Two hours: Conclusion

As I mentioned in the first of these three posts, although David Lago was our point of contact in setting up this meeting, he was ultimately unable to make it.  I have no illusions as to my lack of understanding regarding the actual task of programming.  I am not the “tech guy” of our team.  I am what Michael Nelson has dubbed a “technology generalist”.  What this means is that I know just enough to be dangerous.  I thought about the possibility that in my attempt to explain and demonstrate what we are working on I would be bombarded with questions.  Questions are nothing new mind you, I field them all the time regarding ideabreaker.  However, I am not normally answering questions posed by individuals with PhDs in various branches of computer science.  That is David’s area of expertise.  He has all of the fancy letters behind his name and pretty pieces of paper on the wall.  Still, I was adamant about capitalizing on this opportunity as it had presented itself.  I started by showing some of our proof of concept materials and followed up with letting Vassil be the first person to see our still in progress prototype.

My reservations could not have been less warranted.  Of course Dr. Roussev and I  discussed the finer points of our technology and approach and collaborative practices in general, but I never at any point felt out-classed.  Vassil has that ability to break down complex materials into digestible pieces.  Aside from being a hallmark of a great teacher, it demonstrates much more when outside of the class room.  I will discuss this as a business dynamic in a future post.   In this post I will kill the last two birds with one stone by sharing our discussion on collaborative practices in software and Dr. Roussev’s thoughts on ideabreaker specifically as a product and a platform.  Much of what was put forth is already under consideration, but there were still plenty of eye opening material that I had not previously considered.

Roussev on ideabreaker.com:

Collaboration:

1.  Realtime must be mastered now.  Make it a priority because everything else is a cakewalk.  Careers are made simply on the topic of effective concurrency.

2.  Subtlety in team awareness [ color, icon, shape, transparency, simplicity ] is a difficult art  A mechanism for identity must exist.

3.  Users updating the workspace must be priority in collab development.  Otherwise: ping–>delay–>breakdown

4.  Looking beyond “realtime”:  You must decide between Asynchronous, Synchronous or Hybrid.  Each has its own unique problems, benefits and tradeoffs.

5.  Looking beyond “realtime” even further, identical or divergent environment?  How do you share?  How do you sync?

6.  Read Carl Gutwin.

7.  Reinterpret collaborative visualizations.  Translate human protocol to create intuitive environments.  How can you track the movements of team members on your screen in an effective but non intrusive way. (remote pointers and other visual tools, etc.)

8.  Merging data in a collaborative environment is a difficult science.  Explore techniques to “lock users” out and prevent simulatneous manipulation of the environment and the data.   This will be the toughest nut to crack.

Why is no one doing this?!

1.  No one is doing this because it has already be done.  10 years ago it was done, but the horsepower wasn’t there to do it effectively and the users weren’t there to take advantage of it.  People were not ready.   Remember timing.

2.  Research runs 20 years ahead of the commercial schedule, once the research is able to be commercialized it is done with academia.  It doesn’t belong here anymore.

3.  Everyone is doing something collaborative, look around.  But noone is doing it very well and noone has figured out how to make money with it.  Maybe you are different.  Maybe you will make the money.

4.  History doesn’t repeat itself, it just rhymes.

5.  Did I mention timing?

ideabreaker.com

1.  There are a tremendous numbers of opportunities within this platform, be careful not to chase them.  You cannot exploit them all effectively.  Focus cannot be overemphasized.

2.  Visual applications have been and are the future.  Software has been steadily marching in the direction that ideabreaker has decided to go.

3.  Your approach (object oriented data manipulation) is novel and necessary.  Tabbed has its place in high level organizational, and tables are necessary to view the actual data in a native environment and in a cogent fashion.

4.  People desire to interact in an environment that mimics on some level what they interact with outside of the PC.  This is critical to success.

5.  The programs that we built were what people today call “widgets”  These widgets were deployed to great effect in what was essentially a whiteboard environment.  What you have here is structured and ultimately more useful”

Wow.