Imagine your day is filled with meetings or you’re busy with whatever it is that’s diverted your attention. You may need to book a table for dinner tonight, buy concert tickets, book a flight for that much needed getaway, BUT you have no assistant nor have you got time to look things up. Siri is a virtual personal assistant app that can do all this for you! The input device is your voice and operates the same way as Google Voice Search. The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store, but only works in the US at the moment.
The other day, I demonstrated it to a work mate. I asked for a dinner booking at a restaurant that serves duck in Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Siri came back telling me I need to book a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne and asked if I’d like to look at some flight schedules!! However, it didn’t tell me which restaurant it had in mind for me. But then again, Australia is not flushed with businesses with an online presence and APIs to go with it (API – application programming interface – this allows software applications to talk to each other). For a lay person, what Siri does is recognise your voice request and inputs those details into, for example, an airline booking webpage and then presents the results to you for your decision.
It’s a shame Australia is so far behind to make use of Siri.
Recently I was in the US on business and the trip coincided with the launch of Apple’s iPad. I decided to head down to the nearby Apple Store, approached one of the Apple Genius and asked if I could pick up a 16GB iPad. She said the 16GB and the 32GB iPad models were sold out in that store. I asked her to check the other stores in the Los Angeles area and they too were sold out of both models. I walked out with a 64GB iPad under my arm.
I sync’ed the iPad with my MacBook and transferred my powerpoint presentation to the iPad, edited and animated the slides, hooked the iPad up to a projector and walked through the presentation. It was so easy!! It was less hassle and in less time than firing up the MacBook and hooking it up to the project. As I was on my way to San Francisco on a Virgin America flight (you can connect to the internet on the flight!!! $14.95 for a 30 day pass), I went through the presentation once more, surfed the web, emailed work and friends, checked out FaceBook and LinkedIn, bought the rad Siri Personal Assistant app (will write about this on another blog) from the App Store on the iPad. Apart from presentations, I used Pages (word processor) and Numbers (spreadsheet) to finish off meeting notes and reviewed some financial data. All this was done, literally, at the touch of the screen. The UI was easy and intuitive – it took me less than 10 mins to read through the instructions and master all the finger gesture commands.
As I expected, the presentation went like a treat. Using the iPad allowed me to be more personal with the people I was meeting with – they sat next to me looking and pointing to charts and graphics immediately before us rather than at some projector screen 5 meters or so away. I now use my iPad as my notebook, taking meeting notes and saving it to my directory. Having experienced how suitable the iPad is for me, I can’t wait for the 3G version which would allow more mobility.
The management team at G Media are all keyed up at the moment as our fearless leader Garion Hall is about to unveil our revised and super charged Performance Review Policy. Garion has spent a billion hours, give or take, researching, measuring, benchmarking; you name it he’s done it and all in the name of accurately measuring and recognising G Median’s game-changing performance.
I had a sneak peak at it the other day it looks pretty amazing!! It made me think about my role as a manager. A manager’s most important and most difficult job is to manage people. You must lead, motivate, inspire, and encourage them. Sometimes you will have to hire, fire and discipline employees.
People don’t really work for companies; they work for managers. To the extent that you can be a good manager, you can keep employees, keep them happy, and reduce the costs associated with employee turnover. In the process, you should make your own job easier.
Employees are one of a company’s largest expenses, unlike other costs (buildings, machinery, technology, etc.) employees as assets are highly volatile. Managing performance is not always easy, as there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to managing people and their performance. So as a manager how do I ensure I am getting the best from each individual…?? Well I’m no leading authority but this is what I have learnt in practice, through observation but mostly reflection.. Lots of cringe worthy reflection!
Make sure your people have everything they need to do their job well.
By hell or high water, you have to get them what they need to do the job, and do it right. This includes:
Proper training
Proper tools
Properly defined position descriptions and KPI’s.
Well documented processes and procedures
Adequate and proper motivation
Trust in you as their manager (and yes, they absolutely need this in order to do the job well. It’s not optional.)
Appreciation/Morale
Get everything that impedes your people from doing their job out of the way.
This is often the most difficult for me. It’s not glamorous or fun work. Slogging through this stuff takes lots of time and energy. I know it leaves me drained, but, it needs to be done. What to look for when you are clearing a path:
Old processes and procedures that are no longer needed
Non-productive meetings
Work that is not related to the core mission of your team
Lack of communication.
Unrealistic expectations from customers, other management, or even the employees themselves.
Make sure your people are performing, and make sure they know you’re all over it…
Once you’ve got the first two sorted, it’s time for some accountability. The key here is defining “job well done” in a way that can be objectively measured and inspected. Your people should know:
What is being measured
Why it’s being measured
That you expect them to uphold a certain level of performance
You will be regularly inspecting for that level of performance
What steps you will take if that performance level is not met
What is offered if they exceed that performance level
Phew!! A lot to take in right..? Hang in there still a tiny bit more. Employees are responsible for their own performance within the team. As their manager, I am accountable to our (awesome) board of directors ensuring results in my department, concrete measurable results.
Everyone in the workplace has an important part to play in organisational performance. Good organisational performance is the result of high quality functioning by the individuals within it. Go Team!!
We’re about to dive into “First, break all the rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, G Media Bookclub’s first book. Traditionally, management crafts the ‘perfect’ mould for their ideal manager, recruit using this mould, lumps someone into it like play dough, then becomes frustrated when the manager’s magic wand does not yield the ultimate objective, whatever that may be – profitability, providing best service, technological advances and so on. The book questions the validity of doing so, by examining what makes employees tick.
Firstly, the authors distinguish between skills and knowledge, which can be taught and talents, an innate instinctive skill set that cannot be learned but will determine ultimate success or failure. The reason being that talents are ingrained in an individual, impulses they’ve grown up developing their entire lives. When applied in the business situations will, not only come naturally, but always garner the best results, because it is the person’s speciality. For example, this talent is easily recognisable in athletes, they’re at the top of their game because they are the best, due to their talent – they can run the fastest, hit the hardest, quickest reaction time and so on. Whilst most of us will concur that this makes logical sense, the same theory is lost on most in the business world.
Staff are hired based on their resume, a piece of paper that lists their skills and knowledge, gained from their educations, whether it be in schools or past work experience. While the ability to learn quickly is a talent, it’s the application of those skills learned that matters. It is HR’s responsibility to find that talent in staff, both existing and new, in order to foster business success. To do that, we need to sniff out talents at the interview stage by asking open ended questions, allowing the prospect to showcase their talents, which may or may not be suitable to the organisation.
We at G Media, have not veered too far from the traditional forms of recruitment thus have had varying degrees of success in hiring and retaining suitable staff.
As the Production Manager at G Media I spend most of my day working with young women, whether it is staff or models. As part of my induction I spent many weeks with Garion Hall discussing and learning about the many issues young women face in today’s society and how they take their toll on self confidence.
G Media takes its responsibility to women very seriously. We collaborate with our models and staff to create an environment which supports the development of individual self confidence so that they in turn can make good healthy decisions for themselves. Over the last 10 years Garion Hall, CEO, G Media, has worked extensively with social researchers, health workers and local women’s support groups to better understand what we can do every day at G Media to empower woman who value who they are, feel confident and believe in themselves.
We believe that once a woman recognises her-self worth and confirms that she is a marvelous achievement then her feelings and trust in her own self worth will soar. Confidence comes from a different place inside ourselves, we carry ourselves differently.
All of our experiences in life are opportunities to learn and connect more deeply with ourselves. The more we connect to ourselves, the more healing we do. When a situation makes us feel angry, sad, sick to our stomach, fearful or off centre in any way, our body expresses this discomfort by a physical contraction. This is a signal for us to reconnect with ourselves.
I love it when I see this reconnection in the young women we work with, and they love it too. When young women start believing in themselves and replacing negative thoughts with satisfaction and confidence, their whole life changes. They are no longer making decisions for the wrong reasons; the decisions they make are decisions that are good for them. I get to watch their appearance actually change too. They stand straighter, they walk with a sense of sureness, and they speak with confidence, because they are.
As a woman, there is nothing more inspiring to me than a young woman learning how to stand in her power or a woman standing strong in her power. I feel so lucky in my life to be able to witness these miraculous changes in the women I work with everyday. It reminds me how big love is.
I am lucky enough to work at G Media, a company filled with bright, tech savvy employees who do amazing things with all the latest and greatest technology and software, what else would you expect from a progressive media company whose fearless leader, Garion Hall, is always raving about some new ‘thingy’ he has discovered that is going to change the way we do business. Inspiring stuff! Which makes it difficult for me to admit that I have been harboring a deep dark secret; I love using typewriters. I know it’s not cool, but I do.
My love of using the typewriter began when I purchased my second-hand Olivetti manual typewriter. I would spend hours taking longhand notes for school assignments, and then typing them up. My typewriter always encouraged me to get the story right first time round. I would pound away at the keyboard, each letter typed followed by a resounding ‘click’. I was mesmerized by the brisk action with which it’s hammers sculpted its letters onto the paper and the reassuring ‘bing’ when I had arrived at my manually set margin, then I would reach for the jabby little carriage return lever and move to the next line. I loved the portability, the lack of electricity, of not being “plugged in” to the wall.
I never ever had an accident where I pressed a button and accidentally deleted my work, never to be seen again. And no-one ever tried to hack into my typewriter! It was very secure and I didn’t need to remember a password. Typewriters are much more straightforward to use than computers as they only have one function – typing, it is the simplicity that I long for sometimes.
I am feeling particularly nostalgic about my typewriter as this week I ‘lost’ a document I spent a significant amount of time working on and wanted to present to Garion. Needless to say I was devastated when I couldn’t find it. This would not have happened if I had typed it up on my trusty Olivetti, black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze. I know, this may sound like an impossibly Spartan ideal, where cut and paste is done with scissors and glue, and deleted words remain on the page as angry little blobs. But today I am left jaded by my smarty-pants computer.
Lead by Garion Hall, staff at G Media are always encouraged to research and develop, not only individually but for their team, company and industry alike, across all functions of the business. Thus the establishment of the G Media Bookclub, the rules of which are:
1. be armed and ready with a yellow highlighter
2. find the gold to report and discuss with the group
3. implement the lesson learned in our daily business decisions
Having completed almost 20 years of studying, it’s fair to say I’ve read about many management theories and “how to” guides, so I was rather dubious about rules number 2 and 3 above, when handed “First, break all the rules”. Luckily I had a 300 page guide on how to break all the rules in my lap.
Loathed to mark up a perfectly brand new book, this series of blogs will showcase the interesting bits I did find, somewhat to my surprise. Basically it’s a how to manage guide for managers. Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman looks at staff management from a different angle, backs it up with empirical research spanning over twenty five (that’s right 25!) years, completed by the Gallup Organisation. Their comprehensive research includes interviews with factory hands, receptionists to senior executives across thousands of companies spanning all industries.
And this is your Healing Brush and Content-Aware Scaling on steroids. Because every now and then something comes along in the post-production world that makes you lose your freaking mind. In a good way.
Your first question? How in Holy Hell (no, that is not an oxymoron) is this possible? How can an algorithm know how to do this without the aid of fairy dust, Rainman or Richard Branson? Well, a couple of fancy-pants Adobe researches have paired up with a professor from Princeton and a PhD student to whip up a delicious algorithm called PatchMatch. Which, surprisingly, is not a board game for hip, iPhone-wielding quilt-sewing sugar-induced ADD twenty-somethings. It’s actually a “Randomised Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing” or “Algorithm to put half the world’s photographers out of business and the other half into lazy, jaded and slightly over-caffeinated Photoshop monkeys”. But AWESOME monkeys, so it’s OK! Yes!
So when will we expect to see this feature in Photoshop? Adobe Creative Suite 5 will, according to Adobe, hit the stores on April 12 2010. Which coincidentally is the date we plan for CEO Garion Hall to order it for us, thanks! Nevertheless, CS5 is expected to include a number of advanced technologies, like three dimensional brushes and warping tools. It also is expected to bring more aggressive use of the GPU, including improved utilization of the CUDA GPU computing technology found on NVIDIA graphics cards.
OK, so we wouldn’t know a randomised correspondence algorithm from a bottle of medium spiced salsa, but we’re already thinking of the many applications for the Content-Aware fill. Photobombers ruining our superb photographic technique, the occasional Facebook friend who never wants to be tagged and will therefore be content-awared out of the photo completely, the ugly power line obscuring our otherwise misleadingly romantic sunset photos, the unfortunately placed hand in group photos, the junk mail in our Inbox, some of your hair (when you need a haircut), the person in front of you at the cash register with too many groceries, Nickleback, your girlfriend with the weird fetish of dressing up like herself and pretending to be obnoxious, politicians, utility bills, Lady Gaga, cracks on the pavement you continually trip over no matter how many times you try to remember where they are, dirty clothes, the cast of every reality television show in existence, and pickles.
So apparently the interwebs can do wonderful things for your career. Not the kind where you tell everyone on Facebook – and inadvertantly your boss – how much stationary you stole on Friday, but the kind where you make a video of robots blowing up your city and posting it to YouTube so that Mandate Pictures can ask you to direct a 30-40 million film and give you 1 million real non-Monopoly dollars that did not come from drug lords in South America or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which is sort of the same thing really.
That’s what this guy did. Not the drug lords part, the part with robots and blowing stuff up.
So we thought, yeah, this is a cool video. The post production is a little rough, but he definitely has some skills and he knows how to use them. But then we wonder, well, there were no actors, there was no plot, no narrative. Just robots. And destruction. And robot destruction. How is he going to direct a 30 million dollar film? As it turns out, he won’t be writing his own script, but will be directing someone else’s. Either way, we hope he’s up for the challenge.
Yeah but, we hear you ask, do they actually go anywhere? Can these backyard directors actually succeed? The answer is yes. Sometimes yes. OK, occasionally yes. Although it usually helps if Peter Jackson happens upon a few shorts you’ve done in your spare time. And it usually helps if you use your own camcorder, shoot yourself playing the part of a robot, rotoscope, and then you have something like Tetra Vaal. Or a documentary about extraterrestrials marooned in Johannesburg, called Alive in Joburg. Adidas gives you a small budget to make a viral campaign about an artificial intelligence gone rogue that kinda sorta doesn’t really relate at all to shoes. Or yellow. But it’s called Yellow. Then you go ahead and make some freaking awesome shorts for Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game:
Peter Jackson asks you to direct the Halo movie. The studios pull out and the project falls through. So instead, you make a movie version of Alive in Joburg, using the same gritty style of cinematography with seamless CGI so that it becomes a critical award-winning success. This would be called District 9. Which you should know already because if you haven’t seen District 9 we don’t want to be friends with you.
Another newcomer to YouTube filmmaking: the guys behind What’s in the Box?, which went viral last year despite using ballerinas in soldier costumers (you’ll see what we mean if you watch it all the way through) and have since been approached by big wigs in Hollywood. Meanwhile, we here at G Media Post Production, are scratching our heads, possibly with our pants off (hey, it’s Friday), and wondering why we hadn’t thought of this. or why our CEO, Garion Hall, hasn’t thought of this. We’d like to think Garion will ask us to make a video that includes robots, pizza, sex and explosions and robots. Oh wait, that’s Transformers. OK, so robots, explosions and something resembling a plot. But when Peter Jackson comes knocking on our door we’d have to put our pants on. So maybe we’ll just stick to being awesome at what we do and leave the robots for Hollywood. Or Hollywood for the robots.
Chatroulette is a website that connects two random people for webcam chats. I checked it out. The Chatroulette dialogue and video box is very basic and no advertising banners (I’m sure that will change)! It opens in Firefox, Safari, but didn’t seem to work in Chrome. At the top, there are three buttons: next, report, pause and a cam radio check box. I haven’t used the report button… I can’t be bothered reporting anyone (you need a thick skin if you’re on Chatroulette) nor has there been any bug other than not working in Chrome. The next button is fun. Each click you are randomly connected to a stranger: no names, no id, no anything other than the video feed – anonymous.
Will Chatroulette be the next FaceBook? I don’t think so if it doesn’t clean it up. My experience has been mixed. Chatroulette has proved one thing for me: that women are more evolved than men. The anonymity which Chatroulette provides emboldens people to say and do things that run against normal perfunctory politeness between two strangers. In the majority of cases so far, I’ve seen too many men enjoying “self-love”! Women on the other hand, can carry on a conversation. Well, for at least 2 minutes. That’s a bonus – at least I’m not “nexted”. Being “nexted” means the stranger has clicked the next button to jump to another stranger, because he, she (or even it) hasn’t liked the sight of me (well, I am not the most interesting or attractive looking person in the room, so they can be forgiven if that’s people’s criteria)
It’s not clear what Chatroulette’s business model is at the moment, but it has a key ingredient that would make it a commercial success: eyeballs! I’m sure marketing and advertising would feature prominently down the track. There are people starting to market their own product now by crudely (but effectively for the moment) focusing a webcam on a slide, banner, etc. with their moniker. As a marketing tool, it would be difficult to pinpoint your target market because the audience is random and there no demographic information. The later is easy to solve; require people to register before being given access. But that lessens the fun!
Give it a go, but be warned! Having a thick skin is required!
