Being a first time dad has been the most amazing experience of my life. Watching my daughter grow, and witnessing her constant exploration of the world around her has been extraordinary. Unfortunately when Mondays roll around, it is time for me and many other parents to drop off our kids at the babysitter.  The amount of time we get to interact with each other is very minimal, and pretty sad.

In a world where we all feel so “connected”, the people that matter most have no method of remotely interacting with us.  My 1 1/2 year has no twitter, or Facebook account to update.  She doesn’t check into fourSquare every time we go to grandma’s house. Even with mobile phones and Skype video conferencing, there is no direct method of me interacting with her without the assistance and supervision of an adult. So basically, we could only interact with each other when another adult has both the time and is willing to put in the effort to set up an environment for us to communicate.

This got me thinking “how can my daughter and I interact during my work hours?”  The first thing I did was identify the main characteristics of my daughter, back when I first started working on this project:

• My daughter was one year old.
• Her vocal communication ability was in the preliminary stages of development
• Her motor skills where still not fully developed, so complex tasks like using a keyboard or mouse where not possible.
• She needs adult assistance to use our everyday communication tools that available to us (moble and land-line phones, computers, etc).

At this young age, children are extremely dependent on their parents and other adults for just about everything.  However, there are also several activities that come as naturally as breathing and eating to a child. Two of those activities that i observed where exploration and play, many times triggered by a common catalyst of curiosity.

Children gradually explore their environment and toys and interacted with them, mastering the new skills that they learn along the way. Quickly they are able to identify all sorts of toy input locations which triggered various types of output, such as audio and visual feedback.
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I was ecstatic to be one of the first people to have the opportunity to test run Google Wave. Unfortunately, there is only so much i could do in a collaborative environment that has no one in my contacts list. Hopefully this will change soon, and Google will accept some of the people that I invited so i could run some more “real life” application scenarios. Up till now I sort of feel like I was invited to a party that not nobody has shown up too yet, so i have nobody to talk too

Off the bat, as soon as i launched Google Wave, it was pretty apparent that there was going to be some getting used to. I had a similar reaction when i started my own wiki, and had no idea where to start once it was up and running. I regularly use emails, various collaboration software, cloud computing web apps, and maintain my own wiki. I am typically pretty comfortable in most web environments, however most web environments serve a limited purpose, and it is rather easy to see if the function that the application is going to help accomplish is a fits your needs. Google Wave however seems a little tougher to try to classify. I could imagine people using this system for a lot of very different task. It seems as though it will be a pretty flexible solution once you get through the initial hump of identifying the need the need it will serve. This will probably be the toughest part for some users, but I am sure Google will do their best of advertising different reasons to use the web application.

I won’t really speak on the technical issues that I had, since it is only in a preview state & I was expecting some hiccups. However for the most part it seemed pretty stable. At first glance Google has decided to keep a very similar aesthetic design style that you would find in Gmail, which seemed comforting and easy to get acquainted. There where some vocabulary changes that i did see. Gmail allows you to create filters for email by creating “Labels”. You could accomplish a similar thing on Wave, by creating Read more

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We have add a bunch of new functionality to Empressr Some of the enhancements include and fresh new design, a slew of new transitions, and twitter integration. Also be sure to check out the recording feature in the editor. You could easily create your voice overs within the empressr editor and the assets get automatically placed into your project library.

Below is a quick photo slideshow of my wedding, just about all of them are of my wife since she is much more better looking them me

I’ll post up a more in depth example soon showing some of the more advanced features of empressr.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time using twitter, so thought i may as well create a quick little app for changing my status. I’ll be implementing this in a couple experiments that i am going to be working on in the near future. For now, here is a quick little interface for you to tweet me or anyone else.

Unfortunately my company will not allow be release this source yet…

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I was listening to discussion on this topic which has been getting more attention with social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. Companies may be under the impression that they own their brand, however brand is not concrete, so how could it be owned? It is like saying I own my wife’s love or I own my coworkers friendship. Brand is nothing more then a series of actions in order to influence the perception of your audience, much like love or friendship. So I believe that companies are held accountable by their actions, yet it is up to the audience to react to the action. This action and reaction is what molds the brand and identity of the company. So although no one may “own” the brand both the audience and company help mold it collaboratively.

With social channels such as Twitter, this “action and reaction” brand development has the opportunity to grow or tumble at enormous proportions. Companies need to embrace this new way of relaying their message and listen to analyze audience reactions. There is nobody that could express your audiences perception of your brand then the audience itself.

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