DO THIS, NOW!






Summarized from the NYT Article by DAVID POGUE, Published: October 4, 2007


On November 12th, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally under-served children in poor countries.

The program is called “Give 1, Get 1” and it works like this. You pay $400 www.xogiving.org. One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.

THAT's what you should be buying this Christmas! I just bought mine via paypal.

Change is hard for everybody

Change is always difficult and even more so in the technology and consulting game where we need to manage multiple requirements from multiple stakeholders. So it is rather enlightening therefore to compare how different organizations cope. Our pals at ZD net have an interesting post on how Apple, Microsoft and Ubuntu approach perhaps the most troubling change of all to technologists changing your O/S.

This all helps convince me how Agile as a methodology with it's "work from a vision and do the next easiest set of things we can do" approach is going to end up dominating the way we do businesses and the old "build a big heavy plan and then try and live with it".

There is just something so beautiful about living in Agile and delivering the next set of small, incremental changes on a regular basis, knowing you're part of a bigger guiding vision, not worrying too much about everyting that's next until you really have to.

The nicest thing for me about Agile User Experience is that we roll out a lovely carpet of successful options ahead of the development team to help guide them.

Ireland is so hot right now (said in Zoolander voice)

Ireland is now one of the richest countries in the world. These are numbers for the whole populations. It depends how you slice these numbers up, of course. I have heard estimates that on a business scale Ireland has more wealthy people/companies than everywhere but Japan. Ireland produces most of the world's software, having overtaken the US in about 2005. Again the numbers can be hacked around but the basic concepts are true. Ireland's coming!

Social Partnership:
A significant part of Ireland's recent economic success has been attributed to the “Social Partnership” – a formalized dialog between, the state, employers, unions and civil society actors. This dialog produces periodic binding agreements that cover minimum standards in pay, employment conditions, social welfare provision and specific parts of infrastructural development. In June 2006, a new partnership agreement (binding for the next 27 months) entitled Towards 2016 [pdf] was announced, setting the agenda for social and economic development for the next 10 years.

Ireland and the EU:
Ireland's membership of the EU has had a big impact on its political culture. One of the most obvious recent effects has been the influx of migrant workers from the ten EU accession states. An estimated 200,000 people have since moved to Ireland since June 2004 making it one of the largest recipients (per capita) of migrant labor in the EU. This has made a measurable impression upon the social and economic landscape. Ireland has recently opted to retain the work permit system for workers from Bulgaria and Romania when they join the EU.

The 2004 Irish EU Presidency oversaw the agreement of the draft Constitutional Treaty. Following the French and Dutch referendum results, the June 2005 meeting of the European Heads of State, the Irish Government opted for a pause in the ratification process so as to allow time for reflection and debate in each Member State. It was also during Ireland's EU Presidency in 2004 that the EU enlarged to encompass 25 Member States.

And now (6-NOV-07)...Microsoft has confirmed its plans to built a $500,000,000 Data Center at Grange Castle in Dublin Ireland...count those zeros!

"This is the first mega data centre deployment outside the US specifically targeted for the growth and performance of Windows Live services," said John Mangelaars, vice president, Microsoft EMEA Online Services Group.

Those of us who follow these things and have "folks on the ground" know that is no great surprise. Since the harmonization of the Republic of Ireland into Europe and the Euro and the 1998 Peace Agreement in the other country, Northern Ireland, the island of Ireland as a whole has attracted back more of its best and brightest than ever left. When I ran my small web consultancy in Ulster back in 2002 the main issues were lack of broadband infrastructure, lack of market maturity and importantly lack of people to hire. I tried hard on all three areas before returning to a "once in a lifetime" offer from a little outfit called Staples in Boston...but that's a story for another day...

The point here is that now Ireland is BOOMing. It's full (and I mean FULL) of bright, young, native-English-speaking folks who are looking to the US for more inward investment and partnership. I say the US, which has always had a special relationship with Ireland (since we built their country for them ;) now needs to look to their Celtic buddies as the doorway to Europe and drop the stereotypical "old country" and misty-eyed views of Ireland as a nice place to go for a pint or a fight...but they'll keep that on the menu too if it'll make you feel more at home...it's all about hospitality over there ;)

Big methods
So today the great man of usability says: High-Cost Usability Sometimes Makes Sense Summary: Computing the net present value (NPV) lets you estimate the most profitable level of usability investment. For big projects, expensive usability can pay off.

I don't really agree Jakob, much as I adore you and your conferences and your fashionable glamor publicity shots.

Well, ok. I sort of don't agree. I am a strong advocate of the right tool for the job but simply advocating for a single large, monolitic usability service effort is like harking back to a single mainframe for the hardware world. Very appealing in a marketing sense. One machine in one room. Everybody obeys. We move on....hmmmm...

The real world though these days (and it IS an ever more agile or as I like to say "humane design" world) demands fast, powerful services that inter-relate into a community of services and deliver a networked effective value.

So I am for the aggregation of multiple, appropriate, guerrilla or light-weight methods that can be iterated rapidly, assessed, converted into coded solutions and repeated. We still do all the up-front thinking and planning but when it comes to getting it done - Let's just go do it! Learn from any mistakes and Do it again.