masimuddy

Mark Vanderbeeken recently wrote an article on the where-abouts of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea alumni (This is the school where I did my Masters). Mark names a number of companies and schools were the alum now work and identifies a number of new companies that have been started by the alumni. It’s an impressive list, and I think it speaks to the caliber of people that were associated with the school. I am proud to be part of that community.

One of the alum was featured in a Wired magazine article recently as well. A former professors of the school, Massimo Banzi, continued to work in the area of physical prototyping and with his team has garnered a lot of interest for the open-source prototyping platform they call Arduino (named after a bar we all used to frequent). The article talks not only about the project, but the idea that this is open-source hardware, and there can be a business made out of such a thing.

Congratulation to Massimo and the Arduino team, and all the Ivrea alumni : )

An article over at Wired about “The Brash Boys at 37signals” (makers of Backpack and Ruby on Rails) has prompted a bit of a debate in the blogosphere.

Donald Norman wrote an article asking “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” and 37Signals wrote a follow-up describing “Why we disagree with Don Norman“. Have a read, it’s an interesting debate on software design philosophy.

All articles bring up interesting discussion - is there a single and correct product design process? Probably not. I think the important take-away here is that there are multiple processes and philosophies of product development to consider. But I believe there are some processes better suited for certain situations. The choice of process is only one of the many choices any company has to make on their road to success or failure.

Nokia’s Ovi is Nokia’s newly announced internet service brand. While starting as a Music store and a Gaming store the brand promise seems to be much more - “It will also be an open door to web communities, enabling people to access their content, communities and contacts from a single place, either directly from a compatible Nokia device or from a PC.”

It will be interesting to see how this service will evolve and what they have planned. It seems to have some aspects of a content network I spoke of in my thesis, and allowing people’s digital content to be more accessible on their different devices.
(For full disclosure, I used to work at Nokia’s Research Group as a concept designer)

I just came back from Guy Kawasaki’s talk at BayChi. He presented “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09″ where he talked about how he created the Truemors website (and he insists it’s a website). This is the first time I’ve heard him speak, but it was a really great, and a very entertaining talk. I hope to learn a little and improve my presentation techniques. In his talk, he mostly talked about what he had to do to create the site, and I thought it as a great point that a decent idea, with the passion to implement it and see it through is a great combination.
The service itself is interesting. It makes it easy to upload content to the web (really text snippets) - kinda like twitter, for no user stream But people tend to post news stories and links. Two things in my mind make this site interesting.

Firstly, allowing many ways for anyone to post content, online, sms, email and speech to text technology that lets people upload via calling . Secondly, that it’s sort of a free for-all-all posting site that relies on community moderators (less interesting) and newly introduced community management tools (more interesting). WoW recently introduced such features and it really seems to reduce the amount of spam.

As for the service, we’ll see how it does. Good luck Guy!