I've been monitoring how many developers are watching all of the segments of the video series we've posted on the Take Five site.   It is natural that not everyone will make it to the end, but I'm wondering if there is anything we could do better.

First, I'd like to know if any of these are the causes:
  A) Didn't know series were there
  B) Watched the video from a different page w/out the series navigation
  C) Didn't have time to watch them all
  D) The video, well, just wasn't that interesting
  E) My boss walked by, and I had to quickly switch screens from videos
  F)  Other:  ______________ 

Take a look at two of the series we've posted from the Game Developers Conference:  Optimizing DirectX for Mulicore, or the SkullTrail series with GRIN Software* and UbiSoft*.  Or the very long Confronting ManyCore series.   Once a video is playing in the player at the top of the site, there is a link that says "see Next in series" and/or "see Previous in series" to easily (at least I thought) move from one to the next. 

While you in the player, you can rate the videos, get the embed code and direct links, leave comments, and/or link back to the blogs.

To see more series, they are in "series boxes" on the tabs below the Take Five player.  If you mouse over the numer, you will get a video description. Be sure to click on the blue arrow to see the Virtualization and Community, and coming soon, Open Source tabs. 

I'd love to hear your comments, and answers to the mulitple choice above.  I'm hoping I don't get too many D's.

Happy Friday!

Now I think PowerPoint is a fine tool, we just use and abuse it beyond its intended function. For example, sometimes a discussion is just better served with visual cues, whether charts, pictures, or even (I suppose) those stick figure clip-art people. Likewise a discussion sometimes needs to have a constrained, focused agenda, which is what I get with a series of PPT slides. PowerPoint definitely has some valuable uses.

In our case, we wanted an interactive discussion. The scenario was a presentation on the status of the mobile developer community on ISN to people two levels up the food chain. The recipients were my manager, his peers, and his boss. The outcome we wanted was to level set on the status of our community, get input into our strategy and plans, and actively discuss some of the challenges we're facing. Interactive discussion = Good. Silence while everyone does email = Bad.

Our preparation was to put all of the background material and presentation content on a page into an outline in our internal wiki. The wiki allowed for collaborative editing, and brought a lot of transparency to the discussion. We didn't want to surprise the viewers with the no-PowerPoint approach, so we sent out the wiki address two days in advance with an invitation for comments. We cautioned them that the content wasn't finalized, but welcomed input on the planned topics and outline. We incorporated several comments into the final presentation, so it worked well.

During the presentation itself, I held the page open for editing while others viewed it either projected in a conference room or on their own laptops. We explained the agenda of the presentation (Current Status, Future Plans, then Roadblocks & Challenges) and encouraged people to ask questions about anything they read - not just what I was talking about. We knew we couldn't cover every point in the wiki, but by letting people read on their own we could jump to the hottest areas of discussion for more detail.

Keeping the wiki open for editing allowed me to make changes as we talked. At one point I was able to update some metrics that were IM'd to me by someone else on the call. We added some of the follow up tasks and questions as we went, then fleshed it out in more detail afterwards. The wiki page is now the full agenda, content, notes, and meeting minutes for the entire presentation.

Specific thoughts on using a wiki for presentations:

• More interactive discussion - People were not bounded by the topic of the current PPT slide, so we got exactly the sort of engaged debate we were after.
• Trickier to guide the flow - The flip side of the above point is that without a slide declaring "This the current topic", things jumped around. We had to be willing quick on our feet.
• Have to know the material - I do not recommend the wiki approach if you don't know your topic very well. Again, this is interactive so there isn't any room to hide if people start firing hardball questions.
• Easier collaboration - Ability to create the content for the presentation in a centralized area rather than passing around files saved tons of time (and had revision tracking for a bonus).
• Standard format - Everyone didn't have to have a Windows machine to follow along. Also easier to print for later reference, or to grab sections out to drop into other presentations or collateral.
• Greater detail - Only so much detail can go onto a PPT slide before it becomes an eye chart. In the wiki, people could read in greater depth, read it quickly, then ask questions.
• Not as visual - If we had a more visual oriented presentation rather than discussion based, this may not have worked as well. To me, one of PowerPoint's strengths.
• Harder to time the discussion - We use a "10 minutes per slide" rule of thumb when presenting PPT, but I had no idea what that translated to for a wiki. We included more material than we could cover, which we need to watch closely. It's not entirely bad because people were still able to read it and get the info even if it wasn't discussed.

Overall, it was a definite success and we'll be trying it again in more meetings. It helps that our team is willing to try odd things in the name of both Social Media Experimentation and Saving The World From PowerPoint Poisoning, but I can't imagine others won't be willing to give it a shot.

I hope this was of interest, and I'd love to hear any thoughts on how to improve this technique for the next time around!

Some of the key trends being discussed are

• cloud computing - data, software and services being stored in the cloud. This might change the face of IT as we know it. PC's will no longer hold our data, it will be in the cloud.
• Web 3.0 - web a database of data. With all personal / non personal data being stored in the cloud this will need to become shareable to create mashups. Today the data is limited to the site it was uploaded to, with minimal sharing
• Videos/photos/maps/gps - will become the eyes of the world. You will be able to see what is being seen by who and where
• Search - with the explosion of data, enhancements to search become critical, semantic search will replace keyword search
• online communities will grow. People will start communicating to a group of people more than 1 on 1 communications, example twitter
• mobile devices usage will outgrow PCs. Today there are 3 billion cell phone users vs 1 billion PC users.

What do you think will be the key trends that will become a way of life for us? What about security of our personal data? We will leave digital traces of our lives everyday, what about privacy concerns? How will we overcome form factor issues with mobile device browsing? Would love your thoughts.

The semantic web is coming our way, the ability for web searches to understand what the user is looking for vs what is typed in. I am interested in knowing your thoughts on the semantic web? Is this truly achievable?

Speaking of search, what has your experience been on using search on Intel Software Network?

I am interested in hearing if you were able to get meaningful data to act upon and what results you saw. 

here are the 2 versions of the ISN home pages being tested. 

Previous version

New Version

For those of you still wondering what I'm talking about, I'll let you in on a little secret. We're showing the old design to about half of you, and the new design to the other half. Yes, this is intentional. We're collecting metrics to guage the effectiveness of the new design.

Would you like to do me a favor? Let me know what you think about it.  Does it work better than the old design?  How would you improve it?

But! On Day 2 of IDF, Holly came by the Upload Lounge with one of the MIDs - a unit from Gigabyte. She was supposed to do some "man on the street" video, showing people in Shanghai the MID, and asking them to show what they had in their pockets. But her video crew wasn't available for some reason. SInce I was there with all my gear, and had time before the next session, I happily accompanied her out onto the streets of Shanghai (with Helen, our translator) to do the man on the street video.

But before we hit the streets, I shot this short clip with my Apitek Go-HD, to commemorate my first ever hands-on experience with a real, live MID. Here's the video - about a minute and a half, not long enough to go into any depth. But it should be enough to give you a glimpse of what they're like to actually use.

I'll probably keep shooting and posting these while I'm in Shanghai. I'm here until next week - going to spend a few days working with some of the Intel Software Network team here at Intel Shanghai. And I kind of like the style/technique of these videos. I've had lots of people ask me how I'm doing this. It's very simple: I turn the screen on the camera so I can see myself, then hold it out at arm's length, pointed at me, and pivot around in place to show what's around me, while keeping myself on screen. Kind of fun to shoot, and I like the results.

You know the drill - leave me a comment and tell me what you think. Want to see more like this? Hate it? Have something about Shanghai that you want me to shoot? Drop me a line, and let me know. And thanks for watching!

In the mean time, here are a few that I've managed to shoot with my iPhone. Some of these turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. As always, I love it when you comment on my stuff, so let me know what you think, and enjoy!

You can, as always, see all of the photos I share on Flickr.

Yesterday was "Day 0" of the event - badge pickup, etc., but no real events scheduled. I took the opportunity to escape my hotel, and do a little walkabout exploration of my surroundings in Shanghai. I've been shooting tons of pictures and video, and I could write thousands and thousands of words about how cool Shanghai is. For now, enjoy this little video I put together of my "walkabout" in Shanghai.

Features include: about 100 people offering to sell me a "Rolex", some of the great Shanghai architecture, exploration of the "Super Brand Mall", including the Chinese versions of McDonalds and Toys R Us, a supermarket, and more.

Later that evening, my ISN China colleagues (and Shanghai natives) Richard and Welles basically showed me the town. They took me to PC Mall, which is a 5 story mall full of nothing but computers, electronics, cameras, and games. It's like Fry's on crack, and I'm DEFINITELY going back there before I come home. There's a bonus clip of PC Mall at the end of the video.

I also ran into my first "blocked in China" site while trying to upload this video - blip.tv. I love Blip, for lots of reason - video quality being one of the top. So I was bummed to not be able to use it for this video. Instead, it's on YouTube (strange that Blip is blocked but YouTube isn't - what's up with that?), with the accompanying quality loss. But at least you can see it. And the quality isn't super high anyway - it was all shot handheld in HD on my Aiptek Go-HD, then reencoded to 640x360 on my trusty Elgato Turbo.264. I'll put up a high quality version when I get home.

Here's the video - enjoy!