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Yesterday I learned the art of QUASKing.  Wow, what an amazing thing.  HA!  In any case we gotta do what we gotta do.  The to do list got clobbered yesterday, much much done indeed.  Looks like things are looking up for next week's biz in Ottawa. 

Have Phone, Must Travel

So the other day I reactivated the hiptop.  Why did I ever de-activate it?  Well it was expensive to carry on my own along with my other phone.  And I didn't think tmobile had good coverage yet, and at the time number portability hadn't arrived yet, and the battery life sucked.

Plus I couldn't accurately expense it, lease I had more a conscience back then in expensing it correctly.   This time around it's not a phone at all - pure data on this baby and its much cheaper as a result so I think its a bit more suited for expense'able measures.  What an employee with a conscience?  Well hey when yer the bosses brother ya kinda know more about the internal biz then you'd like at times.  As a result you factor everything in.  One less expense non bill-able to a client the better.  Now don't get me wrong I'll blow the $$$ when I need to for a project, case in point the behavioural observation rig, and much of the danotes coding and such.  Still it all adds up. 

Ok so the battery life sucks, the coverage seems better and there's been many revisions to the software on it since my departure.  So going into the field these next few weeks, well I'd like to have access to email and the web as well photoblog. :)

I'm finding flickr calling me to photo more and more.  Its like flickr's abilities empowers me to photo journal more.  Especially with the new enhancements of tagging and notes.  Its grabbed my interest so much that its now a serious tool to consider for research purposes.  It has the web connectivity, email and blog abilities, discussion groups, minor edit tools like rotate and the added ability to document a photo with in depth and detail and organise it via tags....its just irresistible.  Gotta use it.  Why?  For Example.

NetGen Study.  Microsoft (but heck any major company) wanted to know how college students were adopting, using, changing, and not using technology in their daily lives.  They gave each student 5k approx in $$$ to choose gear in which the students picked what they wanted, what they needed, what they thought (expected) to be : phones, pdas, cameras, tvs, pcs, printers, sound systems, anything "digitally" related basically.  Technology we use every day.  They then observed and journal-ed these students over about 18 months to see how the products either made it or didn't make it in the students ever changing needs and environment. 

Using something like flickr you could essentially ask them to photo document their "trying times" their "ups and downs" their "ideas of innovation" their "moments of pain" and so on.  This ongoing photo journal would help researchers remotely refine the questions they would need to ask in order to get the freshest possible feedback from the students.  And you could either use flickr as the differentantor in your approach on the remote research ability of the project or use it for purely cost reasons.  Either way flickr makes the difference. 

For me and my team we came into the picture at the end of 18 months.  We knew what they requested as far as gear went and general good or bad experiences the students had with the gear.  We set out to shadow the students for two days to observe their lives at school and see how the gear was involved in their daily lives.  Shadowed?  Like you went to school with them?  You bet!  Folk Lore 102 man... there I am in the back.  It was good to see what a typical day was like for a student.  We logged where technology was used where it wasn't, why it wasn't, and observed their peers as well.  A flickr photo journal would of helped spark the conversations needed to talk about immensely.

In fact we've done photo journaling before with standard clickn'snap cameras, tons of studies are done with actual written journals and now we do the same with online survey type journals to get the participants thinking and expressing what is working and or not working so that we we arrive those conversations are in the que and ready to happen.

One of my primary goals at Lextant is to acquire, discover, find, CAPTURE, the freshest data possible.  I think I excel at that.  Either from custom software + hardware solutions like the retail behavioural observation rig to video capture methods to things like flickr and finding more ways to get the real skinny as it occurs to help us get data and make it really have an impact on the team and influence the result us and the client.

Its also a personal goal.  Staying fresh in the industry yields even more potential. 

Using a photo journal in flickr helps the client understand the dynamics of what they are getting into, its not just technology and user experience of it, its branding, loyalty, buzz and witnessing just how fast things can change in a users experience. 

I still want a better camera phone solution.  But I also don't want just a typical black box approach.  I've seen alot of interesting location awareness tools for the symbian os.  Basic games to some interesting location + advertising type function dynamics.  Not that I'm a programmer by any stretch of the imagination but I'd like the camera phone I get to have the ability to get new apps on it, and that it has a developing fan base of crack addict coders looking to tweak the hardware out to do all that it can do.  And a little video capture is welcome as well.  The blue one is older, still decent camera res for a phone camera.  The white one is heavy and kinda bulky, dunno.  Maybe the hiptop will keep me happy until those 2meg pixel - 512mb sd card, mp3 camera phones come out.