Friday Night Links (4/2/2010)…

Man, it is getting really tough to keep up here with everything I have going on. I’m not slowing down anytime soon though and actually my Tuesdays just opened up immensely. But who cares about Tuesday? What I care about is Good Friday Night Links!

• Crazy Airports – Ever thought about building an island that is 4 square miles in the middle of a harbor so you can have an airport? Why not? Everybody’s doing it. Everybody is also landing on the beach, driving their cars across the runway, and creating massive solar arrays to power their airport. Sounds like you have some catching up to do. Regardless, the pictures are pretty amazing and I highly recommend you check out the island airports on Google Maps satellite view. Here is one to get you started.
• Homemade Things That Should Not Be Homemade – If you know me, would it shock you if I said my brother and I have actually made very similar inventions in our lives? I’m sure it wouldn’t. But don’t let me yammer at you. You need to check out the pictures. My favorite: the scaffolding. Also, be on the look out for the thing. Digitante dollars to the person who finds it first and leaves a comment about it.
• Beet Hummus – My most popular posts in FNL has by far been the food postings. You’ll notice Jenny’s comments strewn about in each food post. Well, here is another one for you. I saw the color of that hummus and knew I had to have it. Gorgeous. Wonderful – now I’m hungry.
• Clothes Folding Robot – This robot is programmed to fold clothes, but he has never folded THESE particular clothes before. He analyzes the shape, size, which direction it hangs, and then folds it properly. Good luck trying that technique out on my dress shirt that sat at the bottom of a pile for a week. Even my iron on full blast can’t help that shirt. Here is a direct link in case you can’t see the video below.

  http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/gy5g33S0Gzo&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

Ignite Indianapolis 2010…

Just to recap from last night because I’m lazy:

I attended an event called Ignite Indianapolis. The premise is there is a docket of speakers who are equipped with a Powerpoint presentation and the subject can be whatever they want. The catch is, each slide shows for exactly 15 seconds and there are 20 slides, so the full presentation is 5 minutes (it is also referred to as Pecha Kucha). Timing and pace are everything: some presenters hit their next point exactly as the slide flipped, others rushed through their thought as slides kept turning despite their fumbling of words, and others had speeches with long pauses waiting for the next slide to appear. It’s amazing how long and short the same 15 seconds can feel. I will cover all the presentations with some critiques tomorrow.

Hey! What do you know? Here are the critiques and comments in order of appearance in the program:

1. Ken Christie, President, The 543 Group – He used to work for Disney as an “Imagineer.” What that means is he came up with all the cool rides and displays you see when you go to Disney World. Due to the format, I didn’t get to delve into what he invented and worked on which would have been pretty awesome, I would imagine. Imagineer? Anyway, he went through the process for being creative and it was pretty cool to see something as off-the-cuff as being creative has a structure to it.
2. Dustin Wortman, Student, Ivy Tech – Dustin was, mostly by self-admission, an Anime nerd. I’m not really into Anime, but he did a nice job of covering information on Anime, Manga, and Hentai. Fun fact: Hentai literally translates to ‘pervert.’ Alright then. If you don’t know why that significant, I would recommend NOT Googling it at work.
3. Ann Edwards, Design Strategist, Point Brake – Earlier today I read and commented on Ann’s blog. She certainly looked nervous but her statistics that she presented were pretty amazing. I can’t remember them off the top of my head, but they involved massive exposure gains by companies when they did simple redesigns of product packaging and other small changes with huge impact. Maybe Ann will swing by and post some stats or a link to her presentation.
4. Joe Wilkert, GM & Publisher, O’Reilly Media – I was disappointed by this one. The title was ‘iPad: Important or Irrelevant’ but I’m not sure why the term irrelevant was even included in the title. The entire presentation was a big, fat iPad love fest. I think it’s save to say Joe has an iPad on order with Apple.
5. Stacie Porter-Bilger, CEO, Hoosier Academy – I was extremely interested in this one because Hoosier Academy is a school where the students only go to the physical school grounds once a week. The rest of the time, they are completing homework online. It felt very relevant to me. Having a pair of 1-year olds who are growing up quickly will do that to a person.
6. Daniel Poynter, Founder, GNIC.org – Daniel is in the midst of an experiment (or art project, as he calls it) where he found a person and asked them, “Who is the awesomest person you know?” He then went to the person that was awesome and asked them the same question. Additionally, he is recording all the conversations he has along the way. There were some very interesting responses in there.
7. Jason Moriber, Principal, Wise Elephant – This was far and away the most entertaining of all the presentations. Jason was bounding around the stage, waving his hands, and generally being a complete lunatic. His slides were hand drawn on a whiteboard and very clearly described what he was talking about. The same speech given orally only would have been a snooze-fest, but the active, visual way Jason presented created a huge impact in my brain.
8. Kevin Makice, PhD Candidate, IU – The thing that I loved most about Kevin’s presentation was his cadence. He didn’t match what he was saying to each slide, but it didn’t matter because he was making points that were already impressed on your brain by prior slides. Example: He spend the first 5 slides talking about robots in general and in the meantime slides flashed up with phrases on them. On the sixth slide, he rehashed those five phrases. I felt prepared and I also felt like it was ingenious.
9. Bob Mattax, Developer, Developer Town – Alright, when a presentation is called ‘Why Houses?’ and the guy works for a company called Developer Town, I just assumed he is a real estate guy. Who cares? Wow, was I taken for a loop when I found that he actually builds little “sheds” for software developers. Here’s how it works: you have these little plug-in-able houses on wheels. They have a light on the outside that indicates the occupant is busy, customized paint and features, and windows so you can see in your coworkers house. These little houses are supposed to be placed in a warehouse which is far less costly than an office cube-farm. Outgrow your warehouse? Unplug, wheel them in a truck, take them to a larger warehouse, and plug them back in. Amazing concept.
10. Brian Shafer, Co-owner, Walnut Valley Bison – This presentation made me hungry – both for a nice bison burger and for a tour of the bison farm. The visuals in this presentation were stunning: piles of bison skulls 30 feet high and 2,200 lb beasts staring down the camera. Not to mention, I would have never expected a presentation at this sort of even geared toward bison.
11. Dan Miller, Owner, VCS Indy – This presentation probably was struggling the most for timing and content. Dan under-estimated the amount of time each slide was going to take, relative to his speech and was playing catch up the whole time, even skipping parts that he couldn’t get to in time. As for content, I find computer viruses to be a quasi-interesting subject, however, I’m not sure this was the crowd for it. I’m guessing half the crowd was against him because they were Apple fanboys to begin with. In the end, no solutions were offered – just information – which made the whole thing feel kind of pointless. Dan, if you point out a problem, you HAVE to offer a solution.
12. Doug Karr, CEO, DK New Media – While other presentations may have been more interesting, informative, or entertaining, Doug’s resonated with me the most. I’ve worked in corporate America for nearly 10 years and there is nothing I hate worse than meetings. They keeping you from doing what you need to do, you get more work while you are there, and the people running them have no idea what they are doing until they take your idea and use it as their own. Wow, so frustrating. Meet or die? I’d rather die.

If anyone has a link to all the presentations, I would love to see that in the comments. Additionally, if you were a presenter, let me know how you feel about my critiques! And don’t worry, I plan on presenting at the next Ignite Indianapolis so I may rue the day I ever laid into these guys…

Friday Night Links (8/28/2009)…

I’ve got some interesting stuff from the past week. Check it out:

• Solar Roadways – Driving on glass solar panels? Yep, if these prototypes work out. This would be quite the feat of engineering and could be a planet saver it is works. Apparently, the company also did some calculations and a conservative estimate says that if we replaced all of our roads with these, it would produce 3 times our nation’s electricity consumption. It would also generate its own heat to melt snow in the winter. No more salt on the roads? Count me in.
• Chipotle iPhone App – Chipotle has an iPhone app that allows you to find the closest Chipotle, customize a burrito (and save it to a favorites list), and pay for said burrito before arriving at the store. Delicious.
• 25 Must-Have Ubuntu Apps – Since I got rid of my little Dell computer about  6 months ago, I’ve been missing Ubuntu, the open source, free (as in beer and freedom) operating system. If you want to check it out (or already are), here are some great programs you need to pick up.
• High-Speed Robot Hand – While they certainly aren’t sentient and can’t come to life organically (yet, anyway), robots really out-do humans in some aspects. This video is amazing. The robot hand bounces ping pong balls, picks up a grain of rice with tweezers, and tosses and catches a cell phone out of mid-air. Just a couple more years until Skynet becomes aware.