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For about a year now my company has been using a social networking tool called Yammer.  Yammer describes the service as “enterprise microblogging”, but it’s basically a secure, private Twitter that an organization can use internally.  Yammer’s home page currently claims 40,000 companies use the service.  Like Twitter, each user can build a short profile about themselves, then shoot out little messages to everyone in their network (e.g. your company) regarding what they are doing or thinking including the ability to attach a file to the message.  There’s a way to subdivide the Yammer network into smaller groups (e.g. a group for office A and another for office B) so folks with common interests can communicate without everyone getting potentially unwelcome information.  Messages can be generated and viewed using an Adobe AIR-based client, a Blackberry or iPhone app or through a web browser.  There are other features, but these are the big ticket items.  In generally, it’s a well designed service.

I use Twitter in my personal network and mostly I get random messages from friends about their children’s strange behavior, plans for the coming weekend, current weather and so forth.  My own messages almost always fall within this same garden variety.  If you look at typical Twitter traffic, it’s essentially electronic chit chat.  How is Yammer traffic different?  By and large it isn’t and that’s precisely its value.  In today’s modern business place where employees often work remotely, by choice or due to travel, the proverbial water cooler conversation has largely disappeared.  For some businesses in particular (such as consulting) or in segments of businesses (such as sales), employees can be especially isolated from one another.  Tools like Yammer provides a way of maintaining a personal connection between far flung team members.  And that connection isn’t always idle conversation or gossip.  Often times, great ideas are generated or big problems solved by the casual hallway meeting that is increasingly uncommon.  An unlike regular instant messaging, many people can listen in and join the conversation, just like that hallway meeting.

My experience with Yammer has also shown that it’s a useful tool for:

• disseminating information about what’s going on in the organization (“Hey! Didja hear we just won this deal with such and such new client?”),
• quickly reaching out with a question to many colleagues via a channel that’s not as busy as e-mail (and which is logged away for future reference by everyone in the company) and
• for simply sharing person tidbits.

It’s an impersonal way of making personal connections, if that makes sense.  There are people I only know on Yammer because they live in Seattle or some other city, but their personalities and interests show through across the Internet based on the comments they make and the way they make them.  It’s a little weird, but wonderful at the same time, because I’d not know them at all if it weren’t for my use of Yammer.

So, I like Yammer, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer that much of the basic functionality (if not all) could be recreated using direct competitor Present.ly, DIY social networking offerings such as Ning (which is more than messaging), the ageless Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or even Twitter (one can have a private account, you know).  You can even make your own with open source package StatusNet.  There are many options.  So it’s not so much the tool I like, but the idea.  I’m enamored with this type of communication capability, regardless of how you achieve it.  If you work in an organization where face-time is ever decreasing, you might want to strongly consider rolling-out a capability like this.

Want more?  Here’s a nice compilation of similar services from Mike Brevoort.

On the evening of Saturday 19.Sep.09, Julie and I made our first trip to Red Rocks Amphitheater to take in the Jason Mraz show.  We’ve lived in Colorado for 11 years, yet we’d never been to this world renowned venue.  Shame on us… it’s truly one of the coolest, most spectacular gathering places in the world.  More on that later.

Julie had bought the tickets off Craiglist for this sold-out show as a wedding anniversary gift for the pair of us.  At the time, I wondered: what the hell is she thinking?  They were expensive and my perception of Mraz was one of teenie bopper, highly produced, pop schlock (i.e. not really my thing).  The guy owns the record for most weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 for the single “I’m Yours“.  If that isn’t an indictment, what is?  I began to wonder if I knew what I was talking about when I offered a Facebook update about my concert plans the morning of the show and promptly received some very positive responses from a number of unexpected sources.

Turns out, I was indeed wrong.  Mraz is a true talent.  I really enjoyed the show from the introductions by MC Billy “Bushwalla” Galewood through Somali / Canadian opening act K’Naan and on into the main event.  Mraz had a horn section, keyboards and a couple different percussionists in addition to a three man guitar section which includes himself.  Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the set that evening was pretty heavy in tunes from his current CD (I had listened to “We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things” only once before going to the show).  But he mixed in some other stuff including a cool version of the Seals & Croft song “Summer Breeze” (I say cool because the original was pretty… umm… uncool).  Mraz kept the chit-chat with the crowd to a minimum and instead he and the band focused on cranking out great music.  I was thoroughly impressed and so was Julie.  It is supremely unusual for us to like the same sort of music. After all these years together, could it be we’re starting to rub-off on one another to create some sort of bilateral, mutually moderating influence?  Or something like that.

Julie sucking down a Starbucks & me grinning painfully

Maybe some of it was the location.  Red Rocks is really a special place.  From the natural surroundings to the great acoustics and the amazing views looking up at about 9,000 people from our great seats in the 20^th row. All of it was memorable and worth the expense and hassle of a live concert.  For years, I had been to very few shows and those I had attended were for smaller acts in smaller venues.  I’d grown tired of the traffic, the drunk kids and poor sound quality.  If I wanted the sound of live music, I’d buy a live recorded CD and skip the rest.  Getting old, I suppose, but I feel much the same way about live sports.  However, I will absolutely go to another show at Red Rocks and it certainly won’t take a decade for it to happen.

But, as tempting as it may seem, I would not take a kid to Red Rocks for their first (or even 10^th) live concert.  Not that they wouldn’t enjoy it.  No, I’d avoid it because the kid would be ruined for life when it comes to venues.  I’d grown up catching shows in sterile, boring places like the Bismarck Civic Center, the Bison Sports Arena on NDSU’s campus and the long departed Metropolitan Sports Center in Bloomington, MN.  Red Rocks is spectacular and nothing short of a classic, mega arena (i.e. pro football stadium) could ever eclipse a show at Red Rocks.  And even then it might not beat Red Rocks.

It’s been a while since I wrote about a web service or product, so I thought I’d take a moment to put something out there about Trillian Astra.  Astra is the latest incarnation of a multi-protocol instant messenger (IM) client from Cerulean Studios.  I started using the original Trillian client several years ago when I got tired of managing multiple IM clients to connect with AIM, Y! Messenger, MSN Messenger (now Live Messenger) and private IRC chat rooms.  I discovered Trillian 3.1 and was immediately smitten by its ability to work with all these services while consuming as much computing resource as just a single client.  I was so impressed that I eventually paid to upgrade to the Trillian Pro version.  While there were a few additional features in Pro, I can’t remember what they were (integration with Google Talk?).  I upgraded to Pro because Cerulean Studios earned their $25 (and then some) for creating such a great product.

Fast forward to the fall of 2007 when Trillian began Alpha testing for its new Astra platform.  I immediately signed up to help test and I haven’t looked back.  While Astra has added additional plug-ins for newer social network services such as Facebook and Twitter (you can see FB status updates and Tweets as they are generated by your friends), the big feature is a browser-based client in addition to the locally installed client.  While most of the services already offer this to their users, it was a big advancement for Cerulean Studios to offer such a “works wherever you can get an Internet connection” type solution.  The browser client looks very much like the local client and their servers hold copies of your connections, buddy lists and so forth so you can IM on the go, even if you’re on another person’s PC.  Very handy.

I highly recommend Trillian and if you use more than one IM service, give it a shot as I think it’s the best solution amongst its group of competitors.

Earlier this summer (Sun 21.Jun.09 to be exact) I found myself soaking up some rays and watching rugby at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City, CO.  The Churchill Cup had come to town and how could I miss a triple header finals day? Long time readers of OpenKimono will recall I’ve written about rugby in the past and that I’m a big fan of the game.

Dave at Dick's

Rugby still doesn’t gather the interest in the US it should: my buddy Todd and I were able to walk up to the ticket counter and snare a pair of seats about 15 rows up from the pitch at midfield.  $40 apiece.  Inside, it was evident a sell-out of this relatively small 18,000 seat stadium wasn’t going to happen that day even though the matches featured:

• Canada vs. Argentina Jaguars A (a regular, national team against an “alternate”, development team)
• England Saxons vs. Ireland A (both of these are the “alternate”, development teams)
• USA Eagles vs. Georgia (both of these were their regular, national teams)

Although none of the Tri Nations big boys from the southern hemisphere (AUS, NZL, RSA) or the Six Nations national sides from Europe (ENG, FRA, IRE, ITA, SCO, WAL) participated, it was still international rugby and far better than I’d ever seen in person.

The CAN / ARG match was fast paced and chippy.  The Argentine side didn’t look all that big (I saw them up close after the match), but they were all fast and kicked with precision.  I suppose this is where all the soccer players that get too many red cards end up.  They pulled away in the second half and won by a couple tries.

The ENG / IRE match was just plain brutal.  I don’t think those guys like each other much, although I imagine a lot of the players are teammates on professional club sides in the UK.  It was pretty even the first half, but in the second, the Irish rolled and practically scored at will.  This doesn’t bode well for England’s future in the bigger competitions.

By the time the USA / GEO match was finally ready to go, we’d had enough.  Sun burned and nauseous from beer and nachos, we packed it in and skipped the last match which I found out later USA had taken with ease.  The USA is coming on as a Sevens power, but still struggles to put forth a solid full side, thus the 13-31 score really speaks to how far Georgia needs to come to compete on the world stage.  Still, as of this moment, they sit above the USA in the IRB World Rankings.  Go figure.

Soooo…. what’s the point of this post?  Could one not gather this same info from the good folks at Scrum.com?  Surely.  But you’d miss my little editorial about how the American rugby community, while small, is enthusiastic.  We sat next to a fellow that was about my age and his father.  After a bit of small talk, it was evident both of them had played in their younger years and the game was a common thread between them.  They were having a great time, talking trash, talking strategy.  Pretty cool to see that in this country.  Later, as I was walking the pavilion to get an adult beverage, I was flagged down by a South African guy.  He spotted me in my Springboks jersey and had assumed I was an import like himself.  We chatted for a while, talking a bit about South Africa and rugby in general.  It was evident he was pleased to find a fan of his national team half a world from home.  And I enjoyed reconnecting with a sports culture that draws out national pride unlike anything in the USA aside from the minority of soccer fans in the country cheering for our side to qualify for World Cup 2010.

I guess that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to rugby 15 years ago, and soccer more recently, because it’s a world game unlike American football.  In most of the English speaking world, you can find someone able to have a beer and talk about rugby.  That’s very appealing to me as I truly enjoy being part of the larger world.

My. Time. Flies. How is it I haven’t found time to post anything since February? I’ve been busy, but not that bad. Let me get to work on that.

Late last year, Diageo announced plans to build a bio-energy power plant hard by Scotland’s Firth of Forth in Fife (say that five times fast).  The plant will be fueled by the organic waste yielded by Diageo’s Cameron Bridge distillery and should supply the supermajority of the steam and electrical power needed to operate the plant.  This is practically perpetual motion (not really, but fun to say).  Diageo produces a dizzying array of “adult beverages” including 46 different blended and single malt whiskies; Guinness, Red Stripe and Windhoek (my favorite Namibian lager) beers; Dom Pérignon; Gilbey’s, Gordon’s and Tanqueray Gins; Captain Morgan Rum; Romana Sambuca; Smirnoff vodkas; José Cuervo tequilas and all kinds of other good stuff to drink. Clearly, with all this boozing, these guys produce a lot of waste that could be converted to energy and it will be interesting to see if this first Scottish experiment spreads across their empire.

Today, an outfit called E-Fuel announced a deal with my favorite pale ale producer, Sierra Nevada Brewing, to install a bunch of their EFuel100 MicroFueler machines in SNB’s Chico, CA brewery (the location where I consumed first glass of their legendary Big Foot Ale).  The machines will be fed all the dead yeast and other gunk found at the bottom of the fermentation tanks after each batch of beer is drained off to be bottled and in turn the MicroFueler’s will make ethanol out of that waste.  Fill a MicroFueler with 200 gallons of goop and get about 35 gallons of ethanol a week later.  The machines do require 110V / 20A power supply and water to produce the ethanol and CO2, so it would be interesting to understand their true efficiency.  Brewer’s yeast isn’t just for breakfast anymore, I guess.  Not sure what SNB is going to do with all the ethanol they make, but it would be cool to roll into the pub attached to the brewery with your 64 oz beer growler and get a little ethanol to go.  It seems E-Fuel will sell you(!) one of these machines for about $10k ($7k after various federal tax credits) and their website promotes the idea of just pumping the ethanol right into your vehicle’s gas tank.  Unless you have an E85 flex fuel vehicle, not sure it would be a good idea to try to mix in ethanol on your own, but it’s a cool idea to have one of these sitting next to the house.  Although they are bright green and I’m not sure my HOA would go for it.

So we’ve pretty much covered green ways to deal with the production waste of two of my favorite things, whiskie and beer.  If only there was something for coffee.  Besides composting.  Or Java Logs (who has a real fireplace these days?).  Enter the RITI printer.  While just a concept, this home printer uses the wet dregs from your morning brew as the “ink”.  Although you can’t plug it into a computer and you have to advance the paper / operate the print stylus by hand (a good notch below dot matrix print quality), it’s an intriguing idea.  Some day.

Maybe in the not so distant future, I’ll have an ethanol-powered electrical generator to run my power hungry home office (including a coffee grounds printer), while sipping on Diageo-powered Long Island Ice Tea.  Maybe the future isn’t so dark after all.  I guess it’s time to write Obama and ask him to toss a few bucks in to the next stimulus package for green drinks initiatives.  What could it hurt?

Long a fan of telling business “stories” with pictures, I’m always looking for new sources and references for ideas.  One dropped in my lap the other day when a Point B colleague mentioned A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods in a Yammer posting (more to come on Yammer in another post…).  Graeme’s gift prompted me to recollect and revisit Visual Complexity, another longtime favorite of mine.

Was ist das? Eintausend Wörter.

I’ve been exposed to mind mapping a couple times and it’s nothing new to many folks, but I personally haven’t done much with it. However, it’s picking up steam with many of my colleagues, so I’m giving the Mindjet application a shot as a way to learn about mind mapping.  In many respects, Mindjet is just a different way to collect and organize notes, which is something I do a lot regularly with MS OneNote.  But it’s also interesting in that it does a lot of things you might try to do graphically with MS Visio, but a bit easier.

So I guess it’s sort of a hybrid tool, but it’s really not the tool that interests me.  It’s the mind mapping techniques and other presentation formats like you see on the Periodic Table that I need to spend time learning how to use.  Really not sure where this post is going other than making plugs for PToV and Visual Complexity.  They’re just cool.

I’m a wee bit behind on my posts and can’t believe it’s taken me this long to publish this post which I started on 30.Nov.08.

Julie was due for an upgrade on her personal computing power. As I reached the checkout on Dell.com for her rather snazzy new Dell Studio 1537 (in lime green!), I was offered the opportunity to add a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 netbook to my order.  “How much you pay?”, I asked.  “$173.85 with shipping & handling”, sez Michael Dell and crew.  Sold!  Here’s what came in the cutest little box ever:

• Intel Atom N270 CPU (1.6GHz w/ 512k L2 cache)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 8.9″ Wide Screen WSVGA TL monitor
• 8GB Solid State Drive
• Ubuntu Linux

Make no mistake, this is not your son’s gaming power house PC.  But it runs Ubuntu real nice, goes for hours unplugged, comes with Star Office out-of-the-box and boots up in 42 sec.  Really.  It does.  Honest.  With WiFi, a 10/100 Ethernet NIC, 3 x USB ports and a 15-pin VGA video output, it’s got the basics covered. It is sort of hard for me to touch type on, so I pretty much peck type when I use it during the occassional Saturday morning outing to Starbucks.  My kids like to steal it and check on their Webkinz.  Other than that, I haven’t found too many uses for it.  I think I need to be more purposeful in taking it with me when I run random errands.  If you’ve got ideas on how to use it more, I’m all ears.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics. Enjoy!

Let’s see.  What happened this year?  Quite a bit actually.

According to my 2008 annual report from Dopplr, I traveled 189,838 km (52% of the distance to the moon) to achieve an average “personal velocity” of 21.8 km/hr over the year.  And that doesn’t count my Nike Training Log totals for 133 runs (572 mi over 81 hrs 31 min).  I spent many, many hours coaching soccer, playing soccer, watching soccer or talking about soccer, but I still love it.  I shut down my business and opened up a new career chapter.  Bought a house, sold a house, then refinanced a house.  Hosted a family reunion for 13 and a Thanksgiving dinner for 13.  Crested 500 business connections in LinkedIn and 170 friends in Facebook.  Watched my investment portfolio crater, then shifted gears to take advantage of the market opportunity.  Grew my MP3 collection to more than 4,300 tracks (with many, many more CDs yet to rip) and converted 722 35mm slides to digital images.  I shoveled, mowed, mulched, weed whacked and leaf blowed a whole bunch.  Posted a rather lame 27 times on this blog.  Gotta do better than every other week in 2009, but not exactly off to a blazing start, am I?  I did fire up rockymtnfuller.com, so that has to count for something.

Anyway, a busy year with another on the way.

Now, I leave you with this: JibJab’s usual irreverent compilation of recent events encapsulated in their short film entitled What a @#$% Year! 2008.