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Posted by Richard Ziade on January 30, 2009, 10:04AMHere Comes The Hurricane. Let’s Go Surfing!
Yes, these are trying days for most businesses. Cutbacks, layoffs, the rounds of statistics seems never-ending. It all seems to be signaling the same thing:
Hunker down, board up the windows and ride out the storm.
This looks like prudent advice, but that’s not what everyone is doing. In the midst of all this chaos and uncertainty, some actually take risks and exploit the dynamics at play.
Tim Meaney’s maiden blog post on the brand-spankin’ new Kindling blog explores these ideas further:
Companies that invest in their future during this period, a period where existing markets are shrinking or drying up entirely, stand a better chance of emerging out of this in a stronger position than competitors that do not.
Well put.
For the unfamiliar, the Kindling Blog is a resource for discussions around innovation and ideas within groups, and of course Kindling.
Note: The title for this post was inspired by this dude:
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 28, 2009, 10:14AMCircuit City’s Liquidation (Non)-Sale
Dealnews has a nice summary of price comparisons pitting Circuit City against other stores. The results? Just about everything is still more expensive at Circuit City. I wonder if they’ll still liquidate everything anyway. Ah, the uninformed consumer.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 23, 2009, 10:34AMFlight Simulator’s Last Flight
The big news yesterday in the tech world is that Microsoft will be laying off 5,000 people over the next year or so. It’s a sobering reminder that just about nobody is insulated from this downturn.
For me at least, it’s hard to fully grasp numbers when people start talking in the thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions. It only translates into “a lot” in my head. It’s only after I dive in and hear about the stories of what got affected do I start to appreciate the gravity of things.
It turns out one of the franchises is a casualty of the cutbacks. It looks like Flight Simulator will be no more. I’ll be the first to admit it. I don’t play Flight Simulator anymore. I haven’t played it in years. But I remember the first time I took off on an old 386 PC. The graphics were beyond crude. It was all a silly trick back then, simulating flight. But man was it awesome. It was my first taste of real-time control of 3D. The whole experience pretty much solidified my love for technology and computers.
Flight Simulator wasn’t really a game back then. It still isn’t for the most part. You didn’t really shoot at anything or kill anything and nobody was keeping score. It was just so much fun to pretend to fly.
It makes you wonder what’s left to invent in technology that conjures that type of “Holy shit! How the hell…” reaction.
I hope Flight Simulator somehow survives. It’s a big part of gaming and personal computing history and the latest version looks amazing (though I have no clue how commercially successful it is). We’ll just have to see.
Ah the good ol’ days! Nothing impresses these kids nowadays. Oh wait…
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 20, 2009, 03:28PMCue Up Your Brilliance : Kindling Escapes!
For the better part of 2008, we’ve been using a tool for harvesting and collaborating around ideas at Arc90 that we built ourselves called Kindling. Kindling proved so valuable for us that we decided it was something that many other groups or businesses would find useful.
Fast forward to today, and the shingle is officially up. Kindling is available to the masses at www.kindlingapp.com.
In a matter of minutes, you can have a place to share ideas with others in your group or company. Here's the two-minute pitch :
Kindling is the brainchild of Chris Dary, one of the talented engineers here at Arc90. While Chris planted the seed for Kindling, it was truly a group effort. Nearly everyone in the company visited the effort in one capacity or another. I’m standing on my chair at this very moment (don’t ask how I’m typing) applauding everyone at Arc90. We’re really proud of the results. Kindling’s ease-of-use belies its true power: providing a platform to find, bubble up, build upon and cash in on great ideas within groups.
Kindling is available under a no-obligation 30-day trial. It takes less than a minute to get started. You don’t even have to enter your billing information. We hope you’ll find it as useful (and fruitful) as we have here at Arc90.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 16, 2009, 10:42AMCompfight : A Sweet No Nonsense Flickr Search Tool
I have to say, I’m hating cruft on Web pages these days. Compfight cuts all the nonsense out of a Flickr search and boils it down to what makes Flickr so great: the damn pictures.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 13, 2009, 01:36PMArc90 Well-Represented At Mashable’s NYC Event
For anyone interested in meeting the good looking people behind all that good looking technology at Arc90, be sure to look for us at Mashable’s New Year NYC Networking gathering at 212 Restaurant and Bar. Five of us (yes, FIVE of us) well be attending. It’s happening this upcoming Thursday, January 15 from 7-10pm.
If you’re not sure how to find us, just yell out “Hey Arc90 people!” at any given time. Or just look for me (Rich), Jen, Jess, Chris or Bobby. We might (emphasis on “might”) be wearing one of our legendary t-shirts.
See you there!
A Gallery Of Menus
There are plenty of CSS galleries out there, but how many just focus on menus? That’s right, menus. Well 13 Styles does exactly that. Really nice collection for outright copying or inspiration.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 12, 2009, 08:58PMEnterprise RSS : What The Hell Went Wrong?
Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web is declaring: R.I.P. Enterprise RSS. In essence, he proclaims that the big players that sought to bring the power of RSS to enterprises have floundered. In a fit of frustration, he declares:
We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.
He points to three companies that had their sights on enterprise RSS and never really took off: Attensa, Newsgator, and Knownow (Knownow's web presence doesn't even exist anymore). Anyone that's tracked basement.org's posts on feed syndication would attest to my own enthusiasm about how RSS was going to change the world. Since 2004, I've been patiently predicting (or rooting for, depending on your viewpoint) that RSS would tip and change the way we gather and digest information.
So what went wrong?
Well, there are a few things that happened and a few things that didn't happen. First off, RSS should have never been viewed as a panacea for anything in the first place. RSS is an information delivery mechanism. If your valued information isn't available, RSS alone will never bear fruit. If you're not listening to your inventory deplete or listening to your sales data slide (or rise) or listening to the progress of your latest product effort, RSS has nothing to report. Nobody really spoke to a simple, low-overhead way to tap into the latent information sources in business that would otherwise languish unnoticed. RSS is a great way to inform, but if your sources aren't there, it isn't going to seem very useful.
Another reason RSS went nowhere in the enterprise is because nobody bothered to sell a true value propositon around RSS. This particular gripe isn't just about RSS but about the bullshit surrounding "enterprise solutions" in the first place. Just because RSS, feed syndication and blogging are the technology du jour, that's no reason to assume rampant success. Of all the offerings out there, nobody bothered to really break through the techspeak and put forward a really useful solution that business customers could understand. Do people really want to blog in their respective companies? Is RSS usage data really valued by an enterprise? What are we really selling here?
All of this speaks to how RSS somehow went from being a means to an end. When this happens - when you're implementing web services or XSL or BPEL for no good reason other than because eWeek and a keynote in some circle-jerk tech conference tells you to...when that happens, you're done for.
RSS is compelling because it provides a simple, powerful, platform-agnostic way to deliver intelligence from disparate information sources. It attacks the chronic addiction to go after information ("get me that report!") and has (or had, depending on your level of enthusiasm) the capacity to bubble up key information for consumption. The business climate is more ominous today. As businesses look at the world more cautiously and as they fear making uninformed or less informed decisions, the value of pushing the right knowledge out to decision makers couldn't be more compelling. But alas, nobody's built the bridge between this need and the power of RSS.
RSS enterprise has languished on the launching pad because nobody bothered to connect its power to real value in a business context. It's a failed story that never made it past the early adopters and technology advocates. I don't think its dead. We just need a retelling of the story...but this time around, it needs to make sense.
Tartan Maker
Everyone can appreciate a good Tartan pattern right? (Right?). Well then, check out Tartan Maker, a handy tool for creating authentic looking Tartan patterns that stitch nicely when tiled.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 9, 2009, 09:29AMView Your Installed Fonts At Flippingtypical.com
Here’s an excellent little single purpose site: flippingtypical.com shows all of your installed fonts via editable sample text. Nice. Mac users should check out Fontcase, a nicely designed font manager for OSX. Anyone know of a good font manager for Windows?
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 6, 2009, 09:40AMPut A Little Goo In That Interface!
Fellow ARc90’er Avi and I were chatting up the goodness of physics-based puzzle games like the excellent World of Goo and Crayon Physics and it got me thinking: what’s so universally appealing about these types of games?
I think the answer lies in how these games reinforce our hard-wired logic about the physical world. From our earliest days on this earth, we start to sort out how objects in the real world interact. Some pretty basic ground rules are laid down and reinforced throughout our lives. Things like gravity and the various laws of our physical world are completely hard-wired into our minds. If you actually draw out these laws into their basic scientific formulas, its relatively complex stuff. But in our brains from a very early age, it’s all second nature.
Physics-based games and interfaces play a sort of trick on us. For fleeting moments, even though we’re interacting with pixels on a screen, all those familiar rules are validated. This is why they feel so inspiring when we first experience them. They illicit that “whoah!” after seeing a good magic trick.
As we design interfaces, don’t discount the power of simulating the real world – even in the most subtle ways. Even something as simple as a sliding accordion box feels better than just popping up and hiding information indiscriminately. Just ask Nintendo (with the Wii) and Apple (in just about all their interfaces – iPhone, Coverflow, etc.).
So the next time you’re designing that all-too-boring invoicing application interface, think about putting a nice helping of the real world in it. It’ll make the experience just a little more fun.
[While poking around for links to this article, I stumbled on a nice list of physics-based games. Have at it!]
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 2, 2009, 03:51PMA Trip Through Lebanon
Recently, Tina Roth of the popular Swiss Miss blog shared some photos of her trip to Switzerland. Her photos give us a glimpse into the order and tidiness commonly associated with Swiss culture. I myself passed through Switzerland recently as well, but it was just a waypoint to a markedly different destination: Lebanon. To counter Tina’s post, I thought I’d share some thoughts about life in Lebanon and how design lives in the public space.
For most, Lebanon conjures up notions of conflict, political turmoil and a nearly chronic state of crisis. This characterization isn’t without merit. Lebanon has suffered through a grueling civil war, a mess of a war with Israel in 2006, and countless assassinations of political figures, journalists and most notably, one of it’s most popular prime ministers, Rafik Hariri. To say the least, Lebanon has had a troubled past.
Driving through the streets and highways of Lebanon today, one thought prevailed: the place is a mess. Its shared, public spaces are run down, unkempt and often-times filthy. The buildings and streets feel like the residue borne from fits of capitalist progress, snuck in between periods of conflict and unrest.
As you take in the scenery, you can’t help but connect your surroundings with the way people behave in the public realm. One trip down its main coastal highway and you’re quickly caught up in the anxiety and altogether sense of hurriedness that seems to grip everyone on the road. A trip to the nearby bakery feels like an evacuation.
A society’s shared space can reveal a respect and reverence to the past and hope and aspirations towards the future. When an otherwise forgettable building boldly soars in its architecture, it can signal something bigger and better than the present. When people live and work around and within something they view as worthwhile, it engenders a certain relationship between this “place” and it’s inhabitants. A valued place asks to be taken care of and in return is a source of pride and cultural identity.
Lebanon doesn’t cover its wounds. It’s streets and buildings mutter of a difficult, tortured past. A difficult past is not unique. Most nations have suffered through them. But Lebanon is unique in that its wounds never get a chance to heal. It’s civic spaces suffer from neglect because there is no faith in the future. Why invest in anything when it could all come crumbling down next year…or next month?
So what is left for Lebanon? With a past worth forgetting and an uncertain future, all that’s left is the present. And in today’s Lebanon the present exudes a heart-pounding energy that is both exhilarating and painfully aggravating all at once. The present is all Lebanon can bank on and its people live…and race and compete and cheat and lie to survive because tomorrow, well tomorrow is not for Lebanon.
I can’t help but wonder if this nation of worn down spaces can rise above its current state. What if Lebanon’s goal was not for political revival but something far smaller: a greater attention to the place everyone lives in. What if things like order, cleanliness, civility and respect became the pivot points of a national movement? What if just a bit of the care and attention most in Lebanon give to their private spaces (most Lebanese homes, even among the less affluent, are very well kept) were channeled to the public space? Can physical surroundings change how people think and behave?
I’m not really sure. I do believe that if a society creates places worth caring about or cares more for its existing places (no matter how decrepit they are), it’s collective psyche will be all the better for it.
But it’s not all bad. You can’t help but be struck by Lebanon’s audacity and charm. While it may have a dysfunctional collective psyche, it wears it on its sleeve. Lebanon is an extreme manifestation of human frailty. Its buildings, its shops, its roads and sidewalks tell stories, often painful stories about its past. Dubai may have the tallest this and the largest that, but all its wealth can’t create the rich experiences and history the Lebanon of today embodies. You can create man-made islands, but you can’t construct character. For all its faults, Lebanon bursts with character. It’s all at once glamorous and decrepit. Frustrating and liberating. Invigorating and suffocating. It’s difficult to fault Lebanon for what it is today because, like any one of us, Lebanon didn’t choose its history.
It’s difficult to just say “clean up Lebanon and make it like Switzerland.” To sterilize Lebanon is to couch it in hypocrisy. The balance lies between embracing Lebanon’s past and evincing pride and attention towards its future. Great design is about balance. You can’t drop a Walmart in the hills of Tuscany.
While in Lebanon, I was coincidentally reading, fittingly, Alain De Botton’s Architecture of Happiness. It’s an excellent exploration into the relationship between people and the things and places we create. It’s one of those books you feel compelled to mark up and highlight. I highly recommend it.
One passage carried special weight for me while in Lebanon:
[The Street] offers a lesson in the benefits of surrendering individual freedom for the sake of a higher and collective scheme, in which all parts become something greater by contributing to the whole. Though we are creatures inclined to squabble, kill, steal and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally master our baser impulses and turn a waste land, where for centuries wolves howled, into a monument of civilisation.
World of Goo For $15
World of Goo, one of the best (if not the best) indie games of 2008, is now available for the low, low price of $14.99 on Steam. For the unfamiliar, Goo is a really fun physics-based puzzle game. Worth every penny.