Searching Anywhere

Yesterday, I went to our local Hollywood video. I was looking for a movie by Nick Park (of Wallace & Gromit fame) called "Shaun the Sheep". At the time, I didn't know the exact spelling and couldn't find it on the shelf under "S".

The guy at the counter couldn't find anything similar in the computer. He looked with several different spellings "Shawn, Sean, Sheep, Baah," etc. He couldn't search by director, either. Then it dawned on me. I have the internet on my iPhone. I should search there! I pressed the Google button, followed by the "voice search" button and spoke out loud into my phone "Shaun the Sheep". Within a few seconds I was looking at the official fan site and all 6 of the DVDs (only 3 are available in the U.S so far). Shaun the Sheep: Back in the Ba-a-ath In fact, within a few seconds more I could order the DVD and have it on my doorstep the next day.

The moral here: If companies don't have excellent technology support within their shops, they will lose business. It should scare you as a business owner when the customer has more power on their phone than the person behind the counter does with a high speed connection and full computer. It's time for some technology investment. It's smart business.

The Broken Projector Solution

The other day I was in a business meeting. The meeting started on time...but the video projector did not. We tried multiple computers and settings until we finally concluded the thing was broken. We were at a stand still. We were working on some database design tasks and we really needed to all look at the same screen in order to accomplish our meeting objectives.

I looked around the room and saw 6 laptops. Everyone had a screen directly in front of them. I thought (to myself) "What if they could all see what I'm seeing on their screen?" Then the solution dawned on me. Mac OS X Leopard has built in screen sharing (via iChat or direct connection with VNC). I opened my computer for screen sharing and had everyone else in the room connect to my computer so they could view my screen in a window on their laptops.

Now not only could everyone see directly what I was doing on my screen, but we had another major benefit. Each meeting participant could also interactively control the screen whenever desired. This feature actually led to some confusion as multiple people tried to do something at the same time causing the mouse pointer to jump around or keys typing. By the end of the meeting we had established a new meeting norm for "hands off". Everyone was required to put their hands up in the air "hold up style" and let designated driver do the work when we handed off control.

This is now possibly the preferred method of working. Even if we had the projector working...we could still allow people to connect this way on their laptop. It really made things easier and added some new dynamics to the meeting that made for fun and productivity.