By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 20 December 2010
 The great feedback i received at EvangelOz last week really struck a chord with me. As a speaker at conferences one of the things that I hate is the feedback forms. Not because I don’t welcome feedback, because I can’t remember EVER getting feedback that was actually useful. Giving me feedback like “Giving out prize [insert prize here] was really lame.” doesn’t help me to give a better presentation next time, it just makes me feel bad that I have a little company that can’t afford to give out $1000 phones every time I do a presentation.
I hear many people whinge and complain about conferences, the speakers and the content so I say to all of you: if you want your experience to be better, give constructive feedback and take control of the experience you want to have. If you’re only at a $2,500 conference in the hope of winning a $1000 phone, then maybe you should rethink why you’re actually there.
Giving great feedback is really an art, and an art I don’t claim to be expert in. When I was in school I had a great teacher who helped us all be better at making constructive criticism. He would read someone’s homework or assignment or test submission to the class and everyone’s task was to write down 3 things they liked, and 3 things they think the person could have done better. At first this sounds really easy but if you’re given something really awesome to listen to it’s hard to find something to pick on and if you’re given something really bad, often it’s hard to find something you like. His idea was that we can always improve but not to overwhelm people in the number of ways they can do that. If you just concentrate on the negatives, the person is likely to feel disillusioned and eventually give up and if you only say the positives they will never improve or may feel your feedback is not genuine.
The idea of good and too improve was re-enforced this year when I attended the Imagine Cup finals....
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 20 December 2010
For the final of our three amazing, yet long and intense days at EvangelOz we each gave a 10 minute presentation showing off what we’d learned. There was so much to think about – just look at what we did on Day 1. For something a bit different, and because my new laptop doesn’t have any of my old presentations on it, I decided I’d do a non technical talk. Coming up with an idea and content from scratch with very little preparation time proved to be difficult. In the end I think it worked out ok. I tried a lot of new things, lots of gestures, lots of movement and some story telling that at the time felt very over the top. Even looking at the video now, it feels like too much.
I’d love to hear your feedback so have uploaded the video to YouTube here or you can watch below.
We finished off the day with a mystery activity. We all had a few guesses at what terrible task had been lined up for us. In the end it turned out to be getting on our soapbox in public for 3 minutes. Turns out you have to get permission from building management first, or maybe the security guards were a little bored and just wanted to pick a fight. It was great to see everyone get up and give it a go. It’s quite surprising how scary it isn’t when you’re surrounded by people to support you and the fact strangers will go to great length to avoid the crazy person bellowing across the square. Many thanks to Mark and Chris for being my participants/volunteers in my crazy tirade against smoking in public places.
One of the best things about the 3 days was the wonderful, constructive feedback I received and I think that’s worth a whole blog post on its own. Big thanks to Andrew and Sarah for allowing us to be part of what I think is going to be an awesome year! So John and I need to practise what we’ve been learning so here’s our...
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By Soul Solutions on
Thursday, 16 December 2010
 As many of you probably know the open source, super smooth, DeepEarth Map control supports the very cool NearMap imagery content for Australia. You know, the first imagery provider in the world to fly every capital city in Australia every month and publish that data live on the web within about 2 weeks in full resolution! (tiny exception is we’ve had so much rain that taking photos recently has been pretty hard for the NearMap team). You can create your own Silverlight powered map control for your application using the DeepEarth control and your favourite Silverlight (.Net) developer. Just point them to http://deepearth.codeplex.com or we’d be more then happy to help.
We have a demo site for you to check it out at http://deepearth.soulsolutions.com.au/nearmapdemo/ but this site is only a demo, go checkout the washing you had on the line two weeks ago. Who is that parked in your driveway last month? Wow that tree has grown over the last 6 months, and look they built a Bridge…
We have to move the demo site from time to time as we’re getting way too many hits. If you like the control why not grab a copy and put it in your application. Government and commercial users can contact NearMap for great value-for-money licensing, personal users and many businesses can use it...
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