Thoughts

Open Web Education Alliance

The Open Web Education Alliance is the W3C’s attempt to “help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals”. More from the charter:”Because of significantly differing curricula and standards of quality between educational facilities, students are often not adequately prepared to immediately enter the Web development profession, and prospective employers do not have sufficient information to judge applicants’ knowledge and skills. … the wide scope of the profession, ranging from presentational design, to user interface design, to client-side and server-side programming, makes comprehensive education more difficult.”

Thoughts

Competition for the day

The following paraphrasing of copy was a part of the lead paragraph on a real estate-related blog post this morning. Needless to say, it caught my eye… and put a very grumpy spin to my Friday morning.

logo-tournamentAre you a new business in need of a logo, or are you a company that needs to update your brand logo? Well, you can hire a fancy pants graphics designer, who will take a month or so to give you something you’re not crazy about (and bill you a handsome fee)…. or try Logotournament.

So how do you respond to this kind of service? Would you throw your name into the tournament and give it shot? If not, why not? Like me, do you have a sense that the quality of this work is “a good enough value” in the minds of a LOT of people? If so, how do you compete against it? And on a related note, what are your thoughts in general to “off-shoring” design and programming?

Pick a question. I’m interested in your thoughts.

Thoughts

QR Codes: I'm In The Matrix Now

Wikipedia tells us that QR code is “matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code)” that can be read by phone cameras. This graphic qr1 is my “mobile tagged” name, CCLA phone number, and email address. It was generated from my iPhone Contacts with the Optiscan iPhone QR Scanner and Generator iPhone app.

More about this from The Librarian’s Bane – “QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks.”

QR codes are used on wine bottles, signs, and lots of other stuff.

Thoughts

The Wisdom of Michael Dell

Dell’s earnings have dropped by 63% this quarter. However, Maximum Leader Michael Dell sees blue skies on the horizon and says “We are preparing for what we believe will be a powerful replacement cycle”. One of his wish-dreams is that next year businesses and governments will rush out to buy new computers to run Windows 7. Of course, this is the same guy who in 1997 said of Apple “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Apple’s market capitalization passed Dell’s in January 2006.

Yesterday Dell’s stock closed at $11.48.

Yesterday Apple’s stock closed at $135.07.

Thoughts

Quince

logo-quince

Quince (pronounced kwinse) is a rich, interactive user experience (UX) design patterns library produced for the software community by Infragistics at no charge.