Chris Ronan

…And we landed at the Hickory Street Annex. We love it here. From the time I first checked out the Annex it was love at first sight. A little community of designers, photographers, architects, and more. There’s even a really awesome space (6,500 sq. ft.) that is dedicated to events and receptions that lights up the weekends. The owner even owns a landscaping company so the grounds are perfectly manicured all the time. What’s more, there’s a really cool volleyball court right here in on our little campus.

We’re learning of the new and exciting places to eat and having fun rating our new favorite restaurants (finding new fun with Urban Spoon). And, to my surprise, there’s more in Deep Ellum than I might have originally thought. Lot’s of great dining there!

One of my biggest concerns is that it would be harder to locate for our clients, partners, and general guests. So far, everyone has been able to make their visit to our new home without needing a special GPS. It’s really easy to get here.

The bottom line is that it’s a great community space we’ve been able to customize to fit our needs. It’s very open and we have lots of special little nooks for getting work done in creative ways. We actually have two spaces over here (with two addresses). The owner was gracious enough to let us join the spaces and it makes for a really great and creative environment. Inside, we have two mezzanine levels; one where we will have offices and the other (yet to be determined) will probably be a decompression chamber, of sorts.

It’s been easily 15 years, but in a previous life I used to live very close to this location in a studio loft. It was pretty raw at the time. But, we had lots of neighbors who were some of the most brilliant and creative people I’ve ever met…and in many ways they influenced me to pursue a career in the creative arena. So, for me, this is a lot like coming home. In speaking for the rest of the crew, we’re smitten.

So, I asked about an avatar for my @cronan twitter page and Robbie gave me that plus some extra. I’m pretty stoked about this, even though it’s just a purdy backdrop for my twitter page… Thought I’d share for Robbie since I’ve only been trying to get him to blog for over a year now!

flickr now has a method for twittering your photos: http://bit.ly/eclOU - per @problogger

This morning we were with a client reviewing competitor websites and for a few minutes the interweb slowed down to a painful crawl. Cutting off the internet today is like cutting off our oxygen. Then, Eric sent me this video from Conan last night and it was just hilarious and so very true. Thought I’d repost.

Jeff Nash and his team run a really stellar operation (Advanced Motorsports) and do a fantastic job of building on the Ducati brand experience. Owning a Ducati is about so much more than just the decision making process and leading up to the purchase. The owning experience really only just begins when you roll out of the shop on your new ride. It’s about learning, learning, and more learning… which ultimately lead to a deep appreciation of the art, performance, and the story of the brand. In this video we shot of Jeff, you can get a sense his passion for the sport and for the brand. He’s going to be a great evangelist for the Texas Ducati Owners Club.

Ever had an AMA Pro Thunder Champion work on your bike? I have, and the result is … magic.

It’s hard sometimes to think about Mother’s Day and not feel a little bit guilty. To give context, the following memories may apply [insert your memory here]:

• Making mom really upset because you washed a load of YOUR jeans with her favorite white sweater
• Taking the television completely apart and then having a box of “spare parts” when putting back together
• Tracking black tar across brand new carpet
• Stepping on the end of a shovel when little brother is grabbing for handle…thus smashing his face resulting in trip to ER
• Coloring a surprise mural on an entire classroom wall for teacher (resulting in difficult call to Mom)
• Blaming smaller sibling for the hundreds of terrible things you did

These are just a small sampling of reasons that Mother’s Day seems like it should be a day of apology. However, these reasons make us glad to still be alive because of the amazing patience and steel nerve our Mothers have (and thanks to my Mother for not giving me back!). They brought us into this world and then tolerated our antics for at least 18 more years to follow.

Fast forward several more years and our Moms are still as amazing to us as when we were little. Whether they are just there to listen or to spoil our children, they are so incredibly amazing. They have this power over us that’s hard to explain…. for me it’s summarized in how my heart rate increases when calling her to tell her about winning a new client, or riding my bicycle faster than the month before, or something cool my son or daughter did.

You Moms out there are super human. They should make movies about you and call it the “X-Moms” — with super cool mutant powers. We put you through your paces and you still love us. Then, even better, you offer your priceless wisdom that smacks us in the forehead when confronted with right or wrong choices every day.

To our Moms, from all of us. We love you. Happy Mother’s Day!

Tonight I was cruising through my trusty google feed reader and came across this post on setting up your google profile. It’s really easy and quick to do. You can provide either just enough information or you can provide all kinds of ways for people to find and contact you. For me, I simply gave enough of my online sources (such as my twitter account: @cronan) to allow people to find and connect without giving away my phone numbers to the WWW. You can also use a third party service to verify your identity.

It’s not something that I might have done except that recently I have been connecting with some old friends on facebook. Some of my close pals seem to be more difficult to find. My decision to activate my profile was made once I saw there was another Chris Ronan already there. Don’t know who the imposter is, but I had to throw my profile in the ring too.

Heck yeah, sometimes we’re just not in the mood…and that’s OK. A busy day for most can render Twitter a complete distraction. At times I personally push far away but eventually return.

Saw this article today called “Twitter Quitters Just Don’t Get It.” This discusses how 60% of twitter’ers are dropping it after the first month. While Twitter may not be for everyone, it is a great way to get connected and grab information, in short form, quickly and easily. However, the act of posting twitter messages is just something that may require time to develop your voice. That is something that may come from quitting, coming back, quitting again, and coming back again… And repeat a few times more.

I’m a Twitter’er and a certified Twitter Quitter. To date, I’ve quit Twitter about 137 times. And while I enjoyed the article mentioned in this post, the name does not quite fit with how this nice article flows. This article mentions, “Follow people. A lot of people.” Personally, I totally disagree. It’s been my observations both personally and in advising people to follow LESS people. Especially in the beginning. Spend a few minutes hitting the follow button on just a few who you find to be extremely interesting. 90% of their posts should appeal to you. The last thing you need in the beginning to to get a bunch of stuff streaming across your screen that is meaningless to you. Choose wisely and make sure that each post inspires or enlightens you in some way. Then, as you want more, go get more.

In summary, here are a few thoughts that might help those who are just jumping in. Maybe in some small way this will assist your beginning experience and thus reduce the “Quitter” quotient. From the biggest Twitter Quitter in the world (@cronan) these are my top five (IMHO) suggestions for beginners.  Hope this makes your twittering enlightening and more fun, rather than hard labor:

• Follow fewer, better: Find a few of your closest friends, people you really look up to or respect. Follow them first.
• Be entertained: OK, so there are some celebs out there who are fairly entertaining and some on this list might be appealing to you. You might learn something from people with huge followings…and be entertained in the process.
• Find the right (desktop) tool: If you’re a mac, try Tweetie. If you’re a PC, try Twirl or TweetDeck.
• Beware the “Device Updates:” You’ll figure that out eventually. But in the beginning it’s just more noise. And, in today’s environment you don’t need distraction. Using the right tool will be a good start. Although there are a few good tools for your handheld device that are far better for the beginner than the SMS messaging utilized in the “Device Updates.” Until you’re feel’in it, leave the “Device Updates” off.
• Un-follow Fast: If someone you are following is not interesting to you, un-follow fast. There’s plenty that will be great for you to follow.

May the Twitter forces be with you. It’s easy and you’ll pick it up fast, especially if you’re opening impression is strong.

At least for the time being, we’re using Google Apps. It’s easy, cheap, and so far has been reliable (we’ve not been affected by some of the outage reports lately). Having every to do list manager known to man, I’ve settled into the Google To Do list app, otherwise known as “Tasks.” It’s just a list. You can add stuff with simple keystrokes and hot keys directly from email. You can re-order items. You can assign dates to tasks if you like. Where other GTD managers have been cumbersome (at least for me) is how “organized” they are. This little Task app is stupid-simple. Today they announced a new feature, “Move to List.” This application is so slim that simply moving a task from one list to another has not been an option. It’s a nice feature. Now the challenge is to keep from adding too many lists. Over time, I do hope to see the features mature, but hope we don’t see to many features… in the world of “Task Apps,” doing less better is the best thing a task manager can do for itself. IMHO. Hope it stays Dirt Simple.

We have an affliction. “How does this work?” — is a common question. We were those little kids in the first grade who would raise our hands and ask “WHY” to everything. We were also those kids who took apart the TV to figure out how it worked…sometimes there were parts left over when putting the TV back together… Sorry Mom and Dad.

So our role for our clients is to help them innovate. To apply creativity to their business challenges. To that end, we’re frequently finding ourselves doing things that we’ve never seen before, and sometimes that our colleagues have never seen before either. But doing different stuff is not just about the exercise. It’s about following up the “how does this work” question with another question. “How can a business use this in a meaningful way?”

Open Source VS. Enterprise Applications

Look, we’re always going to be passionate about what’s going on in the open source world. And, it still makes sense for a number of our clients. But it’s important to look at the bigger picture too. It’s important for us to understand that there are key business stakeholders out there who:

• Need to leverage content and community both into and across the enterprise
• Need to normalize their frameworks and infrastructures
• Need to provide application architectures that accommodate the business including marketing, information technology, and ultimately the brand
• Need to conform with compliance
• Need to operationalize

While this sounds like boring stuff, and painfully fundamental, dare we ask — What’s design and creativity got to do with this? Everything. The bottom line is that the human brain can only soak up so much content in a given day. More than ever, we’re in the sea of the same where the web has roughly 120 million blogs. Content is streaming through RSS feeds, building micro sites out of content from elsewhere. Content is packaged up in little bits and pulled into our mobile devices, almost the way we want it. God forbid you are like many of us and have a smart phone where you don’t even need to be in front of a computer any longer to consume huge quantities of data. Those responsible for communities and content have an enormous task of managing and producing the information. Keeping it relevant and “on brand” is another challenge.

Long preamble to a pretty straight forward challenge. One that community, information technology, marketing, and brand managers need to come together on before their content slips into the abyss. And, it’s entirely possible to keep that from happening…without making life miserable for the previously mentioned stakeholders.

So, we’re experimenting to verify and celebrate the idea that user experiences built on technologies such as Microsoft can be incredibly cool too while affording us the flexibility to exercise the creative muscle. Again, the idea is to build applications that resonate with a targeted audience, and that comply with all those business bullets (above) while at the same time staying “on brand.”

Companies like Microsoft have some pretty amazing tools that are extremely viable across the enterprises we find ourselves exposed to. Tools like SharePoint 2007 do not get a lot of love, but we’ve shared recently how it’s entirely possible to enable SharePoint as an important tool for the brand (PlainsCapital.com). And, even though some would like to ignore this, Microsoft was awarded top honors at the Crunchies recently for their work on Live Mesh. Who’da thunk it, right?

Not very long ago, I had a rare chance to visit Microsoft in Redmond with Bob Pearson at Dell. We got to meet people like Scott Guthrie, Betsy Aoki, Laurence Moroney, and some others who are working in the Microsoft Labs on some really cool things. We’re working on a labs-like project for Bob Pearson who has an amazing idea that leverages community. But, we wanted it to be different, to look fantastic, to engage the community, to be enterprise ready, and to be “on brand.” Our discussions were focused around how to leverage some of the emerging technologies to bring value to his business idea. Since then, we’ve been doing deep dives into more and more of these technologies. It’s been challenging and fun.

This initial post is here to setup and document our learning experience on Silverlight. Remember, we’re a design company with some really sharp coders. It’s one thing to learn these new technologies, but it’s another to build a process around how to design AND develop in a realm where both designers and developers must play. Our expectations are high as we aim to achieve an amazing result to blow Bob away and to also set some expectations in the design community.

In the coming posts, I’m asking our team to pay close attention to what we learn and experience through this. We’ve got an obvious benefit of having partnerships with Dell and Microsoft to help us get over the obstacles and learning curves along the way. While what we’ve seen so far has been an amazing start with Silverlight, it needs an artists love and finesse. As a business in a recession, it’s a scary proposition to take on new things when you know that processes will have to be defined along the way. We’re going to be hitting a lot of speed bumps and have more late nights.

We’ll try to position this from a business point of view with technical stuff injected where it makes sense. And, I’ll be asking for some guest posts along the way to help round things out. It’s best to speak to the good, the bad, and the ugly…as anything but a frank approach won’t benefit anyone.

Outside of the immediate RD2 team, we’ll have some help from some of our extended family along the way:

• Bob Pearson (aka - Chief Mad Scientist)
• Christoph Schittko (aka - Chief Problem Officer)
• Christof Sprenger (aka - Clone of Christoph)
• Laurence Moroney (aka - Silverlight Ninja)
• Lukas Cudrigh (aka - Rich Uncle)

Southwest Airlines was recently featured on 33 News. This is a really nice interview of some of our pals at Southwest. The story starts by talking about how Southwest is using Twitter and gives an overview of how Southwest Airlines is using social tools to connect with Customers. Every day people ask me how Twitter can be used in any meaningful way for business. This story gives some ideas in the context of how Southwest’s Emerging Media Team is using these tools as an extension of their natural culture.