Hackfest 2010

Mar 16, 2010 by Dan Taylor    No Comments    Posted under:

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Vancouver 2010 Olympics – as mind map

Jan 25, 2010 by Dan Taylor    7 Comments    Posted under: News, Productivity

Culling through listings of which Olympic events are happening when can be a bit tedious. To this end, I created this mind map to illustrate the flexibility of MindMeister‘s mind mapping solution.

I’ll be keeping the schedule up to date and including a listing of winners, as well as any relevant/newsworthy notes. Let the Games begin!

Videos, coding, and a whole lotta text

Nov 27, 2009 by Dan Taylor    No Comments    Posted under: News, Technology, Video

By the looks of things around here, you’d think that I’d gone a little AWOL – and part of that is true.  I guess when you work on others’ blogs, copy, marketing, and video production – your own personal blog takes a back seat (funny how that making money to pay the bills thing works).  So without further adieu…let me bring ya’ll up to speed on what I’ve been working on.

MindMeister

As I wrote back in the beginning of October, I’ve started working with MindMeister in a variety of capacities.  Truly, this is one of the best gigs I’ve ever had.  Not only is Michael Hollauf (my boss), one of the most supportive people I’ve ever worked with, he’s also very open to any and all marketing ideas.  One of the first projects I did with MindMeister is the 4:37 screencast that went up about a month ago.

I can’t take credit for the video footage in this one, as the intro and most of the screen footage was produced and recorded by Wolfgang Bartelme. However, the vocals were recorded by me.

Shortly thereafter I received a headlong introduction to working with Ruby on Rails.  After installing NetBeans and getting and stunnel connection set up, I now have access to the ‘guts’ of the MindMeister engine.  On any given day, here’s what I’m looking at:

If you’re familiar with coding, then all of this makes sense.  If not, it’s completely Greek to you (and me – partially).  I place myself somewhere in the middle.  My coding experience more or less ended with html, however I’d consider myself a fairly decent php and css modifier, but not creator.  To be fair, when I work with code, I’m only altering text, not actually programming strings.  However, there is a certain level of organization required, as some text has already been created in a string previously, and doesn’t need to be duplicated, rather, a simple expression is needed to call upon this text.

Got all that?  Yeah – me too….but I’m getting there.

The last project I’ve worked on is a screencast video diving into some of the more advanced features of using links within MindMeister mind maps.  Again, the intro and outro were created by Wolfgang, but everything in between is all me – video and vox.

And just in case you’re wondering, here’s what I use to make the magic happen:

• MacBook Pro 2.5 Ghz w/ 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Shure SG 25 microphone
• Allen and Heath Xone XD 53 headphones for monitoring

And if that wasn’t enough – I’ve also authored a blog post or two at the MindMeister Blog

fatfoogoo

Nothing really new in the way of fatfoogoo.  I keep tabs on the daily industry news concerning microtransactions and their applications in the video games industry.  Naturally, in-game advertising also shows up on my radar, as it’s also a monetization method for video and social games.  I did however recently read that one of fatfoogoo’s investors, Christian ‘Toto’ Wolff, recently purchased a minority stake in the Williams F1 racing team.  This buy in signals the first time ever that the teams’ principles, Sir Frank Williams and Patrick Head have allowed outside investment.  So indirectly, fatfoogoo now has a connection to the Formula One racing world?  Awesome.

Naturally, you can always have a read of what I’m reporting for fatfoogoo over in the industry news section.

Talespin

Here’s a teaser that I put together of a much larger project in the works.  At the end of last winter my two filmmaking partners and I had the opportunity to interview Chanda VanderHart and Anna Lea Stefansdotir of Talespin – Musical Tales for Big and Small.  To be honest – we’ve got so much great footage that I’ve simply been overwhelmed as where to start with the editing process (maybe a MindMeister mind map would be in order here?).  Footage was shot by me, while the audio was provided by, unfortunately I never got the guys name – but the dude running the soundboard.  And speaking of audio – let me tell you, aligning a separate audio source with video is much trickier that it looks.  After doing a little research, as well as talking to Ritchie (aka datadirt), it seems as though most DAT recordings run at 48kHz, while most video footage audio is recorded at 44kHz.  Not a major difference, but it’s enough to offset frames.  In other words, I couldn’t simply lay the audio in under the video, as every 60th frame or so, the audio would start to go out of phase.  To correct this, I had to manually splice the audio and line it up with the video.  See if you can hear the cuts – I bet you can’t.

So that’s about it for the month of November.  Sure there’s a whole slew of stuff I’m working on for MindMeister right now, but it’d spoil the surprise if I told you about it pre-launch, eh?  You’ll have to stay tuned.  If you don’t want to miss a beat, you can always follow MindMeister on twitter, become a fan on Facebook, or subscribe to the RSS feed.  Shameless marketing plugs FTW!

Working with MindMeister

Oct 2, 2009 by Dan Taylor    13 Comments    Posted under: News, Technology

Sadly, things like a personal blog take a bit of a back seat when you’ve got a ton of stuff going on.  Such is the case here, as the past two weeks have been filled with meetings, discussions, and new collaborations.  While I can’t go into all of the details of everything that I’m working on right now (pesky NDA’s and such), I’m happy to announce that I’m now working with a Vienna, Austria/Feldkirchen, Germany based SaaS, MindMeister.com.  I’ll be working on marketing and promotion projects with them, and am truly excited about this software.

A bit about MindMeister

MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other’s changes as they happen.

That’s the official website copy (not written by me), and it does a good job of explaining what MindMeister is and does, but to put it bluntly – this thing is one of the greatest organizational tools I’ve ever seen.  Think about your traditional whiteboard – the board that everyone chalks their ideas up on, and where current ideas get expanded, and new ones are created.  Once that whiteboard is filled, chances are the best of the best get carried over to the next iteration.  What if you could store every change that was made to this whiteboard?  Forever?  Enter MindMeister.  There’s a whole bit about the history feature that I could get into, but all I’ll say at this point is….stay tuned.

Ok, so we’ve got ideas saved for perpetuity.  Great.  The problem with the whiteboard is not only that it has limited space, but it’s also physically stationary.  Chances are, your corporate whiteboard isn’t making any international voyages anytime soon.  Through the power of the internet, MindMeister takes the traditional whiteboard and makes it global.  Project managers in Toyko can interact, share, and collaborate on ideas with their counterparts in San Francisco, Sao Paolo, and Sydney, all in real time (provided there’s enough coffee to span those time zones).  And for those that just couldn’t keep their eyelids open, mindmaps can be saved, emailed, embedded, exported…you name it, chances are the folks at MindMeister make an option for you to share it.

Free accounts are offered, but have limited functionality.  Think of it as a try before you buy.  The free version will give you a taste of the complete package, but is akin to driving a V6 with only 4 cylinders firing.  Good, but not the full experience.  I could go on and on about this fantastic software, but why take it from me?  Head on over to MindMeister and get your own map going