User-Centric, Technology that Really Works for You and Me

Imagine if your work life were like this:

• You are up to the activity.
• You are able to concentrate on the activity.
• The activity has clear goals.
• The activity has direct feedback.
• You feel that you control the activity.
• Our worries and concerns disappear.
• Our subjective experience of time is altered.
• The time you spend with your users has a more positive atmosphere.

More confident? Creative?

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22, is known for his well-documented observations, research, and personal observations on the concept of "Flow." According to him, there is common and universal agreement that when there isn't a high correlation between the challenge (the height of the mountain, depth of the dive) and the ability to meet that challenge, fun is something we're definitely not having.

Cool! I've always enjoyed wishing people a happy new year like this: may your new year be the perfect combination of joy and challenge. Maybe I should start saying "challenge and ability?"

Friday morning, some of the DIDX and Techistan team, as well as others in the IP communications and media industry who were attending PTC, will attend a bloggers' breakfast with the topic of discussion "User-Centric Technologies." We'll share more details next week.

Some web sites to check out on user-centric anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/post-agile-useability-process
http://webmonkeyswithlaserbeams.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/user-centric-development/ ***
http://www.usercentric.com/news/2009/01/21/whats-driving-mini-cooper-not-user-experience
http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2010/01/consumer-centric-communications.html
http://www.slideshare.net/missrogue/vrm-the-citizencentric-future-of-communications
http://auds.org/node/6

and of course, everything at http://www.usercentric.com/

(User Centric's growth has earned a spot on Inc. Magazine's Top 5000 fastest-growing firms for the last two years.)
... browse some of our team's other blogs at http://blogs.didx.net/ and http://blog.tmcnet.com/monetizing-ip-communications/. Find out how to get your telephone company to offer phone numbers from around the world. You're welcome to comment, contribute, and collaborate any time.

Televoce CEO on Social Networking at Bloggers' Breakfast

Today's blog is courtesy of Anne Tredway and Bryan Coburn.

Watch the video at http://www.viddler.com/explore/suzannebowen/videos/21/.

Ed Prentice of TeleVoce was one of the small group attending the DIDX Blogger Breakfast during ISPCON. He's focusing on social networking. He remembers Comdex where the hall was so noisy that you couldn't tell how bad the quality might have been during voip demos. He discusses what Skype has done for consumers and small businesses and the fact many don't admit to that fact.


We go on here to summarize this video. Please click and watch and pass on the great clip! ... The SIP community was thinking that Skype couldn't work because it wasn't SIP. But people don't care what a solution is made of. They care what it will do for them.

Ed states that he is learning much from the Facebook world and thrilled to see that Suzanne Bowen and the gang were hosting a bloggers' breakfast during ISPCON at the Il Fornaio. Ed says, "I'm a secret fan of yours. This is great."

(Aw, you have made Suzanne's day, Ed!)

The group asked Ed, "What had he noticed about social networking that most effectively helps you move your business forward?"

Answer: "This is a revolution... we started contemplating as far as all the communications expertise I have ... quit trying to force something into this world... first application we did on Facebook called Poke the Pope on Facebook. It's a tool to learn the system. What we haven't done yet is to figure out how you should take advantage of social networking? ... One of the things you have to do in the social networking world is how do you keep 'them' motivated? ... I found someone who is good at leveraging social networking."

Ed Prentice continues, "When you talk to people in causes (on Facebook), they don't understand the concept of capitalism. All they have is a tincup and they walk around holding their tincup."

This reminds us of the kids who sit in front of Wal-mart with a tincup stating they need funds to go to camp or be in some t-ball play-offs. Not a very good impression and there are better more effective ways of completing this task.

Bring in corporate sponsors instead of thinking how much money will we have left when we are done donating.

Matthew Hardeman asked if by causes, did Ed Prentice mean philanthropic? He mentions that Ed and other social networking entrepreneurs are giving companies and causes another great venue to publish their work.

Ed thinks that social networking is very game-centric. He remembers his meeting with Facebook developers where this fact hit home. Ed is an engineer product designer and finds games concept on Facebook stimulating. How do you make people want to invite others to play the game? Suzanne Bowen and Jeff Pulver were the two key people on Facebook that he sees using it effectively.

See the video recording Suzanne made of Jeff sharing his social networking vision on Youtube.

Thank you from Super Technologies, Inc. and DIDX to Matthew Hardiman of IPiFony, Ed Prentice of Televoce, and Bryan Coburn (the video recorder of this session) at the Bloggers' Breakfast during ISPCON.

Communications via Neural Interface

... Jacked in?