Joey deVilla: “at the June 2006 RailsConf, which had a number of the thought leaders in new-school web development in attendance, the DS was the second-most popular machine there, just behind Mac notebooks and ahead of Wintel laptops”
At first, it seemed incredible that a bug like this could find its way into a shipping product, and it becomes even more annoying when you realize you probably won’t see a fix for it until you buy another phone. But there’s probably a simple explanation for it, and the fact is, everything works fine for a lot of people (but I’m going to stop just short of apologizing for Microsoft, because it’s annoying the hell out of me).
The problem is this: when you delete items from certain IMAP servers, they don’t stay deleted. My guess is that this is common on IMAP servers like the one I use, where everything is organized under one top-level folder (INBOX, in my case). When the Smartphone’s Pocket Inbox goes to create Deleted Items (or whatever folder it wants) in the root of my IMAP space, it fails and so does the delete.
So, there’s a simple workaround: use the move option (right menu, 5) to move it to your trash folder (in my case, INBOX.Trash), and then do a sync (right menu, 9). I have a feeling this problem would go away if I could tell Pocket Inbox to use INBOX as the top-level IMAP folder, though.
Jim Willis: “It was a bit like surfing the web in that we were jumping from topic to topic very quickly but getting into each topic with a profound sense of depth in a very short period of time.”
Renee Hopkins Callahan: The official IdeaFlow BIF-2 Collaborative Innovation Summit wrap-up!
Chris Flanagan: “Next up is turning those connections into meaningful interactions.”
Alice Wilder is here to talk about listening. In college, she did academic research as an undergrad, where she learned how to interview children. In graduate school, she met a visionary woman, Angela C. Santomero, who was working at Nickelodeon, and they worked on behavioral resonance, specifically looking at the negative effects of TV on kids, and they pondered how TV could have a positive effect on them.
Santomero created Blue’s Clues, and it became as popular as Sesame Street. They do a lot of research on the show (Wilder leads the R&D for the show). They get a lot of feedback from kids; one kid said “you’re making me a headache”, and the writers took it right back to the drawing board. They watch kids watching Blue. She showed a pair of simultaneous videos: the show playing, and the kids watching. I never understood how well some TV is configured for simulating true interactivity.
Kids want to be heard, want to express themselves and be listened to. They are working on an initiative to allow kids to publish as a way to learn writing.
Hugh Herr told us that from the knee down, he’s all nuts and bolts: his legs were amputated below the knee after a mountain climbing accident. He was told he’d never climb a mountain aain. The turning point was when he asked “what does a doctor know about mountain climbing?”
Hugh spent his time in the machine shop to build artificial legs and feet that were optimized for mountain climbing… maybe the ultimate mountain climbing boots! He can adjust his height. If he needs to be seven feet tall, no problem!
Simplicity through biological inspiration
He showed the results of his R&D: an artificial knee that permits a normal gait, navigation over rough terrain. They are active and are designed to behave like the biological components they are replacing.
Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work, challenged the audience to tap into the wisdom of their customers. He talked about a shoe designer, John Fluevog, who learned about Linux, open source, and how grassroots contributors can create someting great. He decided to take the same approach to footwear, and asked his customers to submit designs for shoes. They had 300 finalists, and have made 10 different designs of shoes.
Didn’t pay them, but named the shoe after the designer. The lesson is that you can learn amazing things from the people who may never work for you. It can even go further: Threadless is a company that makes t-shirts with designs that customers submit and vote on. They are a framework for expressing their customers’ creativity. He brought up Tim O’Reilly’s phrase: “The architecture of participation.”
Peter Durand of Alphachimp is a tribe of visual learners who doodle the day away. The world he lives in is the world of events; he documents events visually.
Most innovation happens when you’re really irritated. Peter was bitching and moaning to his supergenius friend about all these drawings he has on websites, CD-ROMs, etc. So they started to design a software package to be cheap, fast, and out of control. The Missing Link. It fills in the gaps between event, knowledge input, and knowledge retention. The BIF-2 event archive is emerging as he speaks. He says it took him 15 minutes to construct the site. Pretty cool. I’ll stop blogging it now so you can just go check it out!
Randy Antik of Swat Team Partners is all about championing innovators. He wants to be six years old for the rest of his life.
“You only live in this history” -Frank Gehry
What it’s all about:
Randy’s role: be unstuck, leverage ideas, play to win. As a parent, he and his wife were told his son would never graduate high school. So they asked to have him tested, but the school couldn’t help him with his learning differences. They moved to a city with the resources to help him, tried private schools, tried boarding schools, and that got them closer. Eventually found a doctor (Dr. Mel Levine) who could help, and called him every day for three months until he had an opening.
This turned everything around. The aha was that they were very fortunate, but what about all the other kids? How do you scale Levine’s approach to reach all the kids? So Antik worked with Dr. Levine to explore the market, take initiatives (education, awareness, training, scaling), find money, and figure out what was in it for the stakeholders.. They’ve traind 28,000 teachers, reaching 4,000,000 kids a year, raised $70 million, and are involved with major city and state initiatives.
Many needs and opportunities out there like this. Antik realized he was a facilitator; he was unstuck, curious, and could offer strategic doing. This let him line up his passions and skills, and to realize his role: champion great minds and ideas.
Michael Singer believes “that things need to become more complex.” What if… artists are researchers? What if… an artist does work where no one can see it? He did artwork in natural environments such as the Everglades. What does that tell us about the role of humans there? The role of light? He showed his work in the Denver airport; an acre of wild untamed landscape inside an airport, right next to a McDonald’s. In his work, What If? becomes Imagine.
What if you think about parts of your city that you have trashed? Materials left over from a recycling center can become part of an eco-research park.
Living with infrastructure: can we live with what sustains us? Pictured, a power plant that uses excess heat to grow plants; the nurseries embedded in the plant are used by local non-profits who would otherwise need to go upstate for food sources.
Rick Borovoy (Co-founder and CTO of nTAG Interactive) is talking about networked name tags and belief trees. He builds technology that supports face-to-face community building: a wearable networked computer in the form of a name tag. It slides to reveal a PDA display for sending a message or checking your agenda for the event. It lets you switch modes: group to personal and back again.
Think about your belief tree: perhaps you believe “technology can build community”. Maybe you believe that it can build community online. But even if you organize your beliefs into a tree form, it’s really a belief forest: many beliefs (those of the sponsors, collaborators, etc.) You may think that it’s your product idea that is at the root of the tree, but it’s wrong: you’re what’s at the root.