Nov 28, 2011
Was realizing yesterday, after driving past a closed BlockBuster, that I lived through the beginning and end of the video rental era. I remember my dad rigging up our first VCR and being perplexed about what it did, then excited about the the one shelf of movies at our local video rental store – a boon for the town in Ireland I grew up in. We had no cinema in our town, and had to travel to Belfast for the experience of seeing a movie.
So – roughly it took about 30 years from the first store I visited to driving past the closed BlockBuster. We transitioned from tape, to dvd, blueray ( not me ), and finally to digital on demand movies.
I’ve reached a stage where I want to reduce my footprint. I think I’ve always been that way. As long as I have a macbook, smartphone/iPad and my guitar, I think I’d be ok. I won’t buy another dvd, and likely won’t buy a CD again.
I’m writing this because I was debating with someone that books will be the next to go. It took 30 years for movies, books have been around for thousands of years. I think it’ll take much less than 30 years for us to say goodbye to books as we use them now. I’ve been reading books on my iPad, and I’m starting to adjust. With all of the kindles that Amazon have been developing, it seems that we’ll see more and more transition to digital publishing in short order. At least in the Western world.
So, will there be bookstores like Chapters in 30 years time? I wouldn’t bet on it, to tell you the truth. I think that stores like Starbucks will become bigger, and maybe help us socialize new and good choices of books, music and movies.
I just think the clock is ticking now.
Aug 31, 2011
After weeks of inspiration from ShelterBox, brainstorming, legal discussion, determination and imagination, we set up our project yesterday on the Jazz Hub. The division of IBM that I work for produces software engineering tools. The Jazz Hub is an IBM cloud service that lets students ( and in this exception ) a not for profit team use some of those engineering tools to manage their project.
Our new project page is here. It’ll take a few days for the work items to settle and a little longer for us to get into a rhythm. Our team is small, and distributed. We have three developers right now, working in our spare time. We’re backed by some great volunteers at IBM and at ShelterBox – experienced managers, marketers, lawyers, usability experts … so I hope that we can make this work. In some ways this is an experiment, we’re new to this kind of collaboration. But we’re not new to developing software … so we’ll see how we progress …
Aug 28, 2011
A few months ago, the company that I work for and the division that I work in introduced me to an amazing charity. IBM turned 100 this year, and as part of the centenary celebrations they invited each of their employees to pledge some time for causes. They called it a ‘celebration of service’.
Truth is that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to use my software skills to help communities and with this initiative I have an amazing opportunity. The charity is called ShelterBox. They respond to natural disasters by shipping pre formulated boxes each of which contains amongst other things a tent, cooking equipment, blankets.
If all goes to plan, I’m going to lead a small team to develop an iPhone app for ShelterBox. We’re going to wire the app to social media with the aim of offering another platform for ShelterBox’s supporters to understand and share how they’re helping people in need.
It is a learning experience on so many fronts. I’ve had to work with lawyers and executives internally to make sure that I do this by IBM’s rules and standards. At times it can be frustrating, but it is also a life lesson – learning how to cover ourselves, learning how to keep pushing.
The ShelterBox team are wonderful. Let’s hope we can push this along.
Aug 1, 2011
Fresh, clean, brand new WordPress install, because my blog was hacked. Took me a while to sort it out, and I’ve archived off all of the old posts for now, so everything is new again – except the theme, which was fairly new, but I’m working on a newer one. Hello again.
