So this is a bit late, partly due to being away at a conference and other stuff. But just wanted to make the official announcement that my company’s site, RevolutionHealth.com has had its official version 1.0 launch a few weeks ago.
There’s been quite a design overhaul from our preview site that launched in January. Most of the effort went into cleaning up the navigation and visual design. Check it out and let me know what you think!
I got back from CHI2007 a couple days ago and I must say it was a blast! It was my second conference and my 3D Dental Records project from senior year got in as a poster presentation.
CHI was held in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, I got to visit the Googleplex (got a 1-on-1 tour from the best tour guide ever), got to eat lunch there, and sit on their heated toilets (I didn’t have the nerve to turn on the auto wash/dry feature). Their party was off the hook! I also got to visit Yahoo, Nokia, IBM, and Stanford through complimentary tours the day after the trip.
I went about this conference much differently from last year’s CHI. Last year I pretty much stayed with a few people I knew well and quietly went from session to session. I got a decent amount of value, but somewhere in the year between I realized the really important learning and value from a conference goes on in the hallways and lunch tables that fill the gaps between talks. I had the honor of meeting some really great people and forging new relationships.
I discovered SIG’s at this conference, Special Interest Groups. These are sessions where you sit in smaller circles and discuss a topic with people really passionate on the subject. There’s no better place to meet people with similar interests and get fully engaged in a topic rather than passively watching a speaker.
CHI2008 is taking place in Florence next year. That should be really exciting. However, I’m also considering trying a new conference that has more of a design and industry focus since that is more applicable to what I do. CHI is very heavy on methods and research. I’ve heard good things about SXSW. I’m also interested in checking out BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology conference as well as Usability Week. So many choices…
Some of the pages and tools I designed at Revolution Health got on to TV! See below for the video.
NBC news in New York, I believe, was talking about online health sites they like. The two sites reviewed were the Toolkit landing page and the calculators. The medical guy actually ran through the Lose One Pound calculator. They talk start talking about Revolution Health about 2 minutes in. I’m quite flattered. Thanks Sree at NBC!
Keep an eye on RevolutionHealth.com this week as we’re going into our version 1.0 launch!
Have you ever had an awesome voicemail you’ve wanted to download? Or maybe you just wished you could keep better track of your messages from multiple phones all in one place. Well, those were both me and I found an amazing free service called GotVoice. You basically enter you phone’s information, and automagically the site checks for messages up to 3 times a day, downloads the messages into mp3s, and e-mails you with any messages you’ve gotten.
This solves the three problems above very well. 1) You can download any of those “keeper messages” to your hard drive 2) If you have an organized e-mail system, you can simply treat your voice messages as part of your inbox and track them like you do your e-mails 3) If you have multiple phones, you no longer need to keep checking multiple phones.
The service is ad supported. They do ask for some marketing info and they include an ad in the e-mail (pretty smart) they send as well as put ads on the site. They also have premium service levels if you want them to check your messages more times per day and get some other cool features.
I’m excited. One of the most useful sites I’ve found in a while.
Just moved my site and blog over to a new server. I took the plunge and got some hosting at GoDaddy.com for pretty darn cheap. It seems like it meets most of my needs so far like php support which is needed for this blog and decent storage and speed. Their e-mail forwarding is great, too. I had been running my e-mail through zone edit before which gave my forwarded e-mails a roughly 30 minute delay. Godaddy’s e-mail forwarding is very snappy.
I’ve only noticed one issue with running wordpress on GoDaddy which is I can’t seem to be able to use pretty urls for my post addresses. The other thing is support for Ruby isn’t included until the next higher purchase level (I got the economy hosting), which I was looking at learning eventually. Besides that I’m quite pleased with the hosting so far and from past experience, their service has been quite good.
I ordered a bunch of books recently. I really need to get on reading all these books instead of buying more. Here’s one I just got today. I’ve been working on a new health tool at work and need to revamp its data visualization. I’ve been looking at this book for a while but decided this was a fine occasion to make this purchase.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte is a data visualizations god. He takes real solid human factors and psychological research and turns data visualization into a hard science. His books are exceptional in content as well as actual print and materials quality. The images he packs in his books are nothing but aggregations of data and concepts, but the result is beautiful works of art. This is his first legendary book attacking the raw mechanics of graphing. I have his next two books, Envisioing Information and Visual Explanations, as well.
On a related note, check out Junk Charts, an information visualizations blog. They take dava visualizations and redo them much nicer and is a great way to see some data visualization transformations in action.
Google made a cell phone application that accesses your gmail faster than through your phone’s browser. It prefetches messages so navigating your mail isn’t as excruciating as going directly from a mobile browser (ugh). Unfortunately, my phone apparently doesn’t support the app even though it’s a java enabled phone. I’m still not a fan of mobile browsing at all. It’s especially hard on me as I’m used to my new 23 inch monitor at work and 24 at home. The phone’s screen is just painful.
Saw a new startup called Scrybe who will has a new online office suite offering in beta. It looks like quite a web application with new innovative ways to manage scheduling and collaboration tasks. They’ve released a video on their site showcasing the new features which look thoroughly impressive, as is the marketing technique of releasing this video out on YouTube and other viral video networks. Very smart. My favorite feature was the ability to print all your scheduling and to-do data onto a specially formatted piece of paper that folds up in a smart way to fit in your wallet. That and the ability to access your documents while offline (I’ve never seen that on any web app yet, not sure how it’s done) make this tool accessible and seamless enough to work into everyday life. Can’t wait to try it out.
