The 3D technology company I work for offline has several irons in the fire. Some new, some that seem to have been in the works forever. I’m not sure which are covered by NDAs, so I have to refrain from talking specifics about any of them, but two are nationally (maybe internationally) recognizable, and one is more regional in nature. Another involves a government project that may draw us together with a major training and development company.

In general, the market for 3D is hot just now, and what we can do is a step beyond what the public is rapidly growing used to seeing. It’s still very much of matter of our being ahead of the curve as far as presentation methods go, however, but that can change quickly with the right advances in display technology. We’re hoping to attend the 3D Gaming Summit in LA in April, although funding is not looking good for that at the moment. We’re hoping one of our projects falls into place soon, which would bring in the cash necessary to cover the 3D Gaming Summit and the 3D Entertainment Summit later this year.

On a closer-to-home note, the ridiculous snow we’ve had has managed to remove the gutters from both sides of my house, and may yet remove them from the garage as well. I’m not sure how ice damming occurs on an unattached unheated garage, but it did, and the gutters are probably going to pay the price. Well, along with my insurance company and my own checkbook…

So, projects I can’t talk about and gutter destruction. Do I write a great blog entry or what?

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Well, it turns out I did get to have a little road trip in September. Not quite the leisurely exercise in relaxation I might have hoped for, but it was definitely some serious road-time. How serious? Oh, two back-to-back 17 hour days of driving, one day with a mere 4 hours on the road, then a day of standing for 15 hours, and finally another pair of 17 hour driving days. I almost felt like I was back in college. When I didn’t know any better…

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I just read a tweet from Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) about a foodservice issue.

jeffjarvis Fucking Starbucks. What’s so hard about keeping a pot of coffee full in a COFFEE STORE? I had 2 min. to get a cup. They wasted my time. Grr

What’s hard about keeping the supply of ready-to-serve product full is the actions of the customers. Lots of things come into play here. First, Starbucks has developed the expectation that when you order coffee, you’ll get it right away. Not a bad expectation to build, but it does set you up for problems when you don’t meet that expectation. And you will fail to meet that expectation at some point.

In this case, all it would take is for one or more customers to buy more than what the system (designed to build those high expectations) could accommodate. One customer ordering ten coffees for the office when there is only enough for ten coffees brewed means the next customer or next few customers is going to have to wait. There isn’t much that can be done to avoid that. There is, however, much that can be done to address it when it does happen.

The situation should have been explained to Jeff. “I’m really sorry, but we just had someone come in and order a dozen coffees to go, and it ran us out. We’re brewing more right now, and it’ll be a few minutes before its ready.” That would probably have blunted Jeff’s initial frustration at Starbuck’s not meeting his expectations. Any questions Jeff may have asked at that point would have been an opportunity to tell the Starbucks story of fresh vs. stale coffee and maybe the suggestion of an alternative that could have been made ready quickly – at the same price. In any case, Jeff should have been given a card for a free coffee at a later date, as a gesture of contrition for not meeting the expectations that they’d created.

Whether Starbucks has a policy where any employee can do that kind of damage control, I don’t know. If they don’t, they should. They had no idea that Jeff would tweet about it to his 2665 twitter followers, but his greater reach into the public shouldn’t matter. No customer should walk out of any store or shop angry that the expectations the store or shop has built for themselves weren’t met. Meet the expectations and make sure you can cover those rare times when you don’t meet them or work to build new, lower expectations that you can meet.

Next week is SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics/animation show, in Los Angeles. It would have been a perfect place to do some networking in association with Micoy Omni-3D, the technology I blogged about earlier. Omni-3D is the kind of thing that isn’t easy to grasp for a lot of people unless they can actually experience it, and it’s probably a safe bet that a lot of folks at SIGGRAPH would have been able to not only grasp what Omni-3D is, but grab onto it and run.

It will soon be September and that’s the perfect time for vacation. Still good weather, but outside the normal vacation period and far less busy because of it. I just have a feeling that this will be another September without a roadtrip. It’d fit the Pattern of Threes…

If you like chocolate, go! Visit the Bake or Break blog, get the Chocolate Cobbler recipe, and make it tonight. Save room for it, because you will want a second helping. Or two.

I mentioned my ’service thing’ a couple days ago and said I’d post about it later. I guess it’s later…

I’ve been in the foodservice business for over 30 years now. I’m sure many of my high school and college classmates see me as an underachiever, because they see me working in a hot kitchen, serving a pretty basic menu of food, still in my hometown. Many of them hold high-level jobs in industry, government and academia. I’m glad for them. I hope they’re happy. I am, and I think it’s because I hold service as not only a valid career choice, but if done correctly, a noble one. That’s my goal. To do it correctly.

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” – Herman Melville

Service, to me, is about extending a helping hand. And in some way, you always get compensated for your service. Not always with money or stuff. Or with public recognition or acclaim. Or any of the myriad other rewards that drive people to do things for others. Sometimes, the compensation is internal – you know you’ve done a good thing and that made it worthwhile. For me, the drive is almost always internal. Sure, money and stuff is nice. (Public recognition and acclaim… meh.) But knowing that I’ve helped someone – that’s a payoff.

If Herman was right and we really are connected by invisible threads, helping someone radiates out from us and hopefully resonates, so that person helps another, and another, and before you know it, the whole world has been touched by the pyramid scheme of service. I’m sure there’s a spiritual lesson in there. Karma. Good Deeds. Whatever. But it seems simpler to me.

Doing good makes me feel good about myself. Easy to do, get rewarded almost right away, can be repeated as often as desired. What’s not to like?

Omni-3D can be tough to fully comprehend, much less embrace, but once you’ve seen how the content you’re watching can be outside the projection surface of the dome, on the projection surface, and within the dome, the potential for its use sparks the imagination. The number of possible applications of Omni-3D is huge – from pure entertainment to architectural walk-throughs to therapy for the mobility-impaired to first person shooter games to, well, let your creativity run wild.

The first open-to-the-public (as in people who aren’t investors, potential investors, or potential content producers) demo of Micoy Omni-3D will be at the International Planetarium Society Show in Chicago this weekend. The technology can utilize a full dome theater, and the future of planetariums may be in showing non-traditional content.

If you’re in the Chicago area this Saturday or Sunday, and would like to see what this is all about, please use the contact email address on the Micoy.com website to request a demo. You won’t be disappointed.

Image via Wikipedia

I continue to be amazed at how many people either don’t understand just what evolution is, or don’t communicate what it is very well at all. The recent news of a species of E. coli bacteria that now ‘eats’ citrate is a prime example. Here’s an excerpt from the linked article:

In nature, there have been a few reports of E. coli that can feed on citrate. But these oddballs all acquired a ring of DNA called a plasmid from some other species of bacteria. Lenski selected a strain of E. coli for his experiments that doesn’t have any plasmids, there were no other bacteria in the experiment, and the evolved bacteria remain plasmid-free. So the only explanation was that this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own.

The way that’s stated, “this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own,” it sounds as if the line of E. coli had taken some action to develop that ability. E. coli didn’t take any action beyond living, reproducing, and dying. The citrate-eating ability showed up in one flask of many after more than 33,000 generations. Somewhere along those many generations, a mutation that allowed the cell membranes of one E. coli bacterium to pass the larger citrate molecule through took place. That one bacterium passed that genetic trait on to at least some of its offspring, who passed it along to some of their offspring, and so on.

In a closed environment (a lab flask in this case), the population of E. coli reaches a certain point and then maxes out because the environment won’t support any more. But as more bacteria gained that citrate-eating trait, the environment could support a higher population. The mutant bacteria could utilize both the glucose that every E. coli bacterium could utilize and the citrate that only the mutant bacteria could. They were better equipped, because of a random mutation, to utilize the nutrients in the environment than the non-mutant E. coli were, so their numbers increased while the non-mutant population decreased from lack of suitable nutrients to sustain reproduction. The bacteria didn’t do anything to cause the new trait. They just capitalized on its presence by surviving and reproducing.

What isn’t said is that there were undoubtably many, many other mutations that occurred over the 33,000 generations. But they were mutations that didn’t provide any advantages over the normal genetic makeup of the bacteria. Those mutant bacteria didn’t have a survival edge over the non-mutant bacteria, so they lived and died like the non-mutant bacteria. Evolution is survival of the fittest, and only occurs when a mutation provides some kind of survival benefit in the environment where it occurs. Having cell membranes that allowed larger molecules to pass through was a survival benefit in that environment where citrate was apparently the only ‘large’ molecule to be found. Had some other ‘large’ molecule that was detrimental to the bacterium’s survival been present, the mutated bacterium would likely have failed to live long enough to pass that genetic trait along and the ability to eat citrate would have died along with it.

So, a change in environment can end the advantage a particular genetic trait gives to the organism that has it. The evolutionary process is tied to genetic traits that provide certain abilities in certain environments. Change the environment and the process is altered, sometimes to the detriment of the organism involved. How many species died during an ice age because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at colder temperatures? How many species died when the climate got warmer because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at hotter temperatures?

The evolutionary process is also tied to the number of mutations that occur, which is dependent on the number of offspring produced. Number of offspring increases in two ways. More generations of offspring and more offspring per generation. It may be that had the E. coli been bred in a larger environment, the number of generations it took for the citrate-eating genetic trait to occur might have been smaller (larger number of offspring per generation), because an equivalent number of offspring had been produced.

Evolution seems to be the province of the winners of the cosmic crapshoot of mutation. There are untold billions of mutations that did not provide any survival benefit in the environment where they occurred. Only the mutations that provided a survival benefit in some kind of genetic trait that was passed along to the next generation are part of what ends up being called the evolutionary process.

One can observe the changes wrought by mutation along the way, but only when the changed survive and reproduce better than the unchanged can one describe it as evolutionary. Evolution is not a play-by-play one can report as it goes along. It is history, observed in retrospect.

I followed a link from a @GuyKawasaki tweet today that took me to a demo page for a new web company called KickLight. They’ve got a way of integrating graphics with a videoplayer, so the graphic block below the video can be synced up with the video being played. It looks like it could be very useful for online presentations of various kinds – informational, training, sales, etc. I look forward to hearing more about KickLight. That was the learning part.

Sometimes, though, it’s not about learning something I didn’t know so much as having someone make me think. One of the four examples on the demo page was an excerpt from a Art of the Start presentation Guy did at some point in the past. In it, he talked about his stance that companies that focused on meaning were almost always more successful than those that focused on money. The core of a company, according to Guy, should be “making meaning” and that if a company does that, it will make money. Which I’ll translate into being successful, since Guy was addressing a group of entrepreneurs at the time. I hope he doesn’t mind.

We all have our own experiences that shape our perceptions of things. I’ve worked for Delphi Forums for, well, a while now, and I’ve seen the meaning being made in lots and lots of our forums. The support forums for medical conditions and diseases, for example, provide a lifeline for many of their members. I’ve had tears streaming down my cheeks more than once while reading member posts about the importance of a forum community to someone with a life-threatening or even life-ending illness. Online communities make huge and real differences in many people’s lives. The hosts of those communities and their staffs obviously make meaning with and for their communities. Because Delphi doesn’t provide any monetization for forum hosts, money can’t be the measure of a forum’s success. But all you have to do is read through some of the posts by a forum’s members to see success. True success.

I’m not high enough on the food chain at Delphi to know exactly what, if any, monetary success we’ve had. I have a sense that we’ve done okay. Well enough that the bills get paid, but probably not enough to do a lot of open development. (Meaning development that isn’t funded by one of the larger paying clients of the parent company…) But in terms of providing a service of value to our members, I think we may be among the most successful companies online. Sure, we have our stumbles from time to time, but we have lots and lots of communities that are an intrinsic and meaningful part of the lives of their members. It’s something that makes me proud of being associated with Delphi Forums, and fits rather neatly with my whole service thing. (I’ll blog about my service thing later.)

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not quite as clear on how “making meaning” applies to the business I’m part owner of. When we started the restaurant 29 years and 2 weeks ago, I don’t recall ‘changing the world’ as one of the guiding principles. We wanted to make a living – money. But maybe the uniqueness of the menu we chose, and the underlying philosophy of producing a high quality product at a fair price was an attempt at changing at least the local restaurant world. I’m not so sure we changed that world, but we’ve certainly provided an alternative that seems to satisfy the needs of a fair number of people. We know what a rarity it is to survive for almost 30 years in the independent restaurant business, let alone thrive for that long. We’ve served a lot of food to a lot of people over the years. Perhaps it was a different world we were changing…