Cathexis

iPhone: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Actually

As I posted on the Office 2.0 Conference community the other day, it took me 45 minutes to set up and activate my new iPhone. Thirty minutes of that set up time was spent trying to pry the darn thing from my two teenage daughters’  hands.

One of the major themes of this year’s splendiferous Office 2.0 conference is Mobility and Productivity, and Mr. Jobs obliged by having the iPhone manufactured and released by late June. Our peripatetic conference producer and wunderkind Ismael Ghalimi said “aha” and so everyone at the conference, if they don’t already have the device will get one: It’s their conference packet. No more paper please, no more conference totes to hold your chotchka’s. 

Calling it an iPhone is the marketing ploy to fix all other cell phone providers in the cross-hairs. It’s THE portable internet device. My contacts were synched in 30 seconds, my phone account established in a matter of minutes. Here, after 48 hours is my short list of benefits. No, I didn’t pry it apart to see how I could hack it. I have been waiting for years for something to help me get through my very complicated day.   Pay attention Apple marketing focus groups. This is a high tech, working mom version.

1. Family Calm: Keeps my fidgety, teenage daughter quiet while we’re in a traffic jam. I hand her my iPhone “Chill out and watch You Tube.”

2. Fashion Advice: Check the 10-day weather outlook. What’s the temp going to be like in SF during the conf? Sweater Advisory.

3. Calendar: Client appts. Dentist appts., you name it;  no paper, and no spinning up the laptop.

4. Book tickets: A quick trip to SoCal over the weekend. Safari, Orbitz, I’m done.

Next week, at Office 2.0, the iPhone will be put to a great collective experiment. All of us will have the phone, a Etelos-built conference application will keep us together, video feeds of conf. activities will be available. How do we work? Interactively, connected to the net at all times, and therefore connected to one another.  They call it an iPhone. The Important letter in that concept is “I” .

Office 2.0 and Creativity - Meet Toby Moore

Toby Moore is one of those people who can sustain a conversation across time and distance, not-withstanding the Web, and can get into “collaborative” mode at the drop of a hat. Last week we talked at the Left Bank during an interim moment for him between flights from the U.K., to L.A., to San Francisco, onto Canada and home again.

Despite a hectic travel schedule, we picked up where we had left off in person about 8 months ago (with plenty of Skype conversations in between). The topic, as usual was the process of nurturing a collaborative process from initial first thought (IFT) to final finished product (FFP). (We Love Acronyms!)

Toby and his team at Sleepydog in the U.K. produce game software for Sony. But he is also, along with Howard Rheingold, a visiting professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies DeMontfort University in Leicester, facilitating cross-disciplinary creative projects among academic specialists. DeMontfort is an institution that has specialties in the creative professions.  The Web, he says, and new modes of production are changing the classic design-to-final-finished product process to design for “hackability” or “mixability.”

In our conversation at the Left Bank, we expanded our “back of the napkin” architecture for collaboration, this version incorporating more visualization and social networking elements than our last hand-drawing.   We bemoaned the continuing issues around "HITL" or "human-intervention-transport-layer." which means we need some sort of flow and context-switching services between the conversational and visualization process to definition via wiki tools to full fledged project/production tools.  If only I could scan that napkin onto the web, we'd be zillionaires.

Last year, Toby was an attendee at the first Office 2.0 conference. He and I kibbitzed on the sidelines during the 2006 conference. We were excited about all the new technology we saw, but we agreed:  there needed to be more about the human experience of collaboration at future conferences. Well this year, Toby gets his wish. At Office 2.0 in San Francisco, he’ll be on a panel, moderated by Jevon McDonald, discussing ‘one year later’ experiences with his work with DeMontfort University.

Toby is a consummate creative catalyzer. After his participation at Office 2.0, he’s back in the U.K., launching a creative “open coffee club” for people in the creative professions, and in October, the first European Machinima conference in the U.K.