Wednesday 25 December 2013

Bright Christmas Momments and Merry State Transitions

Christmas is here and our hearts are glowing. It has been real journey getting to this point in time and as the New Year approaches, we are poised for action. Between family and friend reunions my life partner Sandra and I captured a special moment, while walking at the Legislature in our neighborhood backyard on Christmas Eve.

As usual there is a Starbucks coffee in hand. I'd like to Shout Out a very special thanks to the great folks that make Starbucks what it is. They serve good coffee and offer a friendly cosmopolitan atmosphere that serves as a secondary office and workspace. It is also the place where Sandra and I first met.

The parliament building in the background has a lot of history and mystery in its architecture, this is a deep rabbit hole. At this time of year the grounds are lit up bright, which makes it a nice place to take a hearty Christmas walk.

Being situated downtown affords us an oasis of beautiful amenities. We are within minutes of our gym and everything else to accommodate our venture. While I focus on software development, Sandra has finished her Marketing Management Program and is starting further Statistics and Market Research courses in the New Year.



As we each continue to transition our way through the infinite-state machine called life, Sandra and I wish all good people a most joyous season and a New Year filled with creative expression.

Sunday 22 December 2013

Myo Armband is Au Naturel Wearable Computing

We are on the threshold of a whole new way of interacting with computers and by extension anything that communicates using the Bluetooth wireless protocol. Fellow Canadians Thalmic Labs have taken gesture interaction to the Nth and are releasing the groundbreaking Myo Gesture Control Armband, early in the new year.

The armband translates the motions of the arm and the tiny-electrical signals from moving muscles into computer commands. The result is a seamless fusion of human computer interaction and a truly magical sense of control. The Myo could render key tools of the computer age — keyboard, mouse and touch-screen — obsolete and usher in a new era in computing.



Having arrived at such a wonderful moment in time, I can not help but reflect back on some of the earlier efforts at achieving a wearable controller. Below are just a few snapshots depicting how far we have come.

The unwieldy Mattel Power Glove from 1989

An incrementally sexier design from the 1990s

The full body armour Ironman solution!

There are also more recent USB based gesture controllers like the Leap Motion available, however, they are not wireless or mobile. Human expression is our innate gift, our hands are our natural tools and computers need to conform to us, so lets not get this backwards. The future certainly looks like it will blast-off, so have fun!

Tuesday 17 December 2013

Development, APIs, Tools and Exponential Growth

The past months have been extremely productive. The world is experiencing a renaissance in the software development arena and the weekly industry newsletters are pouring in with resources, like never before. The mobile revolution is heralding a planet wide disruptive change and we are thrilled!

Consequently, we have been focused, putting our energy into developing the product code. No longer is it so necessary to bank our innovations for the future, due to less than satisfactory technology. Instead, with a well-crafted architecture that is maintainable and easily extendable we are on path, at the high end of an exponential curve, yielding more results, faster.
"Well-structured software is delivered in half the time, at half the cost, with 8x less bugs." — US Air Force study
"Programmers are the wizards of our age. We weave the fabric of the modern society, tell the stories and bring dreams to life." — Geert Bevin, keynote speaker at GeekOut 2013
Our industry as a whole is in a concerted effort, to make hybrid apps become as interactively and graphically performant as the native iOS and Android options, which are so narrowly focused, expensive and redundantly time and skill sucking. We are rejoicing, now that we are able to deliver our products to all platforms and screens.

Wearable computing is also looking awesome, with new gesture controllers available that are turning out to be just what the doctor ordered. Yes, the new musician using our product will be conducting and realizing their imaginations in full immersive and natural form, everyone will be able to experience the rush of letting their heart sing.


"Our Hearts Sing. Technology alone is not enough. [It is] technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." — Steve Jobs

Monday 16 December 2013

Innovators, Learning Levels and the Zooming Song

As a musician web entrepreneur I support and love all music. Recently, thanks to YouTube I rediscovered a classic rock tune called Zoom Club by Budgie, from their 1974 In For the Kill album. This also happens to be the year I first picked up a guitar. For me this tune speaks about the entrepreneurial vision and passion and has great lyrics, quoted below along with further commentary on its relevance.
"Come on everyone of you g.i's
You are the ones who can care
Speed on you wonderful dropouts
We`ll break the walls of this room in

Zoom along, superstar
All over the land
Move on music man

Come on everyone of you people
You ain`t got mud in your eyes
Tell everybody with hunger
Eat up the music tonight

Come on you`ll only get harder
I wanna get it to you
You are my life
You turn around in your zoot suit

Come on everyone of you preachers
You do the best that you can
Move on every one of you teachers
You do the best that you can"
Music has always been the forerunner of innovations in history and from my vantage point the tune is all about being an entrepreneur on the front lines, doing something great and disruptive. The tune is about birthing something good for the people and the joy of bringing it to the world. Like it says "everybody with hunger, who are doing the best that they can" are invited to zoom along with the music man.

Interestingly, the song mentions the "wonderful dropouts". More interesting, the vast majority of innovations have been introduced into our world by dropouts, like: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Nikola Tesla. In order to innovate (think, breath and be truly alive) it is necessary to learn to think differently.

The usual learning types include, entry level imitation based learning and applied apprentice based learning. While meta-cognition and generative learning are deeper levels where the knowledge cap is superseded and experience is gained by failing forward, leading to understanding then wisdom, which is the ability to see different perspectives. Our product facilitates all these learning types, with emphasis on the meta-cognition and generative levels.

Innovation certainly has its challenges, the challengers might even include the influence of short term thinking instead of doing something amazing. However, all things told this is a most opportune time, when a cross disciplinary team of go getters can startup, move quickly and realize a significant ROI.

Having a strong commitment to excellence has brought our product onto the launchpad. With easily accessible avenues to marketing on a worldwide scale we are primed for a successful mission, with takeoff commencing in the new year.