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| BlackBerry – The Insides Story of Research In Motion - Sunday, August 22, 2010
BlackBerry, The Inside Story of Research In Motion is the story of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie and the parts they played in turning the BlackBerry into a household name. The story begins with a background on Mike Lazaridis’ family, why they left Istanbul and how they ended up in Ontario. It describes Mike as a child, his interest in technology and how he and his friends were always working on numerous projects. We learn that Mike went to school at Waterloo, worked at different companies and finally ended up dropping out of University to start his own company. The company started making products for other companies but Mike couldn’t do it all on his own, he needed a strong business and finance person to help him out.
In comes Jim Balsillie. Jim grew up in Peterborough Ontario, went to Harvard, obtained his MBA and got a job at Sutherland-Schultz. This is where he met Mike Lazaridis. Once Sutherland-Schultz changes direction, Jim joins RIM, invests and becomes part owner.
I found the details of Mike and Jim’s early years to be quite interesting. We have all heard of and seen great leader / innovators in the media but we very rarely get to learn about where they came from and how to got to where they are now.
With Mike and Jim now working together we learn about the different products and technologies that RIM works on until they made the decision to drop all other products and focus on wireless. While working on the creation of their first wireless device, RIM employees started to see what we, as current day BlackBerry users have all experienced, they started taking the devices home so they could stay connected and work from home. Really? Who doesn’t have their BlackBerry with them 24x7? I’m so addicted to mine that I get Phantom Buzzes! But now we know that this addiction to always being “connected” started with the very first device that RIM created.
The device goes through numerous versions as Mike works with Intel to improve the it. I personal didn’t know that the early BlackBerry’s used a more power conscious version of the 386 processor and I think that Mike’s vision of using less power to create longer batter life was ingenious. He thought of doing all of this stuff in the years while everyone else was concerned with increasing performance and not caring about power usage. One of the slogans that Mike devised for the members of the Intel team was “Have you saved a milliwatt today?”
The chapter on “Going Public” explains the need to grow and to find new investors. After getting a couple of larger investors, it was time to work on the IPO. It’s just crazy to think about how cheap the initial IPO was versus what shares can be purchased for today… RIM was rapidly growing, more and more employees were becoming millionaires (at least on paper). Jim set out to get more Carriers as relationships with Bell South started to strain. Mike determines that if their device was really going to get adoption then they need to sell devices, they needed airtime, software and service. Mike strikes a deal with Rogers and RAM Mobile for unlimited airtime. This is when RIM decided to go it alone and try to do everything themselves.
We learned about some technical challenges that arose with the BlackBerry. It worked but you had two email addresses, one for your BlackBerry and one for your office. Mike solved this problem and the “BlackBerry was in sight at last”. But how did the BlackBerry come to be called the “BlackBerry”? It’s not a ground breaking as you make of thought but when you read of they came up with the name, it does make sense.
January 19, 1999 the BlackBerry was launched. To get user adoption, the sales team would give out devices to influential people in businesses to try and get them hooked. Once hooked others would want the devices too! RIM initially offered unlimited packages at $39.99 (what a deal that would be now!). A year later in the 2000’s RIM subscriber rate rose from 25,000 to 164,000, the stock price was as high as $260 to as low at $8.37 and back to somewhere the middle. BlackBerry’s were now used by politicians, sports teams and celebrities (Including Oprah).
The Perimeter Institute - did you ever wonder how it came to be? I have, and in chapter 11 we find out where the idea and its name came from. This chapter also went into listing all the other donations Mike, Jim and other RIM employees have made to our local community (Kitchener-Waterloo). Next we get some details on the infamous RIM vs NTP patent case. I remember this going on but I didn’t realize how long it went on for and what really happened. It was interesting to learn more about it.
After the whole NTP thing was sorted out, various models of Blackberry were released as they worked their way up to the new BlackBerry Pearl. Did you know that the “Total time taken to create a BlackBerry smartphone from scratch and have it packed ready for shipping is two hours”. Two hours? That’s crazy! So why does it take two week for me to get a new corporate device? The two hour timeline is for the Waterloo facility, which is now mainly used for working out new model development before outsourcing the majority of the production to third party vendors.
Early in the book it talked about how Mike’s childhood dream was to be an astronaut, he was offered a chance to work on developing parts for the space arm, which he turned down because he saw a brighter future in wireless, but near the end of the book after providing BlackBerry’s to NASA, Mike learned that his BlackBerry’s have even been used in Space aboard the International Space Station to communicate with Earth. If that’s not some form of realizing your dream then I don’t know what is!
So what did I think? I think it was a great book, a complete page turner! After finishing the book and reading about Mike and Jim’s influences on Waterloo Region, where I currently reside, it made me feel connected to the company, almost like an employee. I now think of RIM as much more than just one of the largest employers in the region and the dealer of my CrackBerry, I think of them as a member of the community and an inspiration for other Canadian companies (that doesn’t sound too cheesy does it?)
BlackBerry – The Insides Story of Research In Motion
Author: Rod McQueen
Publisher: Key Porter Books
ISBN: 9781552639405
Reviewed by: Terry Edwards, President WWITPRO
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| Book Review – The Fred Factor - Sunday, August 08, 2010
Author Mark Sanborn describes the story of his real life mail carrier who loves his job, always goes that extra mile and treats everyone like a close friend.
Why would anyone care about a mail carrier who loves his job? The Fred Factor will show you how bringing passion into your work life can turn the Ordinary into Extraordinary!
The first chapter explains all about Fred and what makes him special. The chapters after that break down all the different aspects of Fred and teach us things like “Becoming a Fred”, “How to Spot another Fred” and “Developing other Freds”.
In “Becoming a Fred” we learn that success is built on relationships and that strong relationships create loyalty and are the basis of partnerships and teamwork. One of the things that you can do to become a Fred is to be interested in other people and what they do. People are flattered when you express and interest in getting to know them better. How many times have you been at a party where you don’t know anyone but just by showing a little interest in the person next to you, you spawn a conversation that lasts the entire night?
“How to Spot another Fred” is a section that contains firsthand accounts of other peoples “Freds” and it asks the question “Do you know a Fred?” Well, I know a Fred. At my local gym there is always this one guy there, Andrew, who is personable and really knows his stuff. He is always introducing himself to other people and giving them tips on how to improve their workouts. I kind of think of him like Norm from Cheers (if you get the reference), everyone just seems to know him and really like him.
In “Developing other Freds”, Mark breaks down the name Fred into Find, Reward, Educate and Demonstrate, with each letter filling a chapter with information on these titles.
The end of the book explains to us where Fred is now and what he thought about being the star of Mark’s book.
This book was only about 100 pages long so it was a pretty quick read. It reminded me a lot of ‘The Secret’ but instead of using ‘The Laws of Attraction’ it’s about treating people how you want to be treated, leading by example and that it only takes one small act to make a big difference.
The book did make me want to show a little more passion and try a little harder but luckily for me, I’m already in a career that I love so it’s quite easy for me to follow the teaching in ‘The Fred Factor’. If I didn’t love what I do I think this book would motivate me to try and find aspects of my job that I do love. From there I could build on the items that I love and work towards being the best person who has ever done that job, regardless of what the job is.
The Fred Factor
Author: Mark Sanborn
Publisher: Currency Doubleday
ISBN: 0385513518
Reviewed by: Terry Edwards, President WWITPRO
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| Microsoft Broadcaster - Sunday, August 08, 2010
I finally had a chance to read through the “August Springboard Series Inside” from Microsoft and one of the things they had in it is “a great new tool for IT bloggers, user group leads, and IT departments called Microsoft Broadcaster. The tool provides an aggregated view of downloadable technical content that you can embed in your sites, blogs, and internal training portals for a richer content experience for your users. The Broadcaster gives the ability to download and embed content on your sites without sending traffic away from your site. You can customize by product, keyword, and format, and even set alerts for content updates”
Now I’m not so much of a blogger as much as a poster but I thought it could be interesting to see what this tool can do and if any of my other blogger friends would see value in it.
I clicked on the link and I was taken to an enrolment form – which was just updating my contact information and putting in some details about my Blog site (monthly traffic, monthly page views, production, technologies and target audience). After clicking ‘Apply’ my request was submitted, they are activating my account and I should return in 2-3 business days to login and activate my account.
Well, hopefully they send me an email in 2-3 business days or I will have forgotten all about this by then… If you have already registered and are using Microsoft Broadcaster, drop me a line and let me know what you think of it.
http://www.microsoftbroadcaster.com/en-us/Login/Index?ReturnUrl=/
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO
Terry @ wwitpro.com |
| July Pub Night - Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Since we previously haven’t done any events over the summer months (July and August) we decided that it might be nice to get together for a Pub Night. On Monday July 26th we a bunch of us ended up meeting in uptown Waterloo at the Heuther Hotel out on the Patio and let me tell you it was a very nice night for drinks on the patio!
Everyone starting filtering in around 7 or 7:30 and it gave everyone a chance to meet who they were sitting beside and start some really good conversations. Some of which were:
IE 8 versus Google Chrome – some of the difference, why some people use one over the other, whose using what browser for what type of browsing (some people keep to IE for banking but do everything else in Chrome or Firefox)
Richard Weait talked about Open Street Map, how it could be used by joggers, nature walkers (linking pictures to maps) and how a lot of major cities are starting to release their data in this format for better collaboration between different departments in the cities.
We talked about different projects that each people are working on, which included anything from BES upgrades to how to convince one members company to move to a SAN instead of just adding more disks to each server.
Overall the night was a success and we hope to do another one soon. Thanks again to everyone who attended.
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO |
| Book Review - Confessions of a Public Speaker - Tuesday, July 13, 2010
As I read more and more books related to public speaking, presentations and marketing, the authors all start to reference each others books. In this particular book, Scott Berkum makes several references to over 30 different books (he actually lists each book and how many times he’s referenced it, which I think is really neat), one of which is “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds, a book that I just finished reading a couple of months ago. Because Scott has read all of these books he doesn’t try to re-hash what they have already said, for example, instead of dedicating a chapter of his book to slide design Scott says “go and read ‘Presentation Zen’ or ‘Slide:ology’ as these two books will cover it in much better detail than I can”. It’s just a little thing but it really showed me that he was only going to focus on what he was an expert on.
This was a fairly quick read and I found the first half of the book to be very engaging and interesting. The first half of the book has chapters entitled “I can’t see you naked”, “$30,000 an hour”, “Don’t eat the microphone” and “How to work a tough room”. When I got to the second half of the book I sensed a bit of a tone change, the writing style seemed to change a little and some language started to come out (not that I care but I haven’t seen this in a business book before). This is when we got into chapters like “Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame”, “Confessions” and “You can’t do worse than this” which seemed like individual articles that were just shoved into this book.
Let start with the first part and why I liked it so much. It may have had to do with the fact that I read the first half of the book on my back deck, sun beating down on me with a cold drink in my hand or it could have been all the really interesting things Scott talked about. Scott started out by telling us what he was (a public speaker) and what he wasn’t (a writer), he dispelled a couple of speaking myths (Why you shouldn’t try to picture people naked) and why the most famous speakers weren’t necessarily the best public speakers. He writes about the things that you should do before a talk, tells why you have control of the room, how to calm down before your talk, to arrive early and most importantly to practice, practice and practice until you have it down cold!
After that bit of a warm up we got to an interesting chapter “$30,000 an hour”. Personally, when I give a presentation at work, for my user group or for another user group, I don’t get paid for it. I do it because I want to do it and my only real goal is to be flown down to some technical conference with all expenses paid. This chapter tells us how some people got started as professional public speakers, how much per talk Scott makes and why some people will never make the big bucks doing professional public talks. It does list what some very popular public speakers make per one-hour lecture and quite frankly it blew me away! (Just as a spoiler – Bill Clinton $150,000+ per one-hour lecture).
“How to work a tough room” was very enlightening as well. Scott lists a couple of different types of room styles, why they work, why they don’t and what you can do to make the best of the room that you have. I would have never picked an auditorium style room as they kind of intimidate me but after reading all the pro’s that these rooms have to offer I’m definitely going to try to get one for my next speaking engagement.
“Do not eat the microphone” was the required reading chapter at my Microsoft presentation seminar (It’s where they do the scouting for the speaker selection at TechDays and where I got this book in the first place). This chapter teaches you how to brainstorm your talk, thinking up all the different ideas and then how to refine and organize the list, as well as why you need to come up with answers to questions that may arise during the talk.
Now this brings us to the second half of the book. It seemed like he was trying to add filler at the end and these chapters were not structured like the first half of the book. Each one was setup differently. “Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame” was just a story of this first big TV break. In “Confessions” Scott has listed 17 paragraphs with a different “confession” in each, one where he admits that he hates attending lectures, one that says he gets paid whether or not his presentation is any good (makes sense but I never had thought about that before. I mean, I’ve had crappy speakers and I’ve never demanded my money back, I just avoid seeing that presenter speak again) and one that I didn’t like “No matter how much you hate or love this book, you’re unlikely to be a good public speaker”. Can we say “encouraging words”? (oh in case you haven’t worked with me before, that was sarcasm)
“Backstage notes” gave some good hints on things to do before the presentation and items that you should request if possible, including using your own laptop, having a remote control and the best way to fill the front rows if no one is sitting in them.
What I did find really funny was at the end of the book, (second or third last page) he made a little joke to do with a blank page. It was witty so I liked it.
In the end it was worth the read, I picked up a lot of good stuff that I’m going to put into practice and because Scott listed all of those references I now have a new “reading list”.
Confessions of a Public Speaker
Author: Scott Berkun
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 9780596801991
Reviewed by: Terry Edwards, President WWITPRO
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| June Event - Thursday, July 01, 2010
On Monday June 28th 2010, we meet for our June event. This month Fred Gregory from Greg-Tech Ltd, gave two presentations “Windows Home Server, Notes from the Field” with observations, tricks and trick followed by his second presentation on “Windows Foundation Server, What is (and isn't)”. After that we were suppose to have a presentation by Terry Edwards on the Windows Server 2008 R2 Recycle Bin but time didn’t allow for it so that presentation will be rescheduled for another date in the fall.
Now to tell you a little bit about Fred’s presentations. “Windows Home Server, Notes from the Field” built a little on Fred’s Windows Home Server presentation from last year. He recapped some information on what Windows Home Server is and what is does and then he gave specific real-life example on where and how he used Windows Home Server at the companies that he supports. The biggest thing that I took away from this presentation is that Windows Home Server comes on pre-built hardware and is an excellent choice for a Branch office File Server and Backup Server. The built-in backup feature along with the ease of installation makes it ideal for Branch office computer backups.
Windows Foundation Server, What is (and isn’t) was another interesting presentation. Not having any exposure to Windows Foundation Server myself I was interested to learn more about it. Windows Foundation Server is basically Windows Server 2008 but Fred listed a number of limitations about using it in a Domain and just in general. Because of it’s cost it make sense to use Windows Foundation Server in the applications that Fred pointed out but you’ll have to attend his presentation to find out what they are ;)
For closing announcements I let everyone know that I was looking for members who are interested in joining a Windows 7 Study group (it will be based on the Microsoft Exam 70-680). At this point I want to make sure that I have enough interested people and from there I will try to secure the study materials so if you are interested please let me know. Other Announcements, Microsoft TechDays 2010 will be coming to Toronto on Oct 27th and 28th check out this link for more details (http://www.techdays.ca/) and The KWLUG will be meeting on Monday July 5th 2010 and they will be talking about the “git revision control system” (http://www.kwlug.org/)
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO
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| May Event - Monday, May 31, 2010
Hi everyone and thanks for join us for our May Event. Jacqueline’s presentation gave us an overview of rapid e-Learning followed by a little bit more of a deep dive into what that really means as well as giving us some theory on how and why this would benefit us when we start to develop our own training materials. I had to leave about half way through the presentation but before that point Jacqueline went into details on how PowerPoint can be wrapped into commercial packages that are SCORM complaint (which means that the results cannot be alerted in any way and other stuff like that) and told us about all the different products that are available for creating/managing your companies e-learning.
While talking about all the e-learning stuff, Jacqueline was also able to show us some of the cool new features in PowerPoint 2010. Improved SharePoint integration (Versioning), preview tab to see presentation before opening them, how to organize project images into a photo album, improved transitions and animations, improved merge management and the best part about office 2010 is that the Office Globe is gone!!!
I’ll post the slides when they become available.
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO
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| April Event Review - Hacking Your Wireless Router - Monday, May 03, 2010
Have you ever thought that it would be cool if your Linksys router could do more than just route packets? What if I told you that it could be used as a bit torrent server, a small web server to take to a trade show, that you could add sensors to make it a local weather station or that you could Modify its power cable so that you can use it in your car? Well, if you attended Richard Weait’s WWITPRO presentation on “Hacking your Wireless Router” you would have seen how to do all of these things and many more!
Our event was held from 7 - 9pm on Monday April 26th at the new Trios location. Richard brought in a couple of different devices that had hardware and software mods. These devices showed us that it’s really just that easy to turn your old Linksys router into whatever you want it to be. The hardware mods were as simple as soldering some wires to as complex as having custom circuit boards manufactured and the software mod was so easy that it was completed in two steps.
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO |
| March Event Review - Thursday, April 01, 2010
On Monday March 29th 2010 Ed Senez and John White from Second Foundation were nice enough to host WWITPRO at their headquarters in Kitchener for their presentation on SharePoint 2010. Knowing that he was working with a technical crowd, Ed skipped over the normal marketing stuff, showed us a couple of quick slides and then jumped right into an on screen demo of SharePoint 2010 Beta. Ed and John took turns talking to various points while the other would show us how it worked on their dual projector display.
Similar to the last SharePoint presentation by Ed, we had a large number of members attend and we had a ton of questions. So much so that Ed and John had to cut the presentation short to meet our time requirements. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing as it means that we will just have to have them come back to do a Part 2 on SharePoint 2010 when it is officially released in the near future.
Some of the things that Ed covered include:
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Meta tagging data
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Globally controlling Meta tags
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Silverlight integration
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Resize Photos right in SharePoint
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The on screen editing has a lot more options available to it
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The on screen editor now uses the Office 2010 ribbon
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New features that work with Office 2010
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New online editors for Word and Excel means that you don’t even need it installed anymore (for some basic tasks)
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I will publish Ed’s slides as soon as he has a chance to modify them for general distribution.
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO |
| Book Review - Presentation Zen - Thursday, April 01, 2010
The Manager of the Service Desk at my office started giving some very visually rich presentations with almost no bullet points, minimum words and a ton of slides. This presentation style was very interesting and left me remembering a lot about the presentation because of all the images that he used. When I asked him about this new presentation style, he referred me to a book by Garr Reynolds called Presentation Zen.
Presentation Zen is only 230 pages long but over half the book is filled with great images that help you visually remember what Garr wrote about. Normally, for a book with only 115 pages of text (at best), I should have completed it in less than two days but I found myself only getting 15 minutes here and 20 minutes there over a period of about two weeks to read it. The funny part is that as I was writing this review, I remembered a vast majority of the key concepts from this book. I started by typing out the concepts and then I skimmed back through the book to see if I had missed anything. I was surprised to see that I had captured pretty much everything in my first attempt! How did I remember it all? I remembered it all because of the way the example slides were illustrated; they really stood out in my mind and helped me make the connection back to what Garr had been writing about.
Let’s get into the key concepts of this book. Today’s presentations are just plain bad! Everyone is using the same old slide decks, the slides themselves are crammed full with information and all the presenters do is just recite the slides bullet points back to you. That’s what’s wrong with presentations today, but how can we fix them? Presentation Zen starts off by telling us that there are really three parts to a presentation: the slides that the audience will see, the notes that you will see and the handouts that the audience will get. Avoid the “Slideument”, the slides are not the handout! Take the time to prepare a detailed hand out and keep your slides simple. The slides should not have to stand on their own; they should be a compliment to a great talk.
Start your presentation by planning out the entire story. One of the biggest problems people have is making their presentation fit into a side template. Break free from the template and use a white board or wall of sticky tabs to completely visualize your idea (plan it out in Analog) and don’t be forced into the slide template.
Pictures and media are going to be what makes your slides look great. Has anyone ever said “The way you left justified your bullet points was amazing!”? No, they haven’t and they never will but if you include a picture that relates to what you’re talking about, the audience will remember it. That’s why Garr thinks it’s so important for you to draw out what pictures you want for each slide and then search for those images instead of making an image you find fit your slide. I have mixed feelings about this point. I see how finding the picture I have in my mind will give me a really great slide but I also don’t want to spend days looking for that perfect picture.
Use high quality images. Crappy clip art isn’t memorable and with all of the free high quality images on the internet you really don’t have an excuse for using bad images. You will find that once you start using better quality images, it will really set your presentations apart from the next guy. Garr is a big fan of iStockPhotos.com but he does list a couple of other free sites where he gets his images from.
Keep it simple, you don’t have to jam everything into one slide; empty space is a good thing. Just like the Japanese washitsu rooms, sometimes less is more as it allows you to really appreciate those few items.
When placing items on your slides, direct the audiences eye with your images. What made me remember this concept was the example slides that Garr provided. The first slide had a number in the top left corner of the slide and picture of two people looking to the right. The people weren’t even looking at the number; they were looking away from it. In the next slide the image of the people was reversed and they were looking at that number in the top left corner. Now I could tell that number was important.
Garr calls them the Big Four but what are they? Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. I’ll just touch on these lightly; you’ll have to read the book for further details. Use contrast to point out a difference, repetition to give your slides a unified look, alignment so images on your slides don’t look like they were randomly placed and proximity to achieve a more organized look by moving things closer or farther from your audience.
The whole point of having a slide deck in your presentation is to have slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. When preparing your presentation you also need to be creative. Creativity may take time but would you rather save 10 - 15 hours of prep time and give an ok but forgettable presentation wasting the time of 100 people (100 hours wasted) or would you rather use that 10 – 15 hours making your presentation something that 100 people get value out of?
When thinking about your presentation as a whole and why you are even giving it in the first place you need to ask yourself two questions: What’s your point? And why does it matter? Keep these questions in mind and drop out all the other junk. There is nothing worse than sitting in a presentation where half of the material doesn’t apply to the presenter’s main topic. Another important point to keep in mind is if the audience could remember only one thing about your presentation, what do you want it to be? Concentrate on that point and keep it as the central theme of your talk.
So what did I think of the book? I thought it was a little preachy about using paper and pencil to map out all of your ideas before even opening a computer but I do see how it can be useful. I would just hate to do all of the re-work of writing concepts down on paper and then having to type it all out on my computer. The use of pictures and the example slides were great. Even weeks after reading the book I still remembered most of the concepts and I really agree with Garr’s thoughts on what makes a great presentation. This book is definitely a good buy and I’m sure my presentations are going to be much better once I start incorporating these concepts!
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO
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| What happened to the 70-640 exam and what is this 83-640 exam? - Monday, March 08, 2010
One of the guys from work went to book the 70-640 exam (MCTS: Windows Server 2008, Active Directory Configuration) on the Prometric Website but he couldn’t find it. The only similar looking exam was the 83-640 exam. He asked me what the difference was and when I looked it up on the Microsoft Website the only difference that I could see was that 83-640 was in English only and 70-640 supported multiple languages but I knew that couldn’t be the only difference.
After doing some digging I found out the following about the 83 series of exams:
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83 is the code for the new “lab-based exams” where 70 is for the traditional multiple choice / interactive item type exams and 77 is for Microsoft Certified Application Specialist simulation exams.
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83-640 will slowly replace the 70-640 exam but the content has not changed, only the format of how the questions are presented.
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The lab-based exam will still feature multiple choice questions as some are more suited for that format but everything else will be lab based.
When the guy from work takes the exam, I’ll hit him up for some details and let you know what he thought about it. And if he passed or not.
okay, I have an update. Click Here to read it in the IT Discussions Area
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO |
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