Long Time Passing
So its been almost year since I posted anything on this blog. I said at the time that I was heads down on a project and I have been and am and will be. It turns out that my model of generating and discussing ideas, building a knowledge base, and evaluating opportunities, all boiled down to stumbling across an idea I believed had potential and jumping in with both feet!
At this point I’ve been experimenting, designing, learning and coding (sometimes coding *then* learning), and endeavoring in a dozen dozen other ways to get TextFlows off the ground. It seems now though that in the lifecycle of this project its time for me to start putting some more effort in to outbound communication. I’m hoping to get back to it semi-regularly.
Here’s where we are in brief.
I met Dennis when he presented at the MIT Enterprise Forum last Summer (’07). Bruce Trvalik and I went together. Dennis presented his idea to the group. He stood in front of a projected Flash animation loop and talked. The animation showed moving text in different formats. Dennis’s thesis was that text as we know and use it was designed for the static medium of the printed page, but that with the advent and proliferation of active display screens in our lives we can leverage a new and more expressive means of communication - by allowing words to fade and move and interact with each other.
Most people at the meeting were intrigued, some were dismissive, I was sold. ( For the record Bruce was unimpressed…)
At the meeting I told Dennis that his plan to migrate an awk prototype to perl would be better handled in Ruby. We later exchanged emails, met and discussed. I decided that Dennis’s path in moving his idea forward would be very similar to any path I would need to take with any idea of mine. I’m interested in applications in the area of knowledge, information, online identity and task management built on social/collaborative/web-2.0 type infrastructures. Since we needed to learn the same things I agreed to sign on to help him put up a prototype Facebook app.
That was a year ago and the path has been longer and windier than I ever imagined. Dennis and I are now partners and co-founders of TextTelevision Inc. and I’m putting all my energies into making it successful.
More to come…