Blog

Every New Year brings potential for realizing fresh experiences and attaining goals for success above every year before.

Towards the end of 2011 we took some time away from finding new project partners to work on developing and launching a platform for Creatives to make their own websites called introduction.io as part of our incubated initiatives but as 2012 begins we're now actively seeking clients to work with on new projects.

Have you got an idea for a new project you'd like feedback on?  Need help rethinking your current online identity and web presence(s)?  Interested in bringing an offline community to the Web, or encouraging a current online community to be more participatory?  We can help out!

Lets discuss how we can work together to make this new year exciting and successful!  You can get in touch via our contact/RFP-submittal form, via telephone at 1.416.642-5469 or email: info@designguru.org

If you weren't able to attend last Friday's Drupal Business Summit in Toronto and missed my talk on Drupal in the Cloud, you can check out some notes I whipped into a microsite at: http://drupalinthecloud.designguru.org

The talk was brief and basically introduced trepidation developers have to working in the cloud, going on to relate our experience trying to get Drupal 7 to run on Microsoft's Azure platform - an experience which helped Microsoft develop a new method for getting Drupal into the cloud.

Mark Surman is in the business of connecting things: people, ideas, everything. A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on inventing new ways to promote openness and opportunity on the Internet.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet.

Mozilla is best known for their Firefox browser, but they also incubate other software projects, grants and engagement efforts such as Mozilla Drumbeat.

In this episode Design Guru Principal sits down with Mark to hear how he got involved with the Web and has worked to promote openness and inclusiveness before and during the past 2+ years he's been the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

LINKS:
designguru.tv
mozilla.org/​foundation
commonspace.wordpress.com

on Twitter:
twitter.com/​designguru_org
twitter.com/​msurman
twitter.com/​qasim

I will be speaking at 2pm with Mark Kuznicki from the Moment about how we worked with Microsoft's Azure platform for a digital solution to share 2011's GovCamp event with people around the world who couldn't attend the event in person.

* You can find out info about the event and register here:

http://drupalsummittoronto.drupalgardens.com

I caught a story last week which was overshadowed in the majority of tech news coverage by Steve Jobs' passing - a UK based company (Datawind) has achieved the lowest retail pricing to date (2999 INR = 62 CAD) on their Aakash tablet computer running Android 2.2 and is making the devices in Hydrabad India.  Like how the announcement of the One Laptop Per Child computer triggering demand for Netbooks a few years back, the release of this ultra-affordable tablet will have massive global repercussions across the digital hardware industry. Promoted in hand with IIT Rajasthan, Aakash has a social mission of enabling students and educators in India and the government is using the product to promote their 'Made in India' campaign to encourage the production and consumption of locally manufactured goods.

Asides from manufacturing and retail prices falling tremendously on tablets and handheld computers, I'm sure that as more portable online computers come to the hands of exponentially more people in Lesser Developed Countries, their productive use of the Internet is going to change international knowledge-sector/services industries.

This may sound like a grand statement but overall, the rate of economic shift away from MDCs will increase in-sync with means for self-education through devices like this and more accessible internet connectivity in countries where people have a craving for knowledge and true need to generate income. Additionally, entrepreneurship and trade have long been culturally understood as facets of life in many parts of the world outside of 'Western' MDCs - which will fuel technology based businesses seeking to operate on an international level. 

Amazing developments are occurring in LDCs these days - access to the Internet is at an all-time international high and its fascinating to watch the rate of adoption increase exponentially as more devices use the Net better and are available cheaply.  This past year alone the Arab Spring movements in the Middle East and Northern Africa have demonstrated that the barriers to entry for using web services like Twitter and Facebook are lowering and that there is massive potential for multi-lateral communication today in areas of the world considered 'remote' (from the Western World?) just a few years ago.

The video in this post is for a project at kbo.co.ke launched last week in Kenya at the GKenya2.0 event which looked at the the future of the country's digital marketing arena.  The 'Getting Kenyan Business Online' project is basically a tool akin to our own introduction.io service (albeit feature-bloated and more for creating a conventional full-fleshed website) and Google's plan is to leverage partnerships with people like Safaricom - the largest East African mobile provider, to kick start the web economy of Kenya - which is very interesting.

My own experience in Kenya with the Web goes back to 1995 when I was one of the first 1000 people in the country logging-on, and though hurdles such as power outages set-back the Net's overall adoption in the region through the 1990s and early 2000's, things are changing in Kenya very quickly - recently back-bone connectivity became possible through sub-marine connections to Asia and Europe and mobile operators have introduced affordable data rates whilst ensuring reliable network connectivity.

Last year I wrote a post about a competition Shopify was running to see how many people could start a new business selling through their service online, and who would do the best at it. 

This time round, there's more prizes totaling $500,000 in value and I can't wait to see what great innovation the competition spurns - last year it encouraged dodoCase to launch!

Check out all the info at shopify.com...

After years of pondering, months of planning and endless hours behind computers trying to make this happen, I'm glad to announce that our latest product, introduction.io is live!

What is it?

introduction.io makes is simple for anyone to have a website showcasing their creativity.

Our service lets you focus on presenting your creative work best – you don't have to worry about hosting, code, or anything complicated and we offer a suite of features which give you tons of flexibility.

The Back-Story

Being a creative individual usually involves an interest in different types of creative expression - for me personally this has meant starting a record label, whipping up interview videos with people I find interesting, constantly photographing and more.  For years I had been tiring of having all the media I create in various projects being stored all over the web and wanted a single place to showcase the best examples of it.

Towards 2010 I began working on this problem and in a couple of months I began seeing it as a platform for anyone to use - knowing that a ton of colleagues and friends would find having a site like mine useful.  Applying experience from client work involving bespoke media handling, intranets and project portfolio functionality, this Design Guru project has been in development full-swing for the past few months and we literally *just* went public!

What it Does

An Introduction is your own online portfolio website, comprising of Projects which contain images and video, located at your own custom URL!

There are many ways to create your portfolio online – from building your own website to signing up for any number of website creation tools. However, it can become time consuming and cumbersome to have to edit code and create an aesthetic reflective of the entire identity of your creative work. introduction.io reduces the stress involved in getting your portfolio online by taking all the hosting, code and design planning/implementation weight off your shoulders.

Try it out!

You can visit the site, choose a plan from http://www.introduction.io/pricing and sign up for free - all accounts come with a free trial month, so you won't be charged during your first month of use and can cancel whenever you'd like.

See an Example

Check out http://qasim.introduction.io to see a glimpse of what's possible - I'm still moving some media around and plan to make my Introduction a constant work-in-progress :)

Read through the main site at http://www.introduction.io and its support section for more information and please drop us an email to email@introduction.io if you have any questions or would like to say hello!

I'm sure you're going to have a ton of fun using the service and can't wait to see your Introduction! :)

Cheers,

Qasim - Principal at Design Guru

For some reason I just found myself on the main website for Internet Explorer and was shocked with how terrible its typography/spacing and overall product marketing was, then thought it might be interesting to take a glance at how Apple does things.

Funnily, even the URLS of the two websites is telling:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/internet-explorer/products/ie/home

http://www.apple.com/safari

This video is an info-graphic I just came across which was originally created by Patrick Clair for Austrailia's ABC1 - dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.

Its been nearly 1 year since the first discovery of the worm - next month I'll be posting more about it and how it has affected computing world-wide.