Emily Chang – Designer

Our company, Ideacodes, is pleased to be working with Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, to provide identity, UI, and user experience design for her next generation web application. 

The JP Morgan and Connector Group Showcase, “a unique forum for companies to introduce their leading-edge products and services to the Silicon Valley’s elite group of tastemakers and influencers ,” took place on Monday, January 30 at the JP Morgan offices here in SF.

The event offered a behind-the-scenes look into some of the innovative new products currently in development in terms of consumer electronics and online services. The Showcase was organized by Auren Hoffman and Patrick Flanders, co-founders of the Connector Group.

A cocktail reception preceded the presentations, with a chance to view various product displays by presenting companies. Each company then gave a quick, 5 minute presentation with visuals displayed on four large screens.
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We had the wonderful opportunity to attend an informal dinner on Monday night here in SF with the Yahoo! design group and a mix of fellow designers, developers, and even some HCI and usability legends.

On the Yahoo-side, I had the pleasure of meeting Larry Tesler, VP of user experience and design, Havi Hoffman, Catalyst for Social Media Marketing, Joy Mountford (founder of Apple’s International Interface Design Project), Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi (the duo behind OK/Cancel). Kevin and I actually recognized each other from the “people radar” on Plazes. I also talked to Don Norman and Jared Spool, Peter Merholz and Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path, Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, and Julie Stanford of Sliced Bread Design. The conversations mostly centered around new web applications – which ones we use, issues with various interfaces, what elements of local search and maps are working well and which aren’t, and how design and social applications are so inextricably linked. I probably spent more time listening than talking, but it’s hard not to when surrounded by some of the great brains of web design and user experience. Thanks to Yahoo for their hospitality. I look forward to more conversations and socializing!

I received email from Marc Guldimann tonight from Spongecell, an “absorbful calendar.” They’re having a launch party here in San Francisco at Ritual Roasters on Wednesday and we’ll be stopping by.

There have been a lot of Ajax calendar applications (see the events and calendar category in eHub). Spongecell differentiates itself with the Spongebar, a natural language processor embedded in the web UI that allows typed phrases such as “lunch with joe feb 3 at 1″ to create a subsequent entry in the calendar. Of course, there’s also a mobile interface to send short queries and appointments.

I found the calendar fast and simple to use with a smooth feature to drag over several blank cells if an event spans multiple days. Events are edited by inline popup screens that cover the interface (a technique I first saw with Jalenack’s Ajax Periodic Table and which Max and I adapted for the Ajax gallery demos).

Other features include importing events and publishing an RSS feed, privacy and sharing with friends or the public. I wish the web interface had better screen resizing for the side panels. It’ll be interesting to see what’s unveiled at the launch party.

Earlier today, I went to the E27 Technology Symposium at Stanford University. E27 is “a forum for young entrepreneurs to showcase their upcoming or new products to influential representatives from newspapers, popular blogs, progressive companies, universities, and venture capitalist firms.”
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My partner at Ideacodes, Max Kiesler, and I are back from attending Search Champs which took place this week, January 24 – 26 at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. Search Champs is an event hosted by the MSN Search team to invite “groups of academics, bloggers, siteowners, and technologists to talk about search… We usually select this group based on who we are reading and we think would provide us great insight. We spend a couple of days with the group showing them our future plans, getting their input and making connections.” This year’s group included 57 attendees, with various backgrounds and perspectives, but with a common interest in making the internet more democratic, usable, and read/writable.

When I was first invited by Brady Forrest (by way of Alex Barnett), I was certainly interested and honored on a professional level, but I also had to pause and consider it personally. It’s no secret that over the years, I’ve always aligned more with open source than Microsoft in terms of software; Apple rather than Microsoft for OS and hardware. More broadly, I have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to corporate dominance. I think fellow Search Champ attendee, Ted Leung describes it best in his post:

I debated with myself over whether or not to attend. I imagined all the flak that I was going to take from open source people for going to a Microsoft sponsored event. I pondered the prospect of actually helping Microsoft improve their products, which could be a double edged sword… So why did I decide to go?… It basically came down to this: if we want the world to be a better place, then people have to start to talk to each other, listen to each other and learn to trust each other… So I took this opportunity to try and take a step toward the world that I want to live in. Part of the problem with the old Microsoft era was the monopoly situation. In search and many ares of web / internet innovation, Microsoft is the trailer (they are #3 in search). So fostering competition for Google seems like the thing to do unless I want to live under a different company’s monopoly, especially in light of Yahoo essentially dropping out of the search race.

For me, the decision to go was based on similar motivations. I would also add a few others. From a designer’s perspective, having the opportunity to provide feedback and possibly impact the development of products effecting the largest population of computer users (those on Windows) was too important to bypass. After five months of covering and reviewing the more than 400 web applications in eHub, I was curious to see Microsoft’s execution of its competing products given their vast resources. I also wanted to see how such a large corporation could begin to make the switch to becoming more user-centric, agile, rapid, and innovative – qualities that are critical in the web 2.0 space.

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Jerry Cimino opens the Beat Museum in San Francisco.  I wish I had been able to make the opening to see the guest of honor – Carolyn Cassady, the 82-year-old widow of Neal Cassady.

Nearly half a century after they flourished in North Beach, the Beats are back in San Francisco.

A modest enterprise called the Beat Museum is staging a grand opening at 7 p.m. today at its new digs at 1345 Grant Ave. featuring a collection of books, manuscripts and ephemera from the days when poets, artists, writers and all the rest made the scene on upper Grant.

In addition, on Saturday the San Francisco Public Library opens a display of the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Kerouac’s manuscript beats all: It is a scroll 120 feet long that Kerouac used to produce his book on a typewriter in an amazing 20-day writing frenzy back in 1951.

Story at SFGate

Update:
On the Road: The Jack Kerouac Manuscript at San Francisco Public Library
Steve Rhode’s Flickr set

CommunityWalk is a web 2.0 user created community with location mapping, photos and multimedia, and much more.  My company, Ideacodes, worked with Jared Cosulich, CEO and founder, to reshape the strategy, design, and functionality of the new dynamic home page.  Learn more at Ideacodes.

In the BBC article, “Extinction alert for 800 species,” researchers have compiled a global map of sites where animals and plants face imminent extinction.

“It’s impossible to know or predict how long these species might have; but certainly within the next few decades, if these sites aren’t protected, they will be gone.”