buzznovation

No body does it better...

If I were more artful ( no pun intended!) I would know how to make the image of the comic below smaller, but I don’t, and suggestions are appreciated. When I was a kid, I think I had every Classics comic book that was printed. They were like visual versions of Cliff’s notes for ten year olds. I am not sure whether I read Stevenson’s book then or later. We used to have a reading club at our library every summer, and I tried to read as many books as I could, one summer reading a hundred books over the course of the summer.

But that said, tonight I was scanning what was on my Slingbox and came upon Kidnapped. I watch it and loved it, and have to say that nobody, I repeat nobody does it better than the Brits and the BBC.

I wonder if kids will ever read the comic, then read the book and watch the BBC. Oh if life would be that simple!

p.s. Thanks to my pal Bryan Zug for helping me get the image better sized! Now I have to figure out how he idid it!..I planning now on trying to get to Scotland to see where they filed it.

Demo and demos...

I am hoping to attend the Demo conference in San Diego in September. I have gotten some E-Mail about meeting up with some companies and Rick Segal was kind to have written positively about my Demo performance of last year. As Rick notes, the network crashed when I was on stage. I was lucky not to panic, but really was disappointed that we got caught in a tech snafu, given the truly outstanding quality of the support that Demo provides to presenting companies.

As I was mulling over the whole idea of demos and pitches in the context of Demo and the E-Mail that I had gotten. I came across an very interesting article in the Seattle Times, entitled  “Body talk: An expert gives his take on the body language of some local notables”

There is a great quote mid-way down the page:

"Holding the palms out is a very old gesture also used by monkeys and chimpanzees. It shows they've got nothing in their hands or concealed under their arms. If you talk with an audience with your palms in an upward position, they not only remember up to 40 percent more of what you've said, but they like you."

I am always fascinated by how researchers/writers can come up with metrics like this. I wonder what kind of studies can be done. But if you talk and present as often as I do, it is almost like not wanting to tempt fate. I have an MindMap of things to think about before I make a presentation, and I am going to put this into the the MindMap.  

Not sure that I am going to buy "The Definitive Book of Body Language", but maybe I should.

Who knows, if I ever get to present ActiveWords to Bill Gates, I certainly would want to talk to him with my palms up!

A different world...

When I got out of law school, and had a job offer in Florida, I was thrilled.  The economy was booming. The idea that flowering trees were trees that didn’t have pine cones on them, was to me remarkable. The idea that in the winter the temperature would be 75 degrees and not 40 below was more remarkable. But the culture, the politics and the I the people were not something I was ready for. Nor do I think that I every understood.

It is now 35 years later, and I am sitting on my deck, looking across the lake, 3,000 miles from Florida, at a dormant Volcano. Not sure why I didn’t come here a long time ago.

Off the grid...but with cool stuff on the horizon...

I haven’t done much blogging lately. Just been off the grid, enjoying summer, pitching ActiveWords, and laying back. There have been days here in Seattle where the weather is truly perfect.

We are real close to shipping our next version of our tablet software which I believe is dazzling. We are testing it both on regular tablets and on UMPCs. I will be very interested in the feedback we get as I truly can’t imagine having either a tablet or UMPC without ActiveWords running on it. If you want to play with it, either E-Mail me, or leave a comment and a means by which we can connect!