So like so many of you gadget-geeks out there, I can’t wait to get my hands on the iPad. (Yes, we ordered a few for Local Wisdom so we are all excited.) As an iPhone user I am a fan multitouch and gesture recognition technologies. And of course I geeked out when I saw the control center in Zion in the Matrix Reloaded and who could forget all the cool interfaces in the Minority Report. Each day we get closer that future reality. Below is an example of a video and associated article about a cool projected wall interface built by students.
Tromso students put together the best interactive display wall we’ve seen yet (video)
Take everything you thought you knew about multitouch and throw it out. Okay, keep the Minority Report stuff, but throw everything else out. What we’re looking at here is a 22 megapixel display, stitched together from the output of no less than 28 projectors (7,168 x 3,072 total resolution), which just happens to respond to touch-like input in a fashion even Tom Cruise would find fascinating. You don’t have to actually touch the wall, floor-mounted cameras pick up your gestures in 2D space and a 30-node computer setup crunches all the computational and visual data to deliver some buttery smooth user interaction. For demo purposes, the makers of this system grabbed a 13.3 gigapixel image of Tromso and took it for a hand-controlled spin. See the mesmerizing show on video after the break.
Being a business owner of a company that offers insurance to its 20+ employees, my eyes and ears were glued to the TV Sunday with the passing of the Health care bill. With all of the sweeping changes that will take effect in the near and far future, my #1 question was: How will this bill effect my business? So of course being the professional internet searcher that I am, I came across an article from The Christian Science Monitor that outlined a very simple explanation. You can read an excerpt of that article below.
Health care reform bill 101: What will it mean for business? Maybe you own a dry cleaning shop. Or a restaurant. Or a small factory that makes, oh, bearings for wind turbines.
Maybe you’re the CEO of a larger firm – a utility, or a toolmaker, or even Google.
What would the health care reform bill mean for your business?
Quite a bit. It could affect business decisions on health coverage for employees at tens of thousands of firms.
Let’s start with a caveat: that dry cleaner, and probably the restaurant, might be too small to be affected by some of the most important business-related elements in the bill. Employers with 50 or fewer workers would be exempt from coverage provisions.
But for top executives at firms with 50 workers or more, the most important question may be this: would the health care reform bill require us to offer health insurance to our employees?
How does the bill work for businesses?
Here’s how that works: If you are a firm with more than 50 employees, and do not offer health insurance as a benefit, and at least one of your full-time employees gets a subsidy from the federal government to purchase health insurance on his or her own, you would have to pay Washington a fee of $2,000 for every one of your full-time workers. (Company accountants take note: you could subtract the first 30 of your employees from that assessment.)
Got that?
Also, even if you do offer coverage, you might have to take some extra action to help any of your low- or middle-income workers who want to buy insurance on their own.
Take an employee who makes less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which today is about $10,800 for an individual, or $22,000 for a family of four.
Perhaps that employee is finding firm-offered insurance expensive. If their share of health premiums is more than 8 percent of their income (but less than 9.8 percent), they would have the option of going out and buying insurance on their own through the new-fangled “exchange” marketplaces the health care reform bill would establish.
And you, as an employer, would have to help them. You’d have to provide them a “free choice voucher” equal to what the firm would have kicked in to provide coverage in the company plan.
When do the changes take effect?
All of the above changes would take effect beginning on Jan. 1, 2014.
One final item: if you’re a firm with more than 200 employees, and you do offer health insurance, you would have to automatically enroll your workers in the plan.
They could opt out of the coverage. But they are the ones that would have to make that decision.
You’d think that vertical-align would center the text vertically, but it does not work in a DIV. The typical fix for this is to add padding to the top and/or bottom of the div and hope it looks good in every browser. While this is a legit fix – and a good one if you do not have a fixed height – there is an even better one for divs that only have one line of text and a fixed height: using a line-height that equals the height of the div.
Your CSS should look like this – the important parts are in red:
Although this 3+ minute trailer for Stallone’s new action pack movie the “Expendables” looks like an amalgamation of cut scenes from all my (and probably yours too) favorite action hero movies from the late 80 and early 90s, I most definitely, will be in the theater to watch. And I’ll probably go during opening weekend with a tub of popcorn, sitting in most middlest seat in the theater. C’mon you gotta admit seeing Stallone, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Arnold the Governator, and a myriad of other action stars all in one movie sounds pretty darn awesome. And no, I have no expectations of Oscar winning performances. What I do expect is a shoot-em-up, explosive, catch phrased filled, movie-testerone-stravaganza. Enjoy the trailer!!!
I am always intrigued by Apple’s patent entries. Most of them don’t see the light of day but at least its one doorway into the creative minds of a smart progressive company. Enjoy to the article!!!
Patently Apple points to a patent application from Apple published today addressing technology to allow users at large events such as concerts, tradeshows, and rallies to utilize their mobile devices to automatically create social networking groups by exchanging “tokens” using such wireless technologies as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The patent application, which was filed in September 2008, describes an example of the technology involving Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, specifically using an “iGroups” application on the iPhone to demonstrate the process by which attendees could invite one another to a group and access information related to group discussion and activities on their devices.
A similar example shows how concert attendees could set their mobile devices to participate in the formation of a group at the event.
In this example scenario, a number of attendees of a rock concert set their Bluetooth-enabled devices to Token Exchange mode. All devices within transmission range of each other at the concert and that are set in Token Exchange mode begin exchanging and storing tokens. These devices are collectively referred to as a Group, and the users associated with devices in the Group are referred to as Group members. The Token Exchange is referred to as a “contact event.” The contact event can be associated with a “contact time” defined by timestamps provided to the trusted service.
Groups created using the method could then utilize functionalities such as e-mail and calendaring applications to interact with each other. The specific “rock concert” example poses a situation in which the musicians on-stage could initiate a group, linking to attendees near the front of the audience. The technology could also “daisy chain” to allow those further back in the crowd to still join the group via attendees further forward even if out of range of the musicians.
In another battle of the heavyweights we have Google versus Microsoft. In an article I caught on CNET.com, Google has created a migration tool that enables Microsoft Exchange Admins to move users information completely off of Exchange and onto Google Apps. Oh I love a good heavyweight fight, especially when the outcome is the advancement of technology. Here is the article in its entirety.
Google making it easier to leave Exchange
Google’s assault on Microsoft’s enterprise software business continues to advance with a new tool that helps companies move away from Exchange. Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange
The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool will launch later today, designed to give Exchange administrators help in moving their users’ data into Google Apps. It’s all part of Google’s pitch for the benefits of cloud computing, which might sound nice to some administrators in theory but can require a lot of work.
Administrators can now download the tool from Google and move 200 users per hour from Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 to Google Apps, including e-mail, contact, and calendar data, said Chris Vander May, senior product manager for Google Apps. It will be available for Google Apps Premier Edition customers as well as Google Apps for Education customers.
Just as Microsoft is throwing resources into Bing and Internet search in hopes of denting Google’s enormous market share, Google is trying to do the same thing to Microsoft’s huge advantage in office productivity software. Over 25 million users are on Google Apps, according to the company, which sounds like a lot but is a fraction of the businesses still using Microsoft products.
Last year Google released a similar tool for letting administrators enable Google Apps but allowing their users to keep their Outlook clients.
There were no kicks or punches thrown between the two heavyweights just a whole lot of user traffic. And the most visited website on the Internet goes to (drum roll please……) the Social Networking GIANT by the name of Facebook. You might have heard of it.
Today Facebook pushed passed Google to be the number visited website in the Internet. I know that I helped Facebook reach this lofty goal and honestly it just makes sense. I mean Google.com is cool with its one text field and “I’m feeling lucky” button. But for the past 6 months my order of internet operations when I want to veg, find news, or just distract my mind a bit, has been facebook.com, mediatakeout.com, slickdeals.net and then Gmail.com (sorry Buzz you have not won me over).
I can always count on my Facebook friends to share the latest weather report, news headlines, funny videos, and updates on their lives. So I completely understand why Facebook is now number one. Furthermore, I believe tomorrow’s internet user’s patience will become even shorter (if that’s possible). The quickest way I can get my information in short blurbs…with videos and links to reference, if I want, the better. BUT there is only one caveat. After I get updated on the thunderstorm that caused the power outage at Mike’s house, I can briefly look through my friends latest albums, scan status updates to found out who is bored, happy, or mad, and when I am done with that I can play the ridiculously popular game (trust me I don’t play but my wife is addicted) Farmville…all with in a 3 minute time frame.
Big Pecker Wines coming to NJ April 1st, not an April fools joke. Look for it at your local retailer with a $9.99 to $11.99 price tag. Thanks to VictorySelections.com for the info!
This reminds me of cars, Detroit Raw Power VS Japans efficient motors. 2 completely different ways to do the same thing. This one is interesting as I’ve done a lot of European travel and I’m very familiar with the green running man. I’d like to hear our in-house designer’s views on this topic, so I’ll try to get them to comment on this article for everyone to read.
“The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background renders it highly legible, the illumination stresses the importance of the message, and the color is evocative of both fire and fire-safety devices (fire extinguishers, fire engines, fire alarms, and the like). If you’re reading this in a coffee shop, cubicle, or other public place, pause and look around you; it probably won’t take long to find that glowing red beacon.
But people in the rest of the world—at least, the kind of people who spend time considering how to mark a means of emergency egress—think our simple red sign is completely nuts. Many other countries use some version of the ISO standard, a symbol developed the late 1970s by a Japanese designer named Yukio Ota and adopted for international use in 1985. This take on the exit sign goes by the informal name “the running man,” and looks like this:”
Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.
Here’s what I took away from the talk
Grow your personal brand Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.
Plan for backup??!!? Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.
Information is free The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.
Ask your customers, how they want to get information There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.
Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:
Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
