My head is spinning from all the excitement in the DC technology community. Over 90 people at an event on widgets this week? WTF!? nextDC, Refresh DC, Social Media Club, DC Bloggers, NoVA Open Coffee, NetSquared, Tech Tuesday, Lunch 2.0 (fyi, this is a random selection, and probably not accurate or complete)…and those are just the ones that want to meet monthly. The only thing to be sure of from all this: there’s a lot of Type A geeks inside the Beltway. But how will all this evolve into something sustainable, vibrant, more diverse, and larger than the sum of a few energetic parts?

I’ve spent the last five years networking with people who think online communities were invented in the last five months. My clients are primarily MBA & lawyer types, and my friends are mostly save-the-world liberal arts people. But every day I’d go through the geeky & design-y podcasts and RSS feeds, dreaming about the west coast. So I thought of starting a technology group in DC because I knew there would be people with similar passions. I purchased the domain silicondc.com and did what any entrepreneur would do: market research. That’s what led me to the cacophony of DC technology groups above. Needless to say, DC no longer needs me to bring people together to talk tech.

What the latest round of DC technology needs is a vision. Continue reading…

Yesterday was DC’s first BarCamp, and I hope it can set the tone for what’s to come in the DC technology community. Unlike the more business-oriented groups like NVTC, GBTC, DC Tech, and MD Hi-Tech, this was by tech people and for tech people. There were noticeable lacks of business topics, VC & legal attendees, and explanations of acronyms. It was beautiful.

The conference was organized by a team of volunteers and paid for by numerous sponsors. Fleishman-Hillard Inc. was kind of enough to donate their office space. There were no set topics, but the 110 attendees presented on 27 hot issues (with varying degrees of preparation). The topics ranged from user experience to Second Life to Getting Things Done. But more important than the details of the content was the energy of the attendees.

Not since the heyday of Netpreneur have there been so many people in one DC room so excited about what’s happening online. This was evidenced by the high level of conversation, the community-willingness to share, and the pure geekery of the attendees (everywhere I turned were MacBooks, iPhones, live bloggers, and people uploading photos to Flickr).

I can’t thank the organizers (Justin Thorp, Jason Garber, M. Jackson Wilkinson, Rodney Degracia, Martin Ringlein, Peter Corbett, Nick O’Neill, and Justin Stockton) enough for the time they so graciously volunteered. Without question this and the upcoming DC Startup Weekend will lead to more technology businesses, higher quality applications being developed, and many new friendships.

You can read some other good conversation about BarCamp at Russell Heimlich’s blog, the Viget Blog, and many other sites. And you can find hundreds of pictures on flickr. See you all next year!

tag: BarCampDC

I have some dreams I’d like to pursue, and all of them depend on more mobility and fewer time on business minutiae. I’m already fairly mobile but there are some issues I’d have to address to be completely mobile. I pose them here as I imagine others will have similar hurdles…

When I say that I’m fairly mobile, I mean that:

• Our work product and project management are all accessible and managed via the internet
• Very rarely do my employees and I need to work in the same facility–office, home, or cafe all work fine (and we all have laptops)

However, there are still things that require physical presence, increased comfort levels with various remote technologies, or changes to our existing processes. In addition, there are things that I personally need to stop doing myself and find a reliable way to outsource. Here’s the list… Continue reading…

Rob Pegoraro wrote in today’s Post how Facebook is now becoming not only the home for personal interactions but business ones. He also raised an excellent point about how Facebook could theoretically allow us to divide which parts of our profile are exposed to our various contacts. While I think that might be one solution, it doesn’t truly address the issue, which is the ways in which our contacts from various settings are come together as we share more and varied information online.

While widespread social networking hadn’t gained steam when I was in school (P2P file-sharing was the big thing), after college I quickly jumped on the Friendster (now sinking) boat. And through inertia I eventually found myself on LinkedIn, Facebook, and (shiver) MySpace. It was easy when LinkedIn was the only business site, Facebook had nice privacy controls, and MySpace was the ugly step-child that you had to deal with because he worked the door. Now the lines have blurred.

For my friends that are reading this, you may find this a wake-up call. After all, it’s going to be a little while before the non-techies of the business-world really start using FaceBook–but it’s quite likely to happen. That means that all the photos, tags, notes, and bizarre status messages may be information you’ll have to second-guess before posting. Continue reading…

This post is part 2 of a series that began here. In the last article I discussed two Outlook techniques for assigning tasks to emails. Below I’ll discuss (some of) the approach I use for generally organizing my day as relates to Outlook.

My approach to personal information management comes from a few sources:

1. From Getting Things Done (GTD) I learned that you need to trust your productivity system to keep you in check, so that you don’t have to second-guess things (did I write back? don’t I have an appointment soon? etc.)
2. In The Four Hour Workweek (4HWW), Tim provided additional motivation that the world isn’t going to end if you delay responding to inputs, and that you should do everything in your power to batch your responsibilities (or better yet, outsource them, but that’s not for this post)
3. I like holding onto things long after I probably should, so I need some sort of super fast filing & retrieval system (while still keeping out of site the things that are no longer relevant)
4. I will not check many places to keep track of things, so I need everything organized in as few screens/programs as possible

Let’s start with the setup: In the morning my Microsoft Outlook is set to Work Offline; when I am online, all email notifications are disabled.

My portable device: I have a Motorola Q that synchronizes via ActiveSync. I can literally type an address into an appointment and by the time I’m in the car that address will be sync’d to my phone so I can enter it into the GPS. Reminders and everything else in Outlook (except notes) are also in live sync. No iPhone for me (yet).

The only way I can really think of to begin this is with the beginning. Continue reading…

(For Part 2 of this series, click here)

Given that I’m supposed to be an “efficiency trainer” and my platform is Microsoft Office, I run into a lot of people complaining about how difficult and counterintuitive Microsoft Outlook is. The Outlook as we know it has gone through six versions since Windows 95, and there have been a lot of productivity-enhancements . I don’t believe that one needs to use to-do list managers, web based calendars or external RSS readers to stay on top of their life. Not to say that they’re not all valuable in their own right, but if you’re already spending a lot of time in Outlook then it can be helpful to keep things in one place.

In the first segment of this Outlook series (this article), you’ll find two ways to get your time-consuming emails into your task list (one way for Outlook 2000-2007 and one for just Outlook 2007). These should help to get your Inbox to empty and allow you to perform your tasks when you need to–without having to stare at not-yet-relevant messages. In my next post I’ll mention how this relates to my personal application of The Four Hour Workweek‘s email management ideas.

The following two techniques are based on the assumption that something you can’t respond to now would be better filed away as a task to deal with later, when you’re reminded to perform it.

Continue reading…

March, 2008: While Google may have sent you here, I’d highly recommend reading the UPDATES HERE which incorporate Apple’s news. The article below relates to the present state of the iPhone, but the link will take you to the proposed changes that will be out this summer. I intend to follow and update you on all the Microsoft compatibility with iPhone issues. You can subscribe to this blog here by RSS or email, if you’d like, or check back periodically.

The iPhone does not support ActiveSync but it does handle Outlook data synchronization and Exchange email downloads. Since I was so curious about this topic (being a Smartphone user) I figured I’d post some of my research on what the “Exchange” account setup feature does provide on the iPhone, and what’s missing from a normal ActiveSync-enabled device.

Microsoft ActiveSync sychronizes one’s email, calendar, contacts, and tasks (not notes) from their Outlook account or Exchange mailbox store to a mobile device. With an Exchange server, this happens wirelessly. When one only has a POP/IMAP account, calendar, contacts, and tasks can only synchronize when connected via a cable (or through third party wireless synchronization software that is installed on one’s desktop). ActiveSync for Exchange also provides mobile device policies that enable Exchange administrators to configure phone password policies and remotely reset a phone’s data (such as if a phone is stolen or an employee terminated).

The iPhone has a screen for entering Exchange server settings, but as of now it only communicates via IMAP4 (see page 45 of the iPhone manual). Thus the email will stay wirelessly in-sync whenever email is pulled down from the Exchange server. This does not enable wireless synchronization of contacts, calendar, or tasks (well, there is no such thing as “Tasks” on the iPhone). It presents a few other problems: Continue reading…

Google Desktop Search is soon going to be a viable alternative to Windows Desktop Search in Windows Vista. This is seriously bad news for Microsoft, and this is largely the result of Google’s new lobbying efforts.

In today’s Washington Post, there are two articles about the new Google lobbying powerhouse here in DC. While Microsoft has had a strong policy influence in this city for the last few years, they’re continuing to suffer the consequences of a poor presence in the time leading up to their major federal antitrust case. Google recently delivered a striking blow by bringing attention to the officials tracking Microsoft’s antitrust compliance the “issues” with third-party desktop search applications in Windows Vista. As a result, yesterday Microsoft agreed to “allow users to select a default desktop search provider in the same way they choose a default Internet browser or media player” and “to provide technical information to other companies so thay can make their desktop program run more smoothly on Vista” (as paraphrased from a Microsoft executive in this article). These changes will come in the Vista Service Pack slated to be released (at least for testing) near the end of the calendar year.

For the last couple years I’ve been recommending Windows Desktop Search (WDS) over Google Desktop Search (GDS) simply because of the Vista and Office 2007 compatibility advantages. WDS is built into the Start Menu, every Windows Explorer window, and every Outlook folder (see below) so it just makes sense for people to get used to WDS in XP and then stick with it in Vista. Until now GDS in Vista has been slow and had poor OS integration. And trying to running both applications would be a huge system hog. Continue reading…

We should receive all forms of mail once per day.

Can you imagine a world where the mailman would show up a bunch of times each day?  Where weekend activities were interrupted by bills and packages at various times?

Sounds foreign…and kind of annoying.  But that’s email.  And that’s what’s wrong with it.
Continue reading…

I sometimes let Kathy Sierra’s writing accumulate in my blog-reader, because I don’t want to just skim her entries. She’s my favorite writer online, and a huge inspiration both to my work and what difference a passionate individual can make. Reading what she’s been through, the way she’s been abused (serious death and sexual threats) as a blogger and as a woman, is just plain awful. Hurtful. Disgusting. While nothing could justify such treatment, the fact that she’s been subjected to it is just unfathomable to me. She’s making such a difference for so many people, in a field that’s not even personal (people have opinions about usability…but it’s not personal). This just hurts.

I thank people like Kate who are continually bringing attention to the continual violence against women, time and again. For raising issues to the light that are often glanced past. This sort of news needs to be in the media. And it needs to change people’s behavior.

I applaud Scoble’s stance on this and hope others will protest as well. If I had a way to, I would. Reading the comments on Kathy’s page shows that people are listening today. I just hope this can make a lasting difference.