Apple iPads for everyone! (at Base22)
March 12, 2010 by Ben Shoemate
This morning we placed an order to give every employee at our company Apple’s new tablet pc.
When April 3 comes around everyone at BTG (which we are renaming to Base22 soon) will have their hands on what we think will be a transformative device. We made this decision for several reasons. First, it became increasingly clear from office chatter – including from our CEO – that everyone in our company was planning to buy one anyway and several said they would buy two and give one to their mother. As technology consultants we all have both individual, and collective reputations as early adopters. When clients ask about new technology and how it will impact their business we need to have an answer based on more than second hand experience.
From my own perspective, the transition to a multi-touch web is as big as the transition from text to html. Most people don’t know this but the web prior to 1994 the web looked like this:
When I became a webmaster of a popular site in 1995 I had lots of users writing me to remember to check the site in browsers like Lnyx. But these guys were fighting a losing battle. Within a year of its launch the graphic based browser completely replaced the text only version for everyone but the contrarians. Another way to look at it was in 1994 the mouse replaced the keyboard as the main way to navigate the web. In the 2000’s the mobile phone gave the text based browser a small bump but for the most part – the text only web died in 94.
Now the mouse is about to have its own competition. In the next few years, as the prices of multi-touch devices like the iPhone and iPad and their many imitators fall, it will become as unusual for a computer to not respond to touch as it is today for one not to have a mouse. Try to use your computer with out a mouse. It can be done. I promise. But it’s hard and most people today can’t do it (just like most people don’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission).
In a couple of years it will be just as hard to only use a mouse. People will try to swipe, pinch, and flick and be perplexed when nothing happens. Devices like the iPad will be the gift people give to their techno-phobic parents and grandparents. Many people that don’t want, or can’t drive “a standard” anymore (in quotes because its hardly standard any more for a car to be manual transmission).
One of my first jobs was teaching computer skills to FDA meat inspectors. Most of these guys were older men, former vets and doctors. The FDA was moving from a paper based system to computer based and Texas A&M hosted classes to do the training. They each came to class and sat a computer – many for the first time in their lives – and had to be taught everything. The very first thing we asked them to do was take the mouse and point at the start button. Half the class would always pick up the mouse and point it, literally at the screen. No one would laugh. They just looked up for the next instruction. So we back up and say, “no no, put it down, just move it around and watch the screen – you see that little moving arrow…” and work from there.
We encouraged them to play solitaire. It was a great way to learn how to use the mouse because you use the mouse like you do your fingers – clicking a card picked it up, and you move it and let it go. It taught them the symbolic but abstract relationship between the thing on the screen and the thing in their hand. Now that abstraction is no longer needed. The computer will become much more intuitive and easy to use because of it.
My mother in law now has an iPhone. With the iPhone a whole new world of functionality opened to her. Now she sends SMS messages, takes photos, looks up addresses on google maps, enters contact information in the address book. All these feature were on her old phone – buried under text based menus – but she never used them. Now she does.
What I’m trying to say is that we didn’t buy the iPads for everyone just to make them happy, just to build moral and team spirit. We did it for the same reason we would need to buy them a mouse in 1994 – we have too. The web is going to change – fast.
But that doesn’t stop us from all being very very excited about our new toys. Including me.
I’m very proud that my company is both able (we have had a good year) and willing – all of us on the board understand the importance of staying ahead of the tide.
It’s time for celebrity teachers?
February 9, 2010 by Ben Shoemate
In the US we have celebrity trainers, celebrity cooks, athletes, song writers, scientists, CEOs, politicians, zoo keepers, mechanics, comedians, and ballon-boy. But where are the celebrity teachers? When a preacher is really good they build a mega-church and broadcast to millions of people. But the best 7 grade math teacher IN THE WORLD can only have 30 students. Why?
Why can’t we celebrate exceptional educators with a nationwide platform to let them reach as many students as possible? Pay them the mega-salary and give them the rockstar treatment. Why can’t the guy in first class sitting next to Vanna White be Mr. Smith – celebrity Algebra 2 teacher one his way to his next Opera appearance?
Just wondering…
My question about the IPad
January 29, 2010 by Ben Shoemate
How in the hell is this thing cheaper than the iPhone? $499, no contract. Iphone with no contract – $699.
How information moves in today’s society
December 30, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
I made a graphic that shows how I think information moves through our society today. At the top is the discovery, on its way to becoming common knowledge at the bottom it has to move through several phases. Each phase is an ecological niche that is occupied by a different species. Each creature on the list feeds off of information and uses it for energy to do work. Without information it dies. Take any topic and you can trace its path through the information ecosystem. Global Climate Change, Health Care, Peak Oil, Asbestos concerns, Water on the moon, etc…
A lot of people may question the placement I gave to Social Media, which I just called “Status Updates”. Social Networks are the current darlings of the internet and a lot people rave about the information they learn from the random utterances of their social network. Be that as it may, the information is mainly in the form of links to one of the above sources, so it can’t be higher in chain since it requires the others to exist so I place it just further down and to the right (more popular). The placement of spam above political speeches was done for one reason – by the time a political speech contains a piece of information, not only does everyone already know it (a politician will only say something he thinks you already know and agree with), but by the time he says it, there has been spam about it for a long, long time.
Let me know if I left out any major categories or if you think I should swap the order of anything in the comments.
Base 22 – Logo inspiration
December 14, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
My company is sponsoring a logo contest over at logosauce.com. We put up a $400 prize and anyone on the internet can login and maybe win. It is an exciting to watch so many designers submit ideas for a logo design, but also a little frustrating. A lot of the designs are uninspired. So I put together a collection of some of my favorite icons from around the web that are inspiring to me.
The way I see it, a name like “Base 22” lends itself to these possible directions:
- Mathematics – Base 2 is binary, Base 10 in the our most common counting system, Base 22 is a math system with 22 symbols and where “22” is the new “10”
- Building – Base – as foundation or a building block
- Science – Base – in science – the opposite of an Acid
- Teamwork – Base as a home for a team – military base, army base, moon base
- Home – Base as home – as in baseball – first base, second base
- 22 – atomic number of titanium
- “Base 22” as a set of letters to play with
Most of the designers have only focused on the last of those and made variations of Big 2, Big B, ect. So I wanted to explore what they could do with the other options.
Base as a Building
A base is a fort, castle, headquarters, home, launch pad, or team living space. So there are a ton of ideas there.
Base as a foundation or building block
B’s and 2’s
If your just going to play with the name, don’t just play with the “2” 
Then there are logos that have nothing to do with the name that would still be awesome.
Time to take another look at GWT
December 9, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
Cody Burleson and I looked at Google’s Web Development Toolkit (GWT) when it cam out in 2007. We even build some small applications to test it. We liked it because it seemed like a good bridge between the enterprise world of J2EE development and the lightweight, web 2.0, AJAX driven applications of today. Now Google has released the 2.0 version of the product. What remains the most promising of this is that complier. Which takes code and compiles it for the web and applies all kinds of magic to make it lighter, faster, and better in many ways. Take a look at the video below. To me the most telling part was the testimony from the Google Wave team – with 100’s of developers working on dozen of feature the JS code alone grew to over 1.5mb. I’ know from experience that when you get just 2 or 3 people working on the same complex application, optimization and looking for reuse opportunities becomes a project in and of itself. Delegating some of that work to a smart complier looks like a brilliant idea.
I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.
If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.
Google raises email storage size to over 80 GB!
November 11, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
I still remember the day I switched from Yahoo Mail to GMail just because Google was offering the unheard of 1GB versus the 20MB limits I was use to. Today I looked down at the bottom of my email and saw this:
Was pushing 90% and had already bought the extra 10 GB Google sells. Wow, now I’m not even at 10% even though I have uploaded all my old email to Gmail (15 years worth) a while back and have over 20,000 messages.
It’s nice to get free upgrades every once in a while.
UPDATE: about 30 seconds after I posted this, I got an email from Google that says the 80GB is for the $20 I already pay for Extra storage (it was only 10GB before). Still nice.
Humbling comparison – Behold your puny planet and tiny star and despair! (video)
October 27, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
Things like this really challenge the imagination.
Eventually scientists say our own sun will expand to encompass the earth’s orbit. That is unimaginably big. But the stars shown in this great info-graphic video, are really is amazing. I can’t comprehend how these massive stars even exist. Their boiling atmospheres extending well beyond Mars or even Saturn if they replaced our star.
A remember, as big as they are, these are insignificant specs of light in a galaxy of 100 billion stars, and a universe of a 100 billion galaxies.
Youtube is full of these videos. Most with different music but here is a similar animation of stars sizes.
I can’t close this post without a link to this article that started my thinking today:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/06/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/
The <!—Session Data—> in my content bug – Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc..
October 26, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
Attention!
This bug affects every content management system using FCKeditior.
Please pass on to everyone writing content on the web
If your using Firefox and Skype (almost everyone is), then most likely you have a Firefox extension that was installed with Skype that messes up content in the portal (and all other content management systems you post to).
If you look around the web there are currently 22,000 calls for help on this issue. It looks like this in your content:
<!–Session Data–>
If you’ve seen this and wondered where it came from, its because you inadvertently have been adding it.
Please stop! 
Here is how:
1) open Firefox
2) in the top menu (files, edit…) click Tools then Add-ons
3) in the add-ons window click Extensions
4) Find "The Browser Highlighter" and uninstall it
This will also make firefox faster (according to this guy – http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/871907.aspx)
What is it:
its a piece of unwelcome, poorly implemented software that ebay built and released with skype. It does things like look for Skype numbers on the web page and highlight them. You wont miss it I promise.
Confluence WebDAV with Windows 7 and Vista
August 24, 2009 by Ben Shoemate
Doesn’t work. Stop trying. Give up. Sure it works in XP. And the web will lead you on a lot of wild goose chases but basically, the problem is windows vista (and windows 7) don’t really support webdav. They say they do, but it is buggy, and there are a million things that break it. I tried every documented "solution" on the web – nothing works. (I can not access it either in webdav – I’m using Win7 64bit version.)
If you want to connect to a webdav server (such as Confluence wiki) so you can drag and drop files, do this:
The Solution:
1) Download and install: http://www.independentsoft.com/independentdav/index.html
2) Once you have it installed (note you may need .net but it comes with vista)
Open it and past the url into the main bar: http://serverdomain.com/wiki/plugins/servlet/webdav (for confluence – use what ever your path is)
3) enter user name and password from wiki (leave domain blank)
Viola – enjoy dragging and dropping files into confluence.
About Me
Name: Ben Shoemate
Location: Houston, TX
About: Ben Shoemate is a web user experince designer, information architect, and technology consultant. He co-founded Burleson Technology Group in 2008, is a former IBMer and proud free thinker.
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