Project OrielEmbracing Change

My apologies for not sending links last week!

* Meeting Bingo: http://bingdoh.com/games/classic-meeting or create your own http://bingdoh.com Thanks to Mike for the selection of words!
* Popular searches in Google today: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
* Enjoyable article on good design comes from good taste: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
* Summize takes product reviews and displays them on a graph: http://www.summize.com/
* National Wildlife Strike Database (animals killed by airplanes). Searchable by type of animal and state. While there are all sorts of bird species listed (as you would expect), you can find that airplanes somehow managed to kill two badgers. http://tinyurl.com/27u8lo

It is a bit of an eclectic collection this week.
Peter

* Interview with Google’s CEO: “We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance. And by the way, I would argue that we in the industry forgot this. We became as a group – certainly I did – consumed with the complexity of the systems that we were building for powerful corporations, and we forgot that there’s a much larger market around consumers for simple solutions.” http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_trans?currentPage=all

* Presentation Tips: “Give everyone at least one piece of paper. A piece of paper is a record, an artifact from your presentation. People can use that artifact to help recall the details of the presentation, or better yet to tell others about it.” http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/presentations.html

* Ceiling height affects how you think and act: “When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,” said Meyers-Levy. “They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.” (apparently the Renewal offices were designed for abstract thinking!): http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/studien/bericht-83419.html

* Research home prices on your phone with HouseFront. Just text message the address to HOUSE (46873) http://lifehacker.com/software/home/research-home-prices-on-your-phone-with-housefront-249969.php

* O’Reilly on their book sales “In the Web design and development area, it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth, but Ajax books have not. The decline of both PHP and ASP are striking…” http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_6.html

No games today, but hopefully some interesting links just the same.

* When distorting information actually improves its understandability: This is especially the case for subway/mass-transit maps because the question is not where x is in relation to y, but can you get to x from y. http://tinyurl.com/3x3t27

* There is good money in open source! MySQL AB, a company whose core business is developing and supporting the open source database server, MySQL, hit $50 million in revenue last year – a 50% increase from 2005. http://tinyurl.com/3xxcol

* DRY process philosophy (Don’t Repeat Yourself). “The philosophy emphasizes that information should not be duplicated, because duplication increases the difficulty of change, may decrease clarity, and leads to opportunities for inconsistency.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_repeat_yourself

* The Gentle Art of Saying No. “You can never be productive if you take on too many commitments – you simply spread yourself too thin and will not be able to get anything done, at least not well or on time.” http://tinyurl.com/22wmw2

Enjoy!
Peter