked. I use it pretty much daily for a variety of reasons leveraging its rich feature set.

Wireframing

MyBalsamiq, the cloud-based version of Balsamiq was the original group standard, but lately we have been moving toward Axure more and more.

Workflows

We use a little known gem, Diagram Creator, created by Chipp Walters. Diagram Creator offers a natural language interface for quickly building logical diagrams. Diagram Creator is not hard to use, but like most software, it takes practice to master its subtleties. For that reason, some members of the team rely on Gliffy, an Industry standard charting program, fashioned after Microsoft Visio. Gliffy offers plug-ins for GoogleDocs and Jira. For simple workflows, used in presentations, we often use the Google drawing tools available in Google Slides.

Ui Graphics and Image Editing

Adobe Creative Suite is still the standard for serious professionals.

Sales and Marketing Presentations

Early on, we adopted Apple Keynote for authoring sales and marketing presentations. Keynote offers much more powerful and more elegant authoring capabilities compared PowerPoint or Google Slides and robust publishing options including Powerpoint, PDF, HTML, JPEGS, and Video output with direct sharing to many social media sites such as Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube.

3) Resource Management Tools

For the purposes of this article, I am lumping resource planning, task management and tracking work completed together as sub components of Resource Management. To manage these functions we used a combination of Google Spreadsheets, Wrike, and Jira Agile.

Google Spreadsheets

Of the three applications mentioned for resource management, Google Spreadsheets is probably the most widely known and understood. Using a series of related Google Spreadsheets and Google Script we created a project management platform that allowed our internal Producers to lookup, cost and allocate resources to their various projects and rollup actuals in realtime to an executive dashboard.

Wrike

Wrike is a relative new and evolving tool. Wrike bills itself as a project management platform, but I feel it is more accurate to describe it as a task management platform. Wrike is is a bit of an acquired taste, but once you master its metaphor, it can highly effective.

Wrike is built on a tasks and folders construct. Folders may contain a combination of tasks and sub-folders. Tasks may include sub-tasks and interdependencies with other tasks. The real power of Wrike is the ease with which you can create complicated folder/task structures to create process templates that can be quickly and easily cloned at the start of a new preserving interdependencies and even individual task assignments,

Key factors for our choosing Wrike included its native support for both Google Docs and Microsoft Office Documents, tight integration with both Gmail and Outlook, threaded discussions around any task, robust reporting, personalized dashboards, watch lists and notification management.

Common Uses For Wrike:

• Preliminary Planning
• Tasks
• Timelines
• Dependencies
• Non-development Tasks
• Financial Pipelines
• Contracts
• AP Invoices
• AR Invoices

Jira Agile

Jira Agile is an agile methodology project management extension for the popular Jira issue/bug tracking system from Atlassian. Since it was designed for agile development, Jira Agile provides many useful management tools including:

• User-story Backlog Repository
• Backlog Grooming (prioritization)
• Sprint Planning
• Developer Assignments
• Sprint Management and Developer Progress
• Burn-down Charts
• Unit Testing and Bug Management
• Developer Collaboration

4) IT Management Tools

As previously mentioned, we Agilix Professional Services standardized on Google Drive for shared storage and file sharing. It comes with Google Apps and the cost of storage is hard to beat.

Code Repositories

For code repositories, we have used XP-Dev and Beanstalk (cloud instances of Reversion) but recently standardized on a self hosted Git Hub server.

Password Management

Most of us are familiar with the concept of password vaults to a manage our personal passwords. IT organizations have similar needs; in fact, even more so. From my experience, this is rarely managed well at most small to medium sized companies. LastPass offers an enterprise version of their popular personal password management software, that is powerful, but spendy. Ironically, for $12/year, the personal professional version of LastPass works great for group password management. One of the coolest features of LastPass is you can share credentials with another LastPass user without ever exposing the username or password. If that individual leaves or no longer needs access, you can simply delete access with a click of a mouse -- without having to update credentials or notify anyone. Likewise, if you decide to update credentials you can do so without impacting anyone's virtual access! Very slick.

5) Accounting

As noted, the most obvious area where Google Apps comes up short, is accounting. Spreadsheets are useful for budgeting and tracking actuals, but they are no replacement for a dedicated accounting system. At Agilix we used a combination of  Google Spreadsheets, Freshbooks and Quickbooks.

Google Spreadsheets 

As mentioned above, Agilix uses Google Spreadsheets for budgeting, tracking actuals and forecasting.

Freshbooks 

Agilix uses Freshbooks for timekeeping, team timesheet reporting and to quickly calculate T&M invoice for clients. If you are wondering why we didn’t use the timekeeping capabilities of Jira Tempo, Wrike or Quickbooks. In the case of the latter, Freshbooks is simply superior in every aspect of collecting time sheets from a distributed team. As for Jira and Wrike, both offer decent timekeeping capabilities but neither program was used by the entire staff. Jira was exclusively the dev teams and Wrike was more, design, PMO and management. This we settled on Freshbooks for ubiquitous timekeeping, company-wide.

Quickbooks 

Agilix uses Quickbooks for its corporate accounting and for generating invoices to its professional services invoices to clients.

In Conclusion

As you may rightly surmise from the patchwork quilt that comprises this toolbox, in my opinion there really isn’t a unified, end-to-end enterprise project management tool suite suitable for small and medium sized businesses; and by suitable, I mean affordable.

If I am wrong about this, I'd love to learn otherwise. Please share a comment, or contact me directly, with your thoughts.

Useful Links:

• Google Apps For Work
• Wrike
• Atlassian
• Diagram Creator
• Gliffy
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Apple Keynote
• MyBalsmiq
• Axure
• LastPass

Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
Professional Services Consultant
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me

Introduction

In this installment, starting with the basics, I will discuss the collection of tools we employed to manage Agilix Professional Services.

About Agilix

Agilix is an ed-tech company based out of Orem, UT, and the professional services team is essentially a product team for hire, creating custom solutions for large educational publishers in the ed-tech industry. As the company name implies, Agilix prides itself on being, “agile”; as in fleet of foot. So, nimble process, flat hierarchies, and lean UX are all important to Agilix -- and that meant choosing a flexible toolset. Since we created the group from scratch, we had the luxury of starting with a clean slate. We were essentially a startup within Agilix, with our own infrastructure and culture. And like all startups, we were cash conscious. Our toolset decisions were driven by these realities.

5 Buckets

Agilix specifics aside, the requirements of enterprise project management are pretty similar across industries and the toolsets can be organized into five, broad categories:

1. Collaboration Tools
2. Artifact Creation Tools
3. Resource Management Tools
4. IT Management Tools
5. Accounting Tools

The Basics: Startup? Google Up!

Call us religious zealots, or fanboys, I really don’t care. Agilix Professional Services was established as a Google Apps shop. Given the selection criteria I shared in Part One of this Series on Tools of the Trade, it isn’t hard to understand how we landed on this decision.

For $5 a user per month, consider the value proposition of Google Apps for Work:

• User Management
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Contacts
• Google Docs (docs, sheets, slides)
• Drawing & Charting Tools
• Google Chat
• Google Tasks (personal todo’s)
• Google Hangouts (video chat and file sharing)
• Google Sites & Forms
• Google Drive (shared storage)
• File Management (robust file sharing)
• Cloud Storage (5 gigs/user included)
• Backups and Disaster Recovery
• Extensibility (Google Script and Extensions)
• Robust Publishing Options
• Free Hosting
• Zero hardware and maintenance costs

Taken together, the Google feature set addresses most all of the functionality outlined in the five major categories above: collaboration, artifact creation, resource management, IT management and accounting -- okay, accounting is a bit of a stretch, but spreadsheets do have a role. ;-)

In other words, you can practically run an entire enterprise on Google Apps alone!

Not to be left out...

If you are a Microsoft shop, you can still integrate Google Apps into your Exchange environment to reap the benefits of both platforms. Google offers various articles about how to implement this.

A Few Google Highlights

Let me highlight a few areas where Google Apps shine.

Google Docs Collaboration
Before Google Docs, few people, if any, considered the notion of real time, multi-author collaboration in a single computer document. Google Docs collaboration is brilliant! Once you experience the productivity boost of working together in real time, it is painful to even consider reverting to the old school practice of circulating documents for input, one author at a time, each adding their initials to the filename. So 2006!

Authoring vs. Publishing
One of the great things about Google Docs is its ability to read other formats for preview or conversion to native Google documents. Likewise, Google Docs offers a wide variety of publishing formats, including Microsoft Formats (.docx, .xlsx and pptx), Open Document Format (.odt), Rich Text Format (.rtf), PDF Document (.pdf), Plain Text (.txt) and Web Page (.html).

My standard process is to author in Google Docs and publish in whatever format the client needs. If a publishing format isn’t specified, PDF is our default publishing format. Once a document is published, especially if it is an editable format, be sure to communicate clearly to your team where any updates are to be authored; typically, I recommend maintaining the original authoring source doc, to prevent later confusion.

SSO User Management
It's not surprising that Google user management offers SSO (single sign-on) across the Google suite, but many 3rd party systems, including Wrike and Jira, also offer SSO integration with Google Apps. What this means is if you create a user in Google, they are also created in Jira and Wrike, for example. We chose not to employ this feature at Agilix, in order to have more control over user licensing management.

Shared Storage
When Google Drive first came out it seemed buggy and unreliable; especially on the iOS platform. For this reason we experimented with Dropbox and Box.net, but ultimately, we standardized on Google Drive. One thing than many people overlook is the the native reversion capabilities of Google Drive. If you want to update a file on Google Drive without losing its version history, right click on the file to be updated and you will see a dialog that allows you to upload a new version.

Hassle-Free IT
One huge benefit of any cloud-based solution, is hassle-free IT.

• No servers to buy
• No growing Pains
• No hosting to manage
• No backups to manage

24 x 7 Phone Support - Included
No provider can promise there won’t be glitches, from time to time, and Google was no exception. The difference is the quality of support, and in this department, Google was best of breed: quick access, short hold times, excellent CSRs and over the top follow-up, both email and by telephone!

These are just a few highlight. If you want to learn more, you can visit the Google Apps for Work homepage.

Beyond Google

Having made the case for the power and excellent value of Google Apps as a foundational toolset, we still found the need to supplement the Google suite in various ways for various reasons, which I will share in the next installment of this series.

If you have any comments about this series or your experience using Google Apps or other project management tools, please share them below or with me directly.

Next post: Part Three - A Professional Services Toolbox, The Rest of the Chest

Steve Lomas
Idea Mechanic
For more articles, visit Digital Bits at blog.stevelomas.me

Sat in on a great webinar today, "2015 Guide to Using Linkedin", presented by Dave Delaney and Brad Farris. Definitely worth while if they present it again. Shout out to Dave Delaney -- Thanks for the invite.

Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.

Introduction

Over the coming weeks I'm will be posting a series of articles sharing my experience with various popular project management tools and my quest to identify and unify the best toolset for enterprise software management.

I have spent much of my career managing distributed teams to create software products. In fact, I started an interactive company in 1995 called CyberIsland Studios, which was established on a literal island in the Pacific Northwest. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, and online collaboration was was still a twinkle in the mind's eye. Managing distributed teams was relegated to phone, fax, FedEx and email. From that time forward, I have been an early adopter of pretty much every promising emerging collaboration and project management technology. Along the way, I have also created a lot of glueware to meet the needs of my teams when commercially available technologies fell short.

My most recent experience as Vice President of Professional Services at Agilix Labs has led me to realize that the perfect PM stack doesn't exist, at least not out of the box, and the many applications that market themselves as project management solutions are partial solutions at best; pieces of the pie.

Part One - Selection Criteria

To set the context for this series on enterprise project management toolsets and to round out this first post, here's my selection criteria for considering new software solutions:

• Cloud-based - This is a must for distributed teams.

• UX/UI Design - Is it thoughtfully designed? Easy to use? Elegant?

• Interoperability - Does it play with other solutions? Is there a public API for custom integrations?

• Mobile Friendly - Also a must, these days. More and more work is being done on mobile devices.

• Data Ownership - Who owns the data? Can you export and/or migrate your data, if you choose?

• Business Continuity - Are they running on a solid infrastructure? What is the up-time promise? How often do they back up? What is their disaster recovery window?

• Financial Stability - Company Size? Years in business? Is there a user community? What do the forums tell you about the company and products?

• Support - How good is their sales support? Ask a question via their website or email. The responsiveness of the sales support team likely reflects the best you can expect from customer support.

• Privacy and Security Policies - It's important to know what's lurking in the birdseed. You can reserve this tedium for serious contenders only, but don’t forget to do this.

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - The acquisition cost is only part of the TCO picture. What about adoption cost? Is the software easy learn? Or, at least easy to use, once you learn it? What will it take to train your team on this software? What about on-boarding new team members? What is the ongoing cost of support? All of these areas need to be considered and quantified up front.
  
  If the software you are considering passes this checklist, there is one last critical hurdle I strongly recommend:
  

• Pilot Program - Run a test pilot with a small internal group, before purchasing. This step alone, can and will save your bacon over and over. Sometimes it is only through practical application that you can tell if the software candidate is a good fit for your team. What’s more, by piloting the software first, you can establish internal expertise to help drive adoption for those applications you do choose.

1. Guy was humorous
2. Guy is a storyteller
3. Guy made it personal
4. Guy shared relevant, actionable information
5. Guy is not an educator

My Notes from Guy Kawasaki’s SXSW-edu talk:

"If I knew Then What I Know Now"

Guy's Top 10 things he wished kids were taught and his kids believed

1) How to continue to learn

• It's not a sprint, its a marathon.
• The goal is to become self-reliant. Learn to learn.

• Steve Jobs traded in his Mercedes every 6 months; never registered a car -- ever; he believed he could drive solo in the carpool lane, park in the handicap spot, wore blue jeans, black mock turtlenecks and new balance shoes...
• If you do all these things, you will not be Steve Jobs.

• Life is a constant pitch
• Pitching for capital
• Pitching for talent
• Pitching for distribution
• The idea is the easy part, buy-in is the hard part ( previously believed opposite)
• Guy’s 10/20/30 rule for presentations
• 10 slides
• 20 minutes
• 30 pt font ideal size (Age of oldest person in the audience / 2 = minimum font size)

• Everyone should learn the basics
• Useful as a BS filter, if nothing else

• Learn to write a one-pager
• One sentence
• One paragraph (elevator pitch)
• One page
• Mantra not Mission statement
• Guy: empower people
• Apple: democratized computing
• Google: democratized data
• Canva: democratized graphics
• Emails: ideally 5 sentences; win or lose with subject line

• Adding graphics double engagement (2x)
• Canva allows you to quickly pick graphics

• An AV pitch is more persuasive

• Market-driven approach to social media guidance
• If I told you recruiters are going to reference your social media, might that govern what you post?
• Use Social Media to market yourself
• Repeat tweets 3x, 8 hours apart (to reach entire audience) and include a graphic for a 6x bump
• Do you have a great avatar?
• Do you have a great profile?

• Help people before they can help you
• Default to "Yes"
• There are two types of people: Bakers and Eaters
• Book: Influence - Bob Childeny
• When someone says, "Thank you", the correct response is not, "You're welcome", but, "I know you'd do the same for me." The implication is very different.
• When someone owes you, the optimal response is to tell them how they can pay you back or return the favor.

• Mike Rowe - Dirty Jobs
• Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck?

Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.

At Agilix Labs Professional Services we consolidated the typical 10-step SDLC methodology into a process called the 5D's:  1) Define, 2) Discover, 3) Design, 4) Develop and 5) Deploy.

While the first two phases are typically linear and somewhat waterfall-ish due to the nature of professional services — clients always want to know what, when and how much — the later three phases are iterative and agile. This hybrid methodology is sometime referred to as agile-fall.

Below is the presentation we created to explain the process.

Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
Founder and CEO, MojoMediaPros, Inc.

Recently, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. If one can't support a personal memory or experience with a link to Wikipedia or some other online reference, that memory is simply suspect, no matter how factual. Forget about the fact that you lived it firsthand, if it's not documented on the Internet, it might as well not have happened. So the story below is one such memory and my attempt to document what little I know about one forgotten individual in the history of animation, hopefully giving credit where credit is due... 

Wikipedia states, "The bouncing ball is a device used in video recordings to visually indicate the rhythm of a song, helping audiences to sing along with live or prerecorded music. As the song's lyrics are displayed on the screen, an animated ball bounces across the top of the words, landing on each syllable when it is to be sung."

• Using a large-format view camera, he photographed his hand holding an ink pen, laying across his animation table. He also photographed the same scene, from the same angle, without his arm -- just his animation table with a blank sheet of drawing paper. This became the background for the famous opening. 
• The image of his hand holding the pen and a section of his forearm was printed as a life-size photo and mounted onto thin cardboard. Next, the image was meticulously cut out using a Xacto knife. Lastly, a vertical slit was cut in the arm's upper part.
• To shoot the effect, animation cells of the Koko drawing sequence were placed onto the animation stand, under the arm cut-out, and shot frame-by-frame — each cell photographed with the tip of the pen carefully placed at the leading edge of the advancing ink line. 
• When played back at 24fps, the illusion was that the hand was actually drawing Koko.
• What made the gag work was genius. Sid anchored a pushpin through the slit in the offscreen portion of the photographed arm, allowing it to pivot and slide freely so the point of the pen could easily be on the advancing line, so it looked like the arm and hand were working together to draw the character.

I had the chance to host a meeting today, using MeetingBurner. My buddy Chipp Walters had mentioned it to me. It was free to sign up, so I thought I would give it a try. I must say, I was VERY impressed! 

We're launching a paid service model soon!
We're excited to announce that in early 2012, we will be launching our paid service model. But don't worry - we are going to continue offering a free account level for new users. More importantly, we are going to grandfather all of our beta users (that's you) into a free package for life, to thank you all for your support during our testing.

Introduction

Introduction
One of my favorite things about the iPhone is the quality of the camera, and it's about to get even better with the iPhone 4s. I love experimenting with the various photography apps available from the App store. As you can see in Figure 1, I have a number of them. 

One app that I have found to be a bit frustrating, is Hipstamatic (Figure 2). Don't get me wrong, it's plenty cool, with its many interchangeable lenses, film types, colored strobes and filters. But that's just it: There are so many options it's pretty much impossible to remember what settings to use to repeat your favorite results. Or, at least, so I thought. 

First, The Strategy...

You need to create a set of Reference images. Pick a simple subject matter (a still life is ideal), and shoot multiple images usint the Hipstamatic app. Each image should have a unique combination of lens, film type, strobe and filter pack.

Steve Lomas is an interactive media veteran, designer, entrepreneur and idea mechanic. He is the founder of MojoMediaPros.

So, yesterday was the the day... The day I referenced back in March...The day the Apple faithful have dreaded for some time...

In it, he speaks of embracing mortality as a springboard to life.

Rest in peace, Steve.

This post is for anyone with lots of apps on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. who is having a hard time keeping track of them...

Background
Recently a friend of mine mentioned how he hates Apple's IOS navigation model of flipping through page after page of icons. I replied that I didn't have any trouble finding apps on my IOS devices. I have most of my apps organized into folders and everything is on one of two two pages. So, my friend, decided to put me to the test. "Do you have a webpage screen grabbing app on your iPad?", he asked. "I don't recall," I replied, "Let's see..." One swipe, one click, and three seconds later, "Yes: Webshot. It's in my utilities folder." 

"Wow! That's impressive", says my friend. He then went on to share that the real problem, was getting his head around the task of organizing hundreds of apps into folders. It just seemed like an endless time sink...

2) Drag all your apps off the lower tool bar and onto the last page, including the apple apps. If your last page is full, go to the next page.

3) With and empty tool bar navigate back to the first page (Home) -- pressing the round physical button will take you there directly.

4) Now reviewing the icons on your home page, drag any two similar icons onto each other; this will create a folder. For example: if your home page included Facebook, a Twitter client and the LinkedIn app, you could drag the Twitter app onto the Facebook app, which will create a folder called "Social". You can rename it if you like. Then drag the LinkedIn app onto the Social folder. This will result in three icons inthe single folder named, "Social". Repeat this process, creating folders for any other like categories, on the page.

5) Drag the folders you created from your home screen onto the empty tool bar. The iPhone will accommodate four; the iPad, six.

6) Now, with folders in tow, navigate to all the other pages (screens) of application icons, dragging appropriate apps into the folders on the toolbar.

7) When you get to the last page, and you have grabbed all the apps that fit the folders on your tool bar, drag these folders off the toolbar, and repeat the process.

Once you have everything organized by folder, you can use the toolbar to relocate your folders to whatever screen you desire. Most people prefer certain, "heavy use apps", to be free standing. My home page is a mixture of both icons and folders, and as I have already shared, all my apps fit on two screens!

8 pages x 16 folders x 12 apps/folder + 4 potential toolbar folders x 12 apps each = 1584 apps

On the iPad, you are allowed a maximum of 11 screens; each screen can accommodate 20 folders or icons, plus the toolbar which can hold a combination of six additiional icons or folders. Each folder can house a maximum of 20 apps. If every slot is dedicated to a folder, that means the iPad has a  maximum capacity of 4520 apps, or until you run out of memory.

11 pages x 20 folders x 20 apps/folder + 6 potential toolbar folders x 20 apps each = 4520 apps

Folder Names 
Obviously, you can name your folders any way you chose, but here is a list of potential folder names that may be useful:

One last tip, to find an app gone AWOL...
Navigate to the the home screen and enter the find mode, by either swiping to the right or by pressing the round physical button at the bottom of your screen. Once on the find screen, type in the name of the app you are looking for. It won't take you to the app, but it will confirm it's presence and you can launch it, which is probably why you were looking for it in the first place. :-)

Now go forth and organize! 

Steve Lomas is an interactive media veteran, designer, entrepreneur and idea mechanic. He is the founder of MojoMediaPros, and CyberIsland Studios.

Steve Lomas
Web Consultant, Idea Mechanic
615.830.6451 cell
stevenflomas@gmail.com

In June of 2009, I blogged about a series of articles I wrote documenting how and why I was using Gmail as the central hub of my e-mail universe -- even for my business domains.

Part 1: Setting up G-Mail

Part 2: Setting up Outlook

Part 3: Setting up iPhone

Forgive me if this offends anyone, but I'm gonna miss Steve Jobs if God calls him home anytime soon. Great to see him today leading Apple's iPad 2 shout out. Greatest marketer and inventor of our age...

I have been reflecting lately on just how dramatically my day-to-day workflow has changed. The tools I rely on today, are completely different from the tools I was using, even a year ago.

Just in time for the HoLiDaYs... meet the iTray !  :-)

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