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Blast Mojo is Live ! Now with scaffolding!

Kyle — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:32:44 +0000

It seems I gained a lot of traffic a little while ago from a little post I made about Mojo. At that time, it seems the internets got confused and somehow a waterfall effect of misunderstandings revolving around the palm pre operating system arose. Gladly those were all cleared up.

Since then there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes by the core team trying to get Mojo open source. They came through a couple weeks ago and now Mojo is official out in the wild.

Being an advocate of open source, I used the opportunity to quickly build a scaffolding framework for Mojo called Mojo Tasks. I had talked about doing it for a while, and tested a few difference implementations before I finally settled on the current implementation which you can find on my Git Hub account.

All that said, I would like to welcome Mojo into the open source world and I am very excited to make more contributions to this amazing UI framework.

First week at Blast Radius over

Kyle — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:52:49 +0000

So as of monday my first full week at Blast Radius is completed. As you can see from the terribly pixelated photo above, I found it with no issues. It just so happens that my apartment is much closer then I originally thought. I literally have been leaving for work 2 minutes before I start, which still leaves enough time for an ever so terrible tasting 7/11 coffee.

Last week was full of a lot of orientation, but I did my best to take it in stride and quickly dive into learning the way things work here. I’ve started learning Mojo, which is an amazing interface development framework that uses the power of Dojo to create a very robust and abstract environment for developers. The code is structured very strongly in a Java style pattern and I’m finding that I’m adapting to it very well. I’ll have a post or two more very shortly about my experience learning it and it’s details which might provide someone coming after me a starting place.

That all said, I’m happy to be settled and in my new work environment with some amazingly talented developers. It’s been so long since I’ve worked with people who were as keen on interface development as I am. It was a long drive and a big decision to move out here, but I’m very glad I did it and cannot wait to continue to learn everything there is to learn about the experienced beast that is Blast. Tomorrow I’ll start “OpX” training which will help me understand and adapt to the very agile and fast past development cycles that have made this company so successful.

Relocating to Vancouver – Senior Interface Developer

Kyle — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:44:49 +0000

I’ve been working hard over the last few years in Toronto to perfect my craft, and I knew eventually I would be relocating to the west coat again for work. It had always been my dream to do what I’m doing now, only with the mountains and coast line by my side. It was all too hard to find good work starting out in this industry. I found Toronto to have a ton of opportunity, and I learned a whole lot from all of it, but regrettably even though I’ve enjoyed my time in Toronto, it never really felt like home. Maybe it’s because I still at heart feel like I belong in a small town, or maybe coastal regions and mountains just put life into perspective for me but it has been a long time coming and I am filled with mixed emotions but happy to announce that I will be leaving Toronto next Friday for a Senior Interface Developer position at

.

Blast is a very reputable company and from all of the talks I’ve had with them over the last year it sounds like I will be working with a really talented group of developers who I already have a lot in common with programmatically, and will be able to learn and share a lot with. This move is going to be amazing. The over all plan is that I will be driving from Toronto to Vancouver in my van, with a trailer. I’m bringing along my brother and father for company, so it will be an amazingly good feeling to spend some time with them. I haven’t spent much time with either of them since I moved here, and I am really excited for my little brother to see all the different parts of our beautiful Canadian countryside. With all that said, I’ll be posting a lot more details here and at my music / tour blog http://giverhard.com as the trip moves along.

Sutori and second hand consumer experiences

Kyle — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:30:04 +0000

I’ve been pretty excited over the last week about the new experiences coming up so I did some digging around and found Sutori.com which is a Blast Radius sponsored pro-sumer driven social network for people to connect and share their experiences and information about products and companies.

The whole concept behind Blast’s success seems to be very much that the marketplace has changed. Consumers now hold the power and as a result, they believe companies need to get smarter in order to please this new level of connected consumer.

I read and responded to a particular blog post on the Sutori blog, talking about second hand experiences and their worth to the community at large. This really intrigued me and I responded with my initial opinion:

I think that you bring up a very interesting point here. Often people will consider second or third hand stories as a form of broken telephone, in which the content cannot be trusted. I’d like to draw reference to a piece of literature called ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell in which he references to ‘thin-slicing’. Often through word of mouth, context is diluted or changed, but generally in the first X amount of steps, the message will remain the same without the saturation of frustration that can be found in first person. The results highlight the original and (possibly?) make a more dense overall consumer experience to base future engagements with relation to the brand in question. This being said, it could very well be that a second or third hand story can possibly be more directly helpful to a consumer looking to make a decision than a first hand encounter as long as the message maintains a an accurate ‘thin-sliced’ version of the original message.

With that said, I started thinking about the type of social network that Sutori really is in relation to another book by Malcom Gladwell entitled The Tipping Point where Mr Gladwell goes on to dissect the reasons and motivations behind a true social epidemic, the kind that are often found in the natural wide scale adoption of a product or trend. Gladwell describes three types of people who make these epidemics occur.

Connectors, people with a vast social circle who specialize in the ‘weak tie’. Mavens, people with extraordinary product knowledge who have a natural need to help people get them the best based on their own personal experience, and Salesmen, the people who actually sell the idea that this product and experience lives up to the hype.

My thought is that Sutori is by nature a very “Maven”-esq network, however it seems that most of the content so far mostly relates to bad experiences with a brand and revolve around warning others. This raises the following question:

How could one use the power of a social network like Sutori to procure positive experiences that can then be shared to all three types of social pro-sumer so that the end result is a widely distributed word of mouth that is overall positive for a brand but also allows for the necessary warnings that protect the pro-sumer network?

Once I thought about this I remembered a site that a friend of mine started a little while ago called mywebvine.ca and I realized that this is one example of how the social graph can really do a great job of promoting positive brand recognition through word of mouth.

So I guess that shows that there are people out there considering both sides of the puzzle. I’m interested to see different ways that the combination of both models can be incorporated so that not only can consumers warn other consumers, but they can also promote good products and in essence start their own little social epidemic around a product that really deserves it.