How my day was...

[mdlbear]

My day at work was almost entirely taken up with the Patent Review Committee: a dry run in the morning for my presentation, and the meeting itself all afternoon. My walk got squeezed down to under half an hour.

But the presentation went well; I'll find out tomorrow whether it passed. In any case, the next step is to get back to turning it from a bailing-wire-and-duct-tape demo into a real system. I'm actually rather pleased with it -- it's a system of physical devices, not just software.

Somehow I managed to twist my right ankle, just standing up out of my chair. Aspirin and a brace seem to have taken care of the worst of it, but I'm grumpy. That was the good ankle.

Not my project, but it's cool as heck and launched today: iCandy.ricohinnovations.com. No Linux client yet, unfortunately; I'll see what I can do. [11-10: Note: iCandy is cool technology, but it's still beta at this point and the site might not be the best introduction to it. The somewhat-misnamed About Us page might be a better place to start. Note that you need a webcam and iTunes in order to use it; we're all hoping that the need for iTunes will go away, because it's just as useful for sharing links to photos and websites as it is for sharing links to music.]

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The requirements for registration are just email, username and password - no more or less than would be asked if you signed up for Twitter or Flickr for example.

We've been working on the website since it became publicly accessible last Wednesday and continue to evolve it as we get feedback. The team (3 people) comes out of research not website development so we're rapidly moving up the learning curve on implementing all the finer points and details. We didn't want the great to be the enemy of the good (enough) to start getting early feedback on how to make things better.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit paranoid about signing up for things, especially if I don't know whether I'm actually going to use them. (I know I won't use iCandy, because I can't - I don't own a webcam, and the camera on my cell phone only takes still pictures.) I do like the concept, and I'm curious to see where it goes; perhaps in the future I might decide I need it after all (which, of course, would require that I buy some hardware).

You might want to involve a web designer at least part-time, though.

[mdlbear]

I'm pretty sure they have one under contract, but just having one is no guarantee that they'll have any sense of what users actually want. (And they're going after a very young demographic for the initial tests, so for all I know that is what they want.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Then you can safely ignore all the nitpicking from someone who's been ordering off the "Senior Silver Saver" menu at Denny's for five years...

[mdlbear]

Hasn't stopped me yet. My actual title isn't "resident curmudgeon", but it might as well be.

Eventually they'll want broader appeal, because Ricoh's main customer base is small businesses and workgroups.