Attention Boeing/AirBus - Start working on blimps!
June 25, 2008 by Ben Shoemate
When I rent a car these days I try to rent a prius. I love gliding silently through the streets, pulling up to fast food windows and not having to shout over the rumble of an engine. Imagine if we could fly in such silent style. Imagine if the airplane was as quiet as a library. This painting made we wish for that. It is a painting by “futurist” Syd Mead who also worked on movies like Blade Runner, Tron and Aliens—but in his most recent work he envisions a future city by the name of Doha, Qatar.
I think we have the building architecture down. But somebody has got to get to work on these wonderful flying machines.
Technically, blimps are soft-body-inflatable aircraft - these are more like zeppelins, rigid-body-lighter-than-air craft. Either way, I would except the longer commutes if I could have a conversation without losing my voice and hearing.
Disney’s new short Glago’s Guest
June 24, 2008 by Google Reader
My first official reason to want to see this new Bolt movie.
Powerpoint version of Shift Happens Movie
February 25, 2008 by Ben Shoemate
The purpose of this presentation was originally to inspire a group of educators at a single school in Colorado to take their job seriously and invest in education. From that intended audience of 250 people, it has now been seen by millions. The message is clear, the world is changing. More and more of my clients are asking me to help them adapt to this change. To prepare road maps and visions and governance models that will help them adapt. What are you doing to prepare?
Decode Your Genome For $1,000
December 7, 2007 by Ben Shoemate
For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.
Tired of waiting on hold - outsource your waiting to India
December 7, 2007 by Ben Shoemate
It’s not just for Fortune 500 companies, you can use a company like Brickwork and pay someone $4/hr to sit on hold for you. From the website:
Remote Executive Assistant
- Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
- Are you suffering from information overload?
- Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
- Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
- Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
- Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
- Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?
Tasks they do:
- Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
- Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
- Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
- Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
- Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
- Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
- Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
- photo edits; b/w to color
- Shopping
assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
within a specific area with address, phone number & route map
Has anyone tried this?
The future of social networks
December 5, 2007 by Ben Shoemate
It seems there are new social tools created everyday. So I had a few questions:
- How long does it take for these networks to reach critical mass?
- What happens when the market is saturated?
- How many networks are people willing to invest time into?
- What’s next for them?
To answer the first question I went to Google trends and plotted MySpace versus Facebook.
From this it looks like myspace has peaked and facebook is nearly as popular now. Next I went to alexia.com which ranks sites. Read more
Google more popular than sex (at least according to google)
October 16, 2007 by Ben Shoemate
I was playing with Google Trends yesterday. With a few keystrokes you can satisfy your need for both useless trivia interesting facts and the data to back it up. Where else can you discover that basset hounds are more popular in Hungary, that Hillary Clinton is finally more popular than her husband, or that in spring of 2007, google became more popular than sex: 
Here are some more fasinating trends (at least to me). Read more
A new site, again
September 3, 2007 by Ben Shoemate
I have had my first real stretch of free time in almost 4 years these past 2 weeks. With it, I thought I would clean a little house and update my website. I have 2 goals with this new site: consolidate and simplify.
Consolidate because I have 34 domains hosted with half a dozen ISPs. This is great for playing the feild and comparing level of service (except they all pretty much suck the same with 1 notable exception), but it is very poor for having any kind of focus. The fact is, I do a little bit of work online each week outside of my client paid activities. But since it is spread out across so many different projects, it is lost.
Simply because my old site, while cool, was based on a cold fusion platform I build my self with several different web services integrated into it. Half of these were down half the time. Well see how well this new approach works. Fingers crossed. (by the way, if its 2010 and this is the only thing up here, you will know it failed.)
